The relationships between social factors and basic psychological needs: A Bayesian Structural Equation Modeling study

Abstract

The relationships between social factors such as autonomy support, structure and involvement and the basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence and relatedness) has been a topic of several studies in the self-determination theory framework. In some studies it has been posit that autonomy support, structure and involvement predicts only autonomy, competence and relatedness respectively; while in others, the effect of autonomy support, structure and involvement in all psychological needs altogether have been studied. We propose another approach for this topic based on Bayesian Structural Equation Modeling (BSEM). In BSEM parameters are seen as variables instead of constants as is in Maximum Likelihood (ML), also when estimating loadings with ML some of them are freed and others are fixed to 0, in BSEM, instead of fixing them to 0, we can set a small variance, so this loading is not exactly 0.