Why do people go to university and why does it matter? Understanding differences in student experiences via a quantitative analysis of student reflexivity and student motivations

Remelie, Richard Gordon (2024) Why do people go to university and why does it matter? Understanding differences in student experiences via a quantitative analysis of student reflexivity and student motivations. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

Underpinned by the philosophy of Critical Realism, this thesis provides new ways to explain differences in student experiences of university. It achieves this by presenting quantitative evidence of statistically significant relationships between student motivations and student reflexivity. This evidence suggests that reflexivity has a stronger bearing on student experiences than is accounted for via Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital, and field, which constitute the most common framework through which student experiences have been analysed in previous research. Building on the work of Margaret Archer, this thesis created new quantitative measures of communicative, autonomous, meta, and fractured reflexivity. The new measures of reflexivity were built into a survey alongside new measures of motivation which were derived from Self-Determination Theory. Using a sample of 336 students from a post-1992 university, Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis revealed that new measures of meta and fractured reflexivity were valid and internally reliable, as were measures of intrinsic, extrinsic, and amotivation. This made it possible to analyse relationships between student reflexivity and student motivations, which revealed that reflexivity and motivations appear to be significantly related. This evidence highlights the importance of reflexivity for student experiences, given what is known from Self-Determination Theory about how human motivations influence the quality of human experiences. Therefore, although further work is needed to replicate the empirical findings and develop better measures of communicative and autonomous reflexivity, this thesis has begun to show the importance of student reflexivity for student experiences. More specifically, the evidence in this thesis suggests that meta reflexivity is likely to enhance student experiences, given that meta reflexivity is positively associated with intrinsic motivation and negatively associated with amotivation. On the other hand, fractured reflexivity is likely to undermine the quality of student experiences, given that fractured reflexivity is positively associated with amotivation. By creating new measures of reflexivity and showing that analysis of reflexivity can be developed by integrating measures of motivation from Self-Determination Theory, this thesis presents opportunities for researchers to explore the implications of reflexivity for student experiences and for human experiences in other domains.