Relationship Between Personality And Social Connectedness To Psychological Stress With Respect To Adjustment In The First Year Of Study

An opening sentence: encompasses the general topic: why is this topic important? Introduce the general issue and its importance.

Relevant studies: determines how research is relevant, what has been found about the topic and important findings.‘Conscientiousness has been linked with higher grades and wellbeing in university students’.

Logical progression of ideas: the flow of the introduction takes the reader by the hand and leads them logically to the aims and hypotheses.

Includes the aim: The aim of the research determines the purpose of the lab report (research). The aim does not magically appear-it is supported by what has been previously written.

Hypotheses have been re-worded: The hypotheses are in your own words. Hypotheses include the main variables and are justified by previous research. The aim is not the same as the hypothesis.

This report summarizes the statistical modelling and analysis results associated with the student wellbeing and academic performance research. The purpose of this report is to document the study design and all corresponding data modelling and techniques used during the study. It also lays out the associated results and inferences.

The study investigated relationship between social connectedness and wellbeing and academic performance. Social connectedness is the measure of the interaction between people. This interaction is defined by the number of connections one has with other people in the circle of family, friends and acquaintances (Milyavskaya, 2010).

It has been found that during transition to tertiary studies, many students experience challenges in striving to adjust to novel social and academic settings (TOKAEVA LILIANA K., 2012). It is perceived that a student’s level of connectedness has important implications for wellbeing and social connectedness (Janese Laster, 2012).

Personality traits such as conscientiousness are also thought to be a factor influencing academic performance at the university (Crespi, 1945). Conscientiousness is the trait of being careful or vigilant.

 These factors could either have a positive or negative impact on their wellbeing and academic performance. This study therefore tried to establish the implication of these relationships (Michie, 2001).

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between personality and social connectedness to psychological stress with respect to adjustment in the first year of study.

Two hypotheses were formulated for the study;

H_o: Conscientiousness will not have a negative relationship with student stress.

H₁: Conscientiousness will have a negative relationship with psychological, and;

H₀:  Social connectedness will not have a negative relationship with student stress.

H₁: Social connectedness will have a negative relationship with student stress.

Students are likely to benefit from this study. The study will enable them to identify the effect of personality and social connectedness to their academic performance (Appleton-Knapp, 2006). They are therefore likely to take necessary action regarding their personality and social connectedness in order to perform well in school (Janese Laster, 2012).

By emphasizing the importance of personality traits and social connectedness to students, they may be able to improve their academic performance and improve their wellbeing in school (Soutter, 2014).

This section provides in detail the models and techniques used in statistical data collection and analysis of raw research data. It also provides for the different ways to assess the research findings.

This section was divided into participants demographics to clearly outline the characteristics of the participants who took part in the survey and the sample that was studied.

Aim and Hypotheses

This section describes the particular characteristics of the sample that was admitted into the study. It provides information regarding the research participants and determines whether the sample is a representative of the population from which it is drawn. It also describes how the sample was drawn from the population.

For our study, we shall examine the demographic characteristics which include age, gender, degree course done and year of study.

This study was limited to first year students taking psychology at RMIT university.  The survey was open to all students in campus but only 403 participants took part. Of these participants only those who reported to be in their first year of study were studied because the study was looking at the transition to tertiary studies. Therefore, a purposive sampling technique was used (Ben-Shlomo Y, 2013).

Of the 403 participants, 293 representing about 72.70% of the participants that took part in the survey reported to be in first year. Of the target sample, 76 representing 25.94% were male and 217, representing 74.06% were females.

Of the 293, 283 did a psychology degree representing 96. 6% while 10 took other degrees representing 3.4%.

Data for this study were collected using questionnaires that were administered online. Students in the study were allocated 10 minutes to complete the study. They were required to complete the survey in secret in order to maintain data privacy.

Demographic data were collected for age, gender, year of study and degree course.

The students were required to provide responses on their measure of conscientiousness, social connectedness and adjustment to university life. They were required to submit scale responses on the degree of association between the two variables and student stress. Ratings were made on a Likert scale with five possible responses ranging from 1=strongly disagree to 5=strongly agree (Morrison, 1983). A Likert scale is a scale from which the participants chose responses that best suited them. It is usually used to measure a person’s attitude by measuring the extent to which they agree or disagree with a particular question or statement. Lower scores represented a lower level of social connectedness and conscientiousness while higher scores represented higher levels of social connectedness and conscientiousness (Cheung, 1994).

Since we are examining the relationship between social connectedness and conscientiousness with student stress, we have to independent variables and one dependent variable.

Our independent variables are:

• Social connectedness, and;
• Conscientiousness

while our dependent variable is;

• Student stress.

A student’s social connectedness explains how well a student relates with others. Relationships give people support, happiness, contentment and a sense of belonging. Social connectedness is fostered when family and friend relationships are positive. Negative relationships tend to impact negatively on social connectedness.

Importance of the Study

The more a student is socially connected the more they are happier and contented. This improves the student’s mental wellbeing and thereby influence positively on results of their undertakings.

A student’s level of conscientiousness explains how careful they are. It also depicts the student’s self discipline. Students who score high in conscientiousness have a high level of self-discipline. High levels of conscientiousness will imply that the students will be careful on their academic progress and wellbeing, thus resulting to better academic performance and wellbeing compared to their peers with low levels of conscientiousness. The more a student is conscientious, the better their academic performance and wellbeing. The lesser a student is conscientious, the lower their academic performance and wellbeing.

