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PSIWORLD 2011

The relation between explanatory style, and self-esteem in a sample of university students

Irina Macsingaa*, Ioana Nemetib

a,b West University of Timisoara, Department of , 4 Parvan Blvd., 300223, Timisoara Romania

Abstract

This study proposes to investigate the relations between 3 factors that are related to students’ motivation and performance (Leary, 2007; Lane, Lane, & Kyprianou, 2004): locus of control (LOC), self-esteem and academic attributional style (AAS). We also assess the causes identified for academic failure and the coping strategies. A lot of 80 students completed the AAS Questionnaire, the Self-Esteem Scale, and the LOC Scale. The results show that high self-esteem students have an internal LOC and the internal AAS is associated with active coping strategies activation. These findings can be used for the adjustment of educational strategies and university policies. ©© 20122011 PublishedPublished by by Elsevier Elsevier Ltd. B.V. Selection Selection and peer-reviewand/or peer-review under responsibility under responsibility of PSIWORLD of PSIWORLD2011 2011

Keywords: explanatory style; self-esteem; LOC; university students; academic coping strategies

1. Introduction

As a result of the educators and psychologists effort to identify and define the factors that can raise the motivation to succed, it was developed the academic attributional style concept, which refers to the way how the student explains the significant academic events (Peterson & Barrett, 1987). This represents an extension in the educational environment of the attributional style concept, which is defined as a cognitive personality variable that reflects the habitual manner in which people explain the causes of events that befall them (Peterson & Seligman, 1987). The researches (Satterfield, Monahan, & Seligman, 1997) show that the academic attributional style is a predictor of high performance in academic tasks and

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +40256592167. E-mail address: [email protected].

1877-0428 © 2012 Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of PSIWORLD2011 doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.01.076 26 Irina I.Macsinga Macsinga and et al.Ioana / Procedia Nemetib - Social/ Procedia and -Behavioral Social and Sciences Behavioral +40256592167 Sciences 33 (2012) 25 – 29

in objective tests affecting the way a student approaches the study and learning (Peterson & Barrett, 1987). The researches (Lane, Lane, & Kyprianou, 2004) about the relation between self-concept and performance demonstrates that self-esteem and academic self-efficiency are significant predictors of performance.

1.1. The Concept of Self-Esteem

Rosenberg (1965) defines global self-esteem as being a positive or negative attitude towards Self. Trying to explain the link between self-esteem and success perception, respectively failure, the research (Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice, 1993) suggests that low self-esteem persons perceive the success as being threatening, because they do not have faith that they will be able to repeat this success in future too, while the high self-esteem persons do have faith in this situation as being repeatable.

1.2. Locus of Control and Attributional Style

LOC and the attributional style are tight related cognitive dispositions, including believes fairly stable in time (Furnham, 2009). Park & Kim (1998) observed that people try to understand the world by making several causal assignments to the events. Also, people are making a connection between the strengthening system and behavior (Rotter, 1966). From this point of view there are two categories of individuals: the ones who believe that positive or negative strengthenings result directly from what they are or from their own actions (the internals) and the ones who believe that positive or negative strengthenings depend on external forces, independent of what they are (the externals). This distinction led the researchers to two study lines: locus of control (Rotter, 1966) and the attributional style (Weiner, 1986). Once the introduction of the attributional style (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978) along the internality-externality dimension, there were also other two dimensions explained. So, the causal assignments vary in a three critical dimensions level: internal versus external, stability versus instability and globally versus specificity. The extension of this notion to the academic study led to the development of the academic attributional style (AAS) and to the elaboration of Academic Attributional Style Questionnaire (AASQ), in order to explain the relations between academic performance and the attributional style. Researches (Satterfield, Monahan, & Seligman, 1997) showed that the students with a pessimistic attributional style for negative results (internal, global and stable assignments) have a significantly lower academic performance than the ones with an optimistic attributional style (external, specific and instable assignments). Taking into consideration the theoretical constructs above, we intend to investigate the relationships between the internality/externality dimension of the AAS, LOC, and self-esteem in a sample of University students. We expect that: (a). the more students are internal, the more the self-esteem level will increase; (b). students who explain negative academic situations through internal causes manifest an academic active coping. We also assess the causes identified by the students for their academic failure and the coping strategies activated.

2. Method

2.1. Sample and sampling procedure

Eighty students in Psychology (91.25% females, mean age 20.6 years) from West University of Timisoara, were randomly selected. The questionnaires were distributed in classes with the permission of Irina MacsingaI. Macsinga and Ioana et al. Nemetib / Procedia / Procedia - Social - Socialand Behavioral and Behavioral Sciences Sciences +40256592167 33 (2012) 25 – 29 27 the lecturers. Respondents were asked to complete and return forms in the following week. Participation was on a voluntary basis and no class credit was given for participation.

2.2. Measurements

In order to test the previous hypothesis we used three measurements: Self Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965) is a 10-item measure with a four-point response scale ranging from strongly agree (scored 4) to strongly disagree (scored 1) for positive items, and the scores reversed when the items are negative. In the present study, the alpha coefficient for the scale was .82 which suggests high internal consistency reliability. A higher score shows lower self-esteem. Internal-External (I-E) Locus of Control Scale (Rotter, 1966) contains 29 items with two answer variants, a and b. The respondent chooses the variant he/she considers to be relevant in his/her own opinion. For each item one of the variants is specific for external control and the other for the internal control. The higher the score is, the more the participant has an external LOC. Cronbach’s alpha was .87. The Academic Attributional Style Questionnaire (Peterson & Barrett, 1987) was translated from English and then back-translated and adapted to our university culture. Cronbach’s alpha was .76. In this research, we described 10 situations of academic failure that resulted from questionning 30 students from 3rd year Psychology of the West University of Timisoara. Each of them proposed 3 academic failure situation. The first 10 most frequently mentioned situations were considered: (1). I did not promote an exam; (2). I have lost my scholarship; (3). I did not collect enough credits for promoting this year; (4). I have got a negative feed-back for my seminar activity; (5). I did not finish a project in time; (6). I do not understand the material; (7). I had a smaller grade than I expected; (8). At the semester end I find out that there are several subjects where I do not have the basic knowledge; (9). At the semester end I found out that I did not promote the seminar; (10). We failed to organize a seminar group activity. The participants had to imagine that they are in one of those 10 situations and for each of them they had to give answers, in a 4 column table (noted A, B, C, D). In Column A the subject had to answer to the question “if this kind of situation would happen to you, what would you think it might caused it?” The causes noted by the students were analyzed to see which are the most frequent. In Column B they had to check on a 1-7 Likert scale (where 1=“it totally dues to the others/situations” and 7 = “it totally dues to me”) the answers for the question “is the cause linked to your own person or to some other people or situations?”, which indicate the internality/externality dimension of the attributional style. In Column C of the table they indicated the answer to the question “how important is the situation if it happened to you?” on a similar 1-7 Likert scale (where 1= “not important at all” and 7 = “very important”) and in Column D they answered to the question “how would you react in this situation?” by choosing between the 7 variants (Peterson & Barrett, 1987) illustrated in Fig.1. The 8th variant proposed by the two authors (“I am looking for an academic advisor support”) was excluded because it does not fit in the Romanian university specific. The 1-3 variants indicate an active coping (rewarded with 2 points), oriented to the problem solving, while 4-7 variants are significant for a passive coping (rewarded with 1 point).

3. Results

A Pearson correlation addressed the relationship between self-esteem (M 17.5; SD 4.36) and LOC (M 11.96; SD 3.15). As predicted in hypothesis 1, results indicated a significant positive correlation between LOC and self-esteem, r = .38, p<.05 (Table 1). The effect size is r²=.146, indicating a high effect. 28 Irina I.Macsinga Macsinga and et al.Ioana / Procedia Nemetib - Social/ Procedia and -Behavioral Social and Sciences Behavioral +40256592167 Sciences 33 (2012) 25 – 29

Table 1. Pearson correlation: Self-Esteem and Locus of Control Table 2 Pearson correlation: Coping and Attributional Style

Locus of Control Attributional style Self-esteem .382 Coping r =.210 p < .05 p < .05 Similarly, in order to test hypothesis 2, a Pearson correlation was used to test the relationship between internal/external academic attributional style (M 52.37; SD 7.72) and coping activated in an academic failure (M 16.65; SD 2.56). The effect size is r²=.044 indicating a small effect. Results indicated a significant positive correlation between AAS and coping, r = .210, p<.05 (Table 2). As we predicted in hypothesis 1, results indicated a significant positive correlation between LOC and self-esteem: the more students have a higher self-esteem, the more internal attributions will make. Internal students` conviction that academic events are under their own control raises the faith in their own abilities. How individuals perceive the viability of their personal control depends on how they value their Self (Deroma, Leach, & Leverett, 2009). The effect size is high, indicating that this association has significant practical implications: we expect a self-esteem raise by stimulating the norm of internality. As we predicted in hypothesis 2, results indicated a significant positive correlation between AAS and coping to academic failure: students who make internal take active measures for overcoming the problem (they will try to overcome the barriers, assuming responsibilities for their own progress). The researches (Henderson & Kelbey, 1992) sustain this result: the understanding of the fact that we are responsible and control things that happen to us is positively correlated with the effort and tenacity we prove in applying active coping strategies in negative situations. In this study it was also realized an analysis of coping strategies activated by the students when they explain each of those 10 academic situations described. Because the study’ length is limited, we selected one example, highlighting the participants` answers (situation 1: not promoting an exam). As we can see in Fig.1(a) , the most frequent choice was to work more, but not to receive any kind of help, followed by the choice of a colleague`s support, as active coping. The good news is that the students are choosing active coping if not promoting an exam; the bad news is that only 2 of 80 persons said they would look for a professor`s help, if they were in such a situation.

Fig. 1. (a) Active coping in situation 1 (not promoting an exam); (b) Causes for the situation

The causes identified by the students in the situation of not promoting an exam were captured in second picture. We observed the students` tendency of saying they did not promote because they did not Irina MacsingaI. Macsinga and Ioana et al. Nemetib / Procedia / Procedia - Social - Socialand Behavioral and Behavioral Sciences Sciences +40256592167 33 (2012) 25 – 29 29 study enough (80%). This event, through the social comparisons mechanism, can facilitate an inferiority feeling, which can also affect the academic success (Strano & Petrocelli, 2005). The present study limits refer to: (a). the sample size (b). the small number of male participants (8.8%) (c). the AASQ instrument contains hypothetical situations of academic failure, so the effort of the respondents to put themselves in such situations will be higher.

4. Conclusions and implications

The present study examines the relationships between students` explanatory style, self-esteem and LOC, pointing out the causes identified by the students and the coping strategies in academic failure situations. The results indicate that: high self-esteem students have an internal LOC; the students who use mostly active coping strategies have an internal attributional style for negative academic events. In most cases the students indicated internal causes for the situations and selected active coping strategies. The recognition of causes that students a2ssign to academic failure is important in the understanding of the student`s academic satisfaction and finally in improving their academic performance. Also, the results of the present study can be useful in projecting some educational strategies focused on the student.

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