Peer relations and motivation in special secondary education: Experiences of adolescents with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties.

Background: According to Self-Determination Theory (SDT), motivation is inherently present in every individual, growing from amotivation via controlled to autonomous motivation, through fulfilment of the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. Peer relatedness has been found to influence motivation multimodally. Students with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD) in special education risk additional challenges in motivation and peer relations. How peer relations influence school motivation according to SEBD students' experiences remains unclear.

Aims: Investigating how peer relations influence SEBD students' motivation in special secondary education.

Sample: Forty-nine SEBD students (age 12-18) from 11 special secondary schools in the north of the Netherlands.

Methods: Transcripts of semi-structured interviews from an SDT perspective were thematically analysed for particular information on peer relations and motivation.

Results: Students positively graded their motivation. Peer relations and students' motivation seemed to influence each other: (1) friends and classmates were salient reasons for school attendance; (2) peer relations influenced schoolwork motivation through relatedness, distraction, cooperation, engaging each other and being alone/loneliness.

Conclusions: Consistent with previous findings, peer relations influence students' motivation in special secondary education. This influence seems reciprocal, additionally shaped by SEBD and a special education context. Feelings of (not) belonging in special education influenced school attendance and schoolwork motivation through different mechanisms, with which variations in motivational orientation, diagnosis and gender might interfere. Future research should investigate the influence of type of diagnosis, additional roles of competence and autonomy for SEBD students and possible generalizations of findings in other special and mainstream education settings.