Types of Medical Students’ Learning Motivation and their Relationship with Learning Engagement and Psychological Well-being: A Latent Profile Analysis

Abstract

Objective: This study aims to classify the learning motivation of medical students using latent profile analysis and explore the relationship between learning engagement within different latent types of learning motivation and psychological well-being. Methods: A total of 635 medical students from a medical university in Guangxi were selected for this study. The Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire, Utrecht Work Engagement Scale-Student, and Psychological Well-being Scale were used to collect data. Latent profile analysis was employed to classify medical students into different types of learning motivation. Regression analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between learning engagement and psychological well-being across different types of learning motivation. One-way analysis of variance was used to investigate the differences in learning engagement and psychological well-being among different types of learning motivation. Results: Latent profile analysis identified three types of learning motivation among medical students: medium motivation (23.46%), medium-high motivation (43.31%), and high motivation (33.23%). Different types of learning motivation had a significant positive impact on learning engagement and psychological well-being (β=0.66, 0.59, 0.62, all p<0.001). There were significant differences in learning engagement and psychological well-being among different latent profile types. Medical students with high motivation demonstrated the highest levels of learning engagement and psychological well-being, followed by those with medium-high motivation, and those with medium motivation had the lowest levels.