Elementary students in the United States are expected to read proficiently in order to be successful on high-stakes assessments. Researchers have found that many elementary students lack the motivation to become frequent readers. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the reading motivational techniques used at a local district to encourage elementary students to become frequent readers. Framed by Skinner's operant conditioning theory and the focus on motivators and their effects on learning outcomes, the research questions explored teachers' perceptions of the motivators that increase student reading in the elementary grades. Data for the study were collected through individual interviews with a sample of 6 teachers who volunteered from the district's elementary schools. Open coding of the transcribed interview data and thematic analysis revealed 5 overarching themes: difficulties and challenges, preexisting perceptions, perceived effectiveness of used incentives/motivators, applicability to other grade levels, and factors critical to support reading development. The findings revealed certain recommended strategies such as free choice reading, increased parental involvement, and grade enhancement that may support intrinsic motivation compared to external motivation, which may be better supported through more immediate rewards. This study has the potential to promote social change by providing educators and other stakeholders at the local site with research findings on effective techniques to motivate elementary students to read more frequently.

The advent of social media networks is radically changing the way we communicate, shareand socialize. These networks are also creating impact on consumer behavior. In this study,we tried to analyze the factors working behind the intrinsic motivation of people upon whichthey are interacting in the social networks and formulating their preferences.Based on the theory of intrinsic motivation, we identified five factors to be most relevant withthe phenomena we attempted to address which are Curiosity, Power, Status, Tranquility, andIndependence. Among these five factors, we tried to analyze the relative importance of eachone on the buying behavior of users in the form of choosing social media platforms. Westretched out inquiry to the identification of the influence of demographic factors as well.According to our analysis, it has been revealed that the relative importance of curiosity ismore than any other factors and it also has a strong association with the nationality of theuser. Again, status has been identified as the second most important factor however; itshowed no association with any demographic factor.To conduct this study, we have taken a qualitative approach. Our philosophical underpinningsare based on the positivist and objectivist perspective which defined how we are going toreceive and interpret reality as researchers. However, on more practical terms, we chosesurvey as our data collection method as it allows us to collect mentionable amount of datawithin a short time span and keeps the opportunity of higher statistical analysis open.Regarding the sampling method, we have followed both the non-probability conveniencesampling and Quota sampling method. We have collected our 206 respondents from UmeaUniversity, which was divided by equal half of male and female quota. After collecting thedata, we analyzed it and presented the empirical findings in the chapter 5. Then the analysisrelating to the research question and the hypotheses was presented in the chapter 6 where wealso decided about the null hypotheses on the basis of stringent statistical tests. At the end, wesummed up out findings and proposed some implications and future research possibilities.This study can be helpful to understand the links between human motivation and the userinteraction in the social networks. This kind of relationships has not been fully appreciated inthe literature so far. From a managerial perspective, social media platforms are continuouslybecoming one great route to reach the consumers and engage them with the brands. Thus,understanding the motivation of the users might help the marketers to formulate their strategybetter and they can also take better decisions regarding which kind of social media is to use topromote the products on. As we also studied the demographic factors and one of the uniquecapacities of social media networks is the ability to identify demographic segments veryspecifically, the managers can capitalize on our demographic findings to differentiate theirpromotion on the basis of demographics across various social media platforms.This study has several limitations as time and resource scarcity did not allow us to explore theissue more profoundly. Thus, it has kept many research opportunities open such as exploringthe influence of psychographic factors on the choice of social media, use of user generatedcontent to build a stronger brand profile, identification of extrinsic motivators behind thebuying behavior of users and so on.