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competence, relatedness) that are precursors of autonomous motivation for program alumni?

Results for analysis of research question 1a show that for the 16 alumni interviewed there is no overall relationship between autonomous motivation and attribution of changes in these psychological needs to The Future Project. There does appear to be a ceiling effect, with all alumni exhibiting a moderately high or high autonomous motivation score. Specific findings are reported in this section.

Attribution to The Future Project was somewhat varied, but the overwhelming majority reported a strong (level 3) competence attribution to The Future Project. Competence consistently increased with all forms of attribution to The Future Project, but overall autonomous motivation showed no change with increasing attribution to The Future Project. Specific findings are reported in the following paragraphs.

4.3.1 Alumni autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Figure 7 presents the distribution of alumni scores of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Overall the vast majority of alumni reported level 3 autonomy, and there was roughly a 50-50 distribution

competence and relatedness.

Figure 7: Distribution of alumni self-perceived autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

4.3.2 Alumni autonomy, competence, and relatedness attributed to The Future Project. Figure 8 below shows the distribution of coded levels of alumni attribution to The Future Project for changes in each of the three psychological needs.. Here roughly half of alumni reported a high level of attribution to The Future Project to explain changes in their sense of autonomy. The vast majority reported a high level of attribution of change for competence, and slightly more than half for relatedness.

0 0 0 6 9 9 10 7 7 0 2 4 6 8 10 12

Autonomy Competence Relatedness

Level 2 Level 3

Figure 8: Distribution of alumni attribution of change to The Future Project.

4.3.3 Relationship between alumni psychological needs and attribution to The Future Project. Figure 9 graphs the relationship between overall autonomous motivation and attribution of change in autonomous motivation to The Future Project, as Figure 7 did for student data. Here there are six data points due to there being six distinct values once averages were calculated. The graph shows no overall positive or negative relationship between attribution to The Future Project and autonomous motivation. This is possibly due to a ceiling effect; all alumni had autonomous motivation averages

between levels 2 and 3. Alumni with both the lowest and highest attribution to The Future Project had the highest autonomous motivation scores. There were fluctuations in the graph, which could reflect that the data set was so small, 16 alumni interviews, and

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Autonomy Competence Relatedness

Level 1 Level 2 Level 3

Figure 9: Attribution to The Future Project and overall alumni autonomous motivation.

The following is an example of how some students exhibited high autonomous

motivation, in this case specifically relatedness, with no mention of The Future Project:

I think in relationships, friendship wise, I love the friends I already have but I'm not closed, shut down. I'm always willing to make a friend. I think having family around me who has taught me how to connect with people and how to have conversations and just be myself and everything helps me to make a new friend or meet people (Alum 10, School 7).

This is high relatedness because the alum mentions having close relationship and being able to create new trusting relationships, so it is therefore context independent. There is no attribution to The Future Project in this regard.

In contrast, Figure 8 had shown that the majority of alumni did have high attribution to The Future Project for changes in competence and relatedness. Since high attribution is not necessarily associated with high autonomous motivation according to Figure 9, the results in Figure 8 could reflect the fact that students perhaps had begun with low competence and relatedness and so participation in The Future Project provided

2.67 2.33 2.33 2.11 2.78 2.67 1 2 3 1 2 3 A v er a g e A u to n o m o u s M o ti v a ti o n S co re

them with increased competence and relatedness but that was dependent upon The Future Project context. The following quote supports this conclusion:

my [future] project was successful in my high school. I think that was one of the greatest accomplishments for me because my project was

surrounded by the word loss, and I felt like in senior year I lost a lot of things. To create a project that pretty much summed up how I was feeling helped me to have that open dialogue with my classmates and people around me...I was shocked with my event turnout. I only expected, literally, ten people to come. That's what I thought was going to happen, but over eighty people came. That was a huge accomplishment for me because I had the support of classmates who I thought we had a rift between one another (Alum 16, School 9).

In this example, the alum specifically references the project she did with The Future Project and how it helped her connect with classmates. This alum was scored as high (level 3) attribution for relatedness, but an overall level 2 for relatedness because she mentioned struggling with relationships outside of The Future Project context.

These two examples illustrate why there was a lack of an overall positive relationship between autonomous motivation and attribution to The Future Project indicated in Figure 9. Due to the lack of a clear trend, no succinct conclusion can be drawn regarding the effect of The Future Project on alumni autonomous motivation.

4.3.4 Summary. The analysis to answer research question 1b compared alumni

levels of autonomy, competence, and relatedness (autonomous motivation) to changes in

these that could be attributed to The Future Project in order to determine if The Future

Project has a plausible influence on student autonomous motivation. The findings,

4.4 Research Question 2a: How does participation in The Future Project influence