Psihološka obzorja /Horizons of Psychology, 19, 3, 5-18 (2010) © Društvo psihologov Slovenije 2010, ISSN 1318-187 Znanstveni empiričnoraziskovalni prispevek The contribution of personality traits and academic and social adjustment to life satisfaction and depression in college freshmen Sanja Smojver-Azic, Ivanka Zivcic-Becirevic* and Ines Jakovcic Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, Croatia Abstract: The aim of this study is to investigate the role of personality traits and student academic and social college adjustment to their overall life satisfaction and depression. Sample of 492 freshmen completed a battery of measures. Hierarchical regression analyses are applied to analyze the contribution of predictor variables on life satisfaction and depression in the group of male and female students. After controlling for the personality traits, college adjustment had a significant contribution to student depression and life satisfaction. Optimism has a significant protective role only with male, but not with female students. Key words: life satisfaction, depression, optimism, adjustment, students Prispevek osebnostnih potez in akadamske ter socialne prilagojenosti k zadovoljstvu z življenjem in depresivnostjo univerzitetnih novincev Sanja Smojver-Ažič, Ivanka Živčič-Bečirevič* in Ines Jakovčič Oddelek za psihologijo, Fakulteta za družbene vede, Univerza v Rijeki, Hrvaška Povzetek: Želeli smo raziskati vlogo osebnostnih potez ter študentske akademske in socialne prilagojenosti študiju, splošno zadovoljstvo z življenjem in depresivnost. 492 novincev je izpolnilo baterijo vprašalnikov. Za analizo doprinosa napovednih spremenljivk na zadovoljstvo z življenjem in depresivnost smo uporabili hierarhične regresij ske analize. Po kontroli osebnostnih potez, prilagoditev študiju pomembno prispeva k pojavu depresije in zadovoljstvu z življenjem pri študentih. Optimizem ima pomembno zaščitno vlogo samo pri študentih, ne pa pri študentkah. Ključne besede: zadovoljstvo z življenjem, depresija, optimizem, prilagojenost, študenti CC = 3120 # This paper is a part of research project Risk and protective factors of student mental health and academic adjustment (009-1301675-0854), supported by the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education, and Sport. * Naslov / Address: Ivanka Zivcic-Becirevic, Sanja Smojver-Azic, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, Slavka Krautzeka bb, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia, tel: +385 51 228 803, fax: +385 51 403 736, email: izivcic@ffri.hr College transition is recognized as a critical developmental period accompanied by a variety of challenges that impact on several spheres of adolescent adjustment. Students make new social contacts and modify existing relations with parents, family and peers. They are supposed to develop new habits for academic environment and make new plans for the future. Because it requires adjustment to a variety of demands, adjustment to university is usually viewed as multifaceted. Baker and Siryk (1984) assumed four different types of adjustment: academic, social, emotional adjustment and institutional attachment. Academic adjustment depends on how well the adolescent manages the educational demands of the university experience. Social adjustment relates to interpersonal experience at the university, emotional adjustment indicates whether the student experiences general psychological distress or shows somatic symptoms of distress. Institutional attachment indicates the degree of commitment that the adolescent feels toward the university. Academic adjustment is a critical aspect of adolescent and young adult adaptation, related to academic perseverance and mental health problems during adulthood. Successful adjustment, particularly during the first year, predicts academic success (Deroma, Leach, & Leverett, 2009), and withdrawal from college is often linked to adjustment difficulties (Rickinson & Rutherford, 1996). Based on several recent studies Roussis and Wells (2008) conclude that university students are nowadays struggling to cope with more severe psychological problems than in the past. A survey of approximately 13000 students in USA demonstrated that there has been an increase in the number of students manifesting severe symptoms of stress and anxiety in the last fifteen years (Benton, Robertson, Tseng, Newton, & Benton, 2003). In a large sample of Turkish university students Bayram and Bilgel (2008) found an alarmingly high prevalence of depression, anxiety and stress symptoms. The incidence of major depression among students has doubled from 1994 to 2003 and the incidence of suicide attempts has tripled in the same period (Benton et al., 2003). Depressive symptoms and life satisfaction are important indicators of emotional adjustment in college student population. Life satisfaction as a global judgment of one's life is an aspect of subjective well-being and it is supposed to be different from ill-being usually measured as depression (Diener, Oishi, & Lucas, 2003). Psychological well-being and psychological distress are usually regarded as almost orthogonal dimensions of mental health (Headey, Kelley, & Wearing, 1993). The life satisfaction of college students has usually been examined as a precursor of withdrawal or drop-out with the common assumption that global life satisfaction depends on a specific experience in student's life (Lounsbury, Saudargas, Gibson, & Leong, 2005). Frisch et al. (2005) and Kjeldstadli et al. (2006) stress that life satisfaction predicts academic failure and retention at college. Higher incidence of depressive symptoms in females is consistently confirmed in cross-cultural literature while gender differences in life satisfaction are frequently mixed and contradictory (Dorahy et al., 2000). The causes of such results are still not completely understood and researchers are still trying to explain correlates, risk and protective factors related to gender differences in depression and life satisfaction. Subjective well-being is defined as a person's cognitive and affective evaluation of life, which includes emotional reactions to events as well as cognitive judgments of satisfaction and fulfillment (Diener, Lucas, & Oishi, 2005). Life satisfaction is the cognitive component of subjective well being and means subjective evaluation of life according to subjective criteria (Pavot & Diener, 1993). Research of subjective well-being shows it's stability over time and it's correlation with stable personality traits, especially extraversion and neuroticism. Diener, Oishi and Lucas (2003) stressed that focusing solely on these two dimensions may oversimplify the complicated pattern of associations between personality and subjective well-being. Traits such as self-esteem and dispositional optimism are also related to subjective well-being (Lucas, Diener, & Suh, 1996), although it is not clear enough whether these narrower traits uniquely predict subjective well-being once the shared variance with traits such as extraversion and neuroticism is controlled. Optimism and pessimism, defined as generalized positive and negative outcome expectancies, are believed to represent important predictors of adjustment (Scheier & Carver, 1985). Scheier and Carver (1992) have studied dispositional optimism as global expectation that good things will be plentiful in the future and bad things scarce. According to their perspective of how people pursue goals, optimism leads to continued efforts to attain the goal, whereas pessimism leads to giving up. Optimism was already confirmed as one of the significant predictors of adjustment to college as well as psychological well-being (Aspinwall & Taylor, 1992). Optimists displayed smaller increase in stress and depression during their first semester of college compared to pessimists. Besides its direct effects, optimism is related to lower usage of avoidant coping strategies, which is in turn related to fewer reports of depressive symptoms (Mosher, Prelow, Chen, & Yackel, 2006). Dispositional optimism is associated with active coping, effective problem solving and resilience in the presence of stressful life events and college settings, and with academic success (Peterson, 2000). Adjustment to university can be related to evaluations and expectations which influence feelings and understanding of events (Chemers, Hu, & Garcia, 2001; Jackson, Pancer, Pratt, & Hunsberger, 2004). According to Karademas (2006), optimism partially mediates the relation of self-efficacy and perceived social support to well-being. The way in which students cope with adjustment difficulties depends on whether they perceive this new life situation as a challenge through which they can realize their potentials or as a threat to self-esteem and personal integrity. According to several researches, transition to university may affect men and women differently (Wintre & Yaffe, 2000), although it is not confirmed in all studies. Our previous results stress gender differences in adjustment to college. Female students are better academically and more socially adapted, but have poorer emotional adjustment comparing to male students (Zivcic-Becirevic, Smojver-Azic, Kukic, & Jasprica, 2007). We have also found that different big five personality factors are correlated with specific aspects of college adjustment in female and male students and that optimism is positively correlated with all aspects of college adjustment (Smojver-Azic, Zivcic-Becirevic, Milanovic, & Sutlic, 2007). The aim of this study was to identify predictors of life satisfaction and depression for male and female students. The contribution of student college adjustment (academic and social) to their overall life satisfaction and depression was examined after controlling the contribution of personality factors, the big five personality traits and optimism and pessimism as narrow traits. We have hypothesized that neuroticism will have the greatest contribution to depression and student wellbeing, while optimism, pessimism and college adjustment will also have additional contribution. Our hypothesis was that academic adjustment will be more important for female and social adjustment for male students' life satisfaction and depression. Method Participants and procedure This study was a part of a longitudinal study concerning risk and protective factors of student college adjustment. In the first part of the study, a representative and randomized sample of492 (297 females and 195 males) freshmen from University of Rijeka, Croatia, completed a battery of measures. The unbalanced distribution of gender in this sample mirrors the distribution in the student population of the University. Participants' age ranged from 18 to 24 with the mean age of 19.12. 55.3% students moved from home in order to study at this university. Group testing was organized on each faculty. Instruments The Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ; Baker and Siryk, 1999) is a 67 item self-report questionnaire that is widely used to measure the quality of adaptation to university life. The SACQ provides an overall index of adjustment as well as scores on four aspects of students adjustment to university: academic, social and personal-emotional adjustment, and institutional attachment. We used 65 items because two of them were not interpretable in our sample. Factor analyses extracted three factors: emotional, academic and social adjustment to college, explaining 36.72 % of variance. Final version consists of 59 items. In this study we have used only academic and social adjustment subscales with good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha for academic adjustment of .90, and .83 for social adjustment). The correlation between subscales is .58. Beck Depression Inventory-Second Edition (BDI-II; Beck, Steer and Brown, 1996) is a 21-item self-report measure evaluating depression symptoms. Each item is rated on a scale from 0 to 3, resulting in a total score between 0 and 63. Cronbach alpha in this sample is .90. The results vary from 0 to 44, with the mean of 7.44. Even if the average result is within normal range, 16.5% of all students have BDI above cut-off of 13. Big Five Inventory (BFI; John, Donahue and Kentle, 1991) is a self-report measure of five broad personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. Using a five-point Likert scale, from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree) participants rate themselves on 44 descriptive phrases, such as, "is talkative" or "is sometimes rude to others." The BFI is an internationally well established instrument for assessment of the Big Five and its reliability and validity have been proven in numerous studies (e.g. John and Srivastava, 1999). Internal consistency in this study ranged from acceptable to excellent: 0.80 for Neuroticism, 0.78 for Extraversion, 0.75 for Openness, 0.72 for Agreeableness, and 0.83 for Conscientiousness. Optimism was assessed using Life Orientation Test (LOT; Scheirer and Carver, 1985). The LOT is eight-item plus four filler items self-report measure assessing generalized expectancies for positive versus negative outcomes. Responses on a 5 point Likert-type scale range from 0 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree). We have used LOT as a two-dimensional scale. The Cronbach alpha for optimism is .69 and for pessimism .72. Life satisfaction. A single item survey question with an 8-point Likert type scale (0-7) was used. Students had to assess how satisfied they were with their life at the moment. The average assessment of 5.2 indicates that students are relatively satisfied with their life in general. Results Gender difference in all variables were tested by t-test for independent samples. The results are presented in Table 1. Females have more depressive symptoms and show higher neuroticism and openness. They are also better academically adjusted to college compared to males, while there is no sex difference in social adjustment. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses (method enter) were performed to answer our main research question. Big five traits were entered in the first step, optimism and pessimism in the second step and academic and social college adjustment in the third step. Separate analyses have been done for life satisfaction and depression as criteria, in the sample of females and males. First, we calculated the correlation among all the variables included in the regression analysis. The results are shown in Table 2 and Table 3. Table 1. Differences between male and female students (t-test) Males (N : = 167) Females (N : = 262) M SD M SD t Neuroticism 10.43 4.92 12.65 5.52 4 23*** Extraversion 20.89 4.78 21.13 5.22 0 47 Openness 25.52 5.57 27.12 5.83 2 83** Agreeableness 24.17 5.23 24.64 4.83 0 96 Conscientiousness 22.20 6.00 22.47 5.50 0 49 Optimism 10.74 2.84 10.44 3.08 1 10 Pessimism 5.91 3.24 5.86 3.16 0 17 Academic adjustment 123.07 23.63 131.65 23.79 3 /- £ *** 65 Social adjustment 64.32 14.89 66.19 15.39 1 25 Depression 6.24 5.98 8.29 7.96 2 .85** Life satisfaction 5.30 1.28 5.10 1.31 1 58 **p < .01, '"p < .001 The Pearson coefficients indicate significant correlation between all the predictor variables, besides openness, and both criteria of student adjustment (life satisfaction and depression). The direction of the correlations is as expected (Lounsbury et al., 2005). The variables entered in each step significantly contribute to life satisfaction and depression. All included predictors explain 43% variance of life satisfaction in females and 34% in males. Personality traits accounted for the most part of the variance, but when college adjustment was entered in the third step, only neuroticism had a significant contribution to life satisfaction in females, while optimism is a significant predictor in males. The social adjustment is the significant predictor of life satisfaction in the last step in both groups of students and the academic adjustment only in females. The predictors altogether explain 45% variance of depression in females and 49% in males. Again personality traits accounted for the most part of the variance. Neuroticism and pessimism have a significant individual contribution to depression in both groups, while optimism stays a significant predictor of depression only in males. Both aspects of college adjustment are significant negative predictors of depression in both groups of students. Discussion The results of the present study confirm our previous findings about gender differences in some aspects of students' adjustment at the beginning of college H H iO 00 g ^ o — ' • ' • — — P in > s Ui Ul M O p: & a> o > m ti r t a v b r a. o a i a> e <2 e p ^ CD e 55 s t o u e o S3 rt> B (Jj to (jJ 4-^ to (jJ L.J to O 00 (jJ to NO 00 J J J J J J J J J J J . J J J . J J 4 4 5 3 2 3 5 3 i to to 00 4- O o NO