Week 9: Correlation Results
Hello everyone! Welcome back to my blog!
I’ve officially finished gathering survey responses, and I’m happy to share that I reached all my goals! I collected 71 total responses, with 34 from school students and 37 from college students — they’re pretty close in size, which is great for comparing the groups.
I’ve also finished calculating the correlation coefficients for both groups and the overall sample, and in today’s post, I’m going to share those results.
The Correlation Results
| Group | Extrinsic Motivation & Performance Anxiety | Intrinsic Motivation & Performance Anxiety |
| School Students | 0.256 | -0.435 |
| College Students | -0.001 | 0.033 |
| Overall Sample (School + College) | 0.176 | -0.192 |
What do These Values Mean?
Positive values mean the two factors increase together. Negative values mean that as one increases, the other decreases.
So the data came out mostly as I expected:
- For school students and the overall sample, the values for extrinsic motivation and performance anxiety were positive, meaning performance anxiety increases as extrinsic motivation increases
- For school students and the overall sample, the values for intrinsic motivation and performance anxiety were negative, meaning performance anxiety decreases as intrinsic motivation increases
- For the college students, the value for extrinsic motivation and performance anxiety was slightly negative, and the value for intrinsic motivation and performance anxiety was slightly positive
However, I found it interesting that the correlation strengths turned out to be very different across the two groups. Here’s how correlation strength is generally measured:
- 0.00 – 0.19: Very weak or no correlation
- 0.20 – 0.39: Weak correlation
- 0.40 – 0.59: Moderate correlation
So in my study:
- School students showed weak to moderate correlations.
- College students showed almost no correlations at all.
- The overall sample fell into the very weak correlation range, likely because the college students’ data pulled the average down.
Why Might This Be?
After thinking it over, this actually makes a lot of sense. College students and school students are at different stages of life and different stages of their music careers. College students may love music, but they’re likely under more pressure to succeed, get scholarships, and perform well, which might be causing higher levels of performance anxiety, regardless of whether or not they have high intrinsic motivation. Meanwhile, school students often participate in music as a hobby, so their motivation type might be more clearly tied to their performance anxiety levels.
In order to find further explanations for my correlation results, I also calculated the average extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation, and performance anxiety levels of each group (they are all on a 5 point scale), and this is what I found:
| Group | Intrinsic Motivation | Extrinsic Motivation | Performance Anxiety Levels |
| School Students | 3.931372549 | 2.901960784 | 2.794117647 |
| College Students | 3.27027027 | 4.036036036 | 3.094594595 |
So, school students are more intrinsically motivated, while college students are more extrinsically motivated and also experience higher levels of performance anxiety. It’s also interesting that only 29% of school students perform frequently, while 62% of college students perform frequently. That could explain why college students report higher levels of performance anxiety — they perform more often, so they’ve had more chances to experience it. These results also support my correlations and what I talked about earlier. Originally, I had thought that college students would be more intrinsically motivated, but after talking with my advisor, I realized burnout from being a music major might make them to lose some of their joy for music.
That was a lot, so I’ll stop here for now! Next week, I’ll wrap things up, explore a few more parts of my data, and talk about my final product. Thank you so much for reading, and stay tuned for more updates!
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