Comprehensive assessment of children's psychological needs: Development of the child Reiss Motivation Profile for ages four to eleven

• Tested assumptions of Reiss's theory of intrinsic motivations in children
• Constructed a rating scale for parents or teachers of children aged 4–11
• Provided initial evidence for the factorial validity and reliability
• Overall construct validity of the child assessment tool was good.

The purpose of this paper is to test assumptions of Reiss's theory about the assessment of intrinsic motivations in children. We constructed a rating scale that can be used with parents or teachers to assess the strength of 10 psychological needs among children aged 4–11 and evaluated the psychometric properties. Sample 1 included parents (N = 365) of children aged 4–11 years. Sample 2 consisted of 55 adolescent-primary caregiver dyads of youth aged 12–17 years. Caregivers in this sample completed the parent report version and the adolescents completed a previously validated school version of the Reiss Motivation Profile® (RMP) to assess concurrent validity. Sample 3 was composed of teachers who completed the child RMP about the children (N = 333) in their classes. Results provide initial evidence for the factorial validity, test–retest reliability, scale reliabilities, construct validity, and concurrent validity of the child assessment tool.