Students’ perceptions of motivational climate and enjoyment in finnish physical education: A latent profile analysis

The purpose of this study was to identify student clusters with homogenous profiles in perceptions of task- and ego-involving,autonomy,and social relatedness supporting motivational cli-mate in school physical education. additionally,we investigated whether different motivational climate groups differed in their enjoyment in pe. participants of the study were 2 594 girls and 1 803 boys,aged 14 -15 years. students responded to question-naires assessing their perception of motivational climate and enjoyment in physical education. latent profile analyses pro-duced a five-cluster solution labeled 1) ‘low autonomy,related-ness,task,and moderate ego climate’ group’,2) ‘low autonomy,relatedness,and high task and ego climate,3) ‘moderate auton-omy,relatedness,task and ego climate’ group 4) ‘high autono-my,relatedness,task,and moderate ego climate’ group,and 5) ‘high relatedness and task but moderate autonomy and ego climate’ group. analyses of variance showed that students in clusters 4 and 5 perceived the highest level of enjoyment where-as students in cluster 1 experienced the lowest level of enjoy-ment. the results showed that the students’ perceptions of vari-ous motivational climates created differential levels of enjoy-ment in pe classes. © journal of sports science and medicine.