ABSTRACT
The generalisability of published findings and the applicability of contemporary theoretical models in representing and explaining the academic motivation of students in different parts of the world have often been intuitively and implicitly assumed rather than empirically and explicitly inferred. This is because the majority of the research from which those findings and theories are derived are conducted by Western researchers and with samples of Western students who are far from representative of the world’s population. As such, there is a need to test the transferability of Western-developed motivation theories and their measurement instruments in illuminating the schooling experiences of students in non-Western cultures. With this backdrop in mind, the present entry was written with two purposes. First, it aims to provide an overview of major theoretical and disciplinary paradigms on studying the link between culture and behaviour, and apply them to illuminate existing academic motivation studies, in particular survey research. Second, we seek to describe a taxonomy of psychological universals, which posits a hierarchy of different levels of universality, and apply it to identify the universal and culturally specific features of academic motivation. Together, the various perspectives discussed provide us with an integrated and heuristic framework to advance our understanding about cultural influences on academic motivation and its processes.