We try to establish the relationship between each of the independent variables and the dependent variable by modelling for correlation of these factors. The coefficient of correlation between social connectedness and student stress and that of between conscientiousness and student stress are examined and inference made:

The following points provide a guidance on inference concerning coefficient of correlation, r.

A positive correlation coefficient implies a positive relationship while a negative correlation coefficient implies a negative relationship between the dependent and independent variables (Gupta, 1977).

The data was analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS).

Descriptive statistics, that is mean, standard deviation and range were used to describe the sample.

This study may be limited through the use of questionnaires as a method of data collection. Since questionnaires should generally be brief, vital information regarding student performance and wellbeing might have been left out.

Online questionnaires require that students should have access to internet in order to participate in the survey. However, not all students might access the internet.

The sample of first year psychology students, who were majority of the studied sample, might not be a representative of the total population of students in campus.

This study was designed to determine the impact of social connectedness and conscientiousness on student performance and wellbeing. This section provides results that were obtained from data analysis carried out using SPSS(version 25).

The results will be presented in four sections according to the following characteristics: demographic characteristics, descriptive statistics for the study variables, relationship between conscientiousness and student stress and the relationship between social connectedness to student stress.

Data for the 293 desired respondents was analyzed using SPSS (version 25) and the following provides description for the participants:

Method

Of the participants who took part in the survey, about 72.70% were studied, as this was the target group. Majority of the studied sample were first year year students taking a psychology degree with a percentage of 96.6%. Only 3.4% of the individuals admitted into the study did other degree courses.

The mean age for the individuals is 19.8908. The male students represented 25.9% while the females represented 74.1%. 96.6% took a degree in psychology while 3.4% took other courses.

These data can be presented in pie charts as shown below:

Descriptive statistics for the variables

Conscientiousness had a minimum score of 8 and a maximum score of 30, implying a range of 22. The range represents dispersion of the data set. The mean of the dataset was 19.9420.

Social connectedness had a minimum score of 32 and a maximum of 118, implying a range of 86. Its mean was 85.0068.

Student stress had a minimum score of 1 and a maximum of 51, implying a range of 50. Its mean was 17.9693.

The following table summarizes the descriptive statistics for the three variables:

	M	SD
Student stress Social connectedness Conscientiousness	17.97 85.01 19.94	8.29 15.74 3.60

The relationship between these two variables was examined by performing a correlation analysis using SPSS (version 25).

The correlation coefficient between conscientiousness and student stress was found to be -0.153 and a p-value of 0.009 obtained.

This implies a negative relationship between conscientiousness and student stress. P-value is less than 0.05 indicating strong evidence against the null hypothesis at 5% level of significance. We therefore reject the null hypothesis that Conscientiousness will not have a Hello, 
The marked parts are the parts that the student already provided in the results handout and needed to be part of the report.

negative relationship with student stress in favour of the alternative hypothesis that Conscientiousness will have negative relationship with student stress.

The correlation coefficient between social connectedness and student stress was found to be -0.447 and a p-value of 0.000 (less than 0.001) obtained.

This implies a negative relationship between conscientiousness and student stress. P-value is less than 0.01 indicating strong evidence against the null hypothesis at 1% level of significance. We therefore reject the null hypothesis that social connectedness will not have a negative relationship with student stress in favour of the alternative hypothesis that social connectedness will have a negative relationship with student stress.

In this section we try to interpret and discuss the significance of the findings in the research.

Results

The study tried to investigate the relationship between conscientiousness and student academic performance and wellbeing (student stress) and the relationship between social connections and student stress.

The analysis carried out suggested that the two hypotheses were supported. Therefore, conscientiousness and social connections indeed suggested to have an impact on student’s academic performance.

Negative correlation coefficients imply that the two variables are negatively correlated to student stress. Thus, the two factors have a negative impact on academic performance.

A low level of social connectedness will impact negatively on academic performance.

Less conscientiousness will impact negatively on academic performance.

The results are consistent with other previous research that social connectedness and conscientiousness affects academic performance (Godwin, 2015).

From the study findings and discussions, the following recommendations can be made:

Students should have high level of social connectedness in order to better their academic performance and wellbeing.

Students should have high levels of conscientiousness for their good academic performance and wellbeing.

More research should be conducted to investigate the impact of social connectedness and conscientiousness on performance in other life aspects such as business (James, 2012) (Joshua J. Jackson, 2010).

Research should be carried out to investigate relationship between social connectedness and conscientiousness. It would be prudent to be able to find out whether these two variables are related in any way.

References

Appleton-Knapp, S. L. K. K. A., 2006. Measuring Student Expectations and Their Effects on Satisfaction: The Importance of Managing Student Expectations. p. 11.

Ben-Shlomo Y, B. S. H. M., 2013. Epidemiology, Evidence-based Medicine and Public Health. p. 9.

Cheung, K. M. L., 1994. A Comparison Between the Rating Scale Model and Dual Scaling for Likert Scales. p. 13.

Crespi, L. P., 1945. Public Opinion toward Conscientious Objectors: IV. Opinions on Significant Conscientious Objector Issues. p. 34.

Godwin, A. S. T. D. P. G. S. G. S. P. M., 2015. [IEEE 2015 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) - Camino Real El Paso, El Paso, TX, USA (2015.10.21-2015.10.24)] 2015 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) - The academic performance index. Creating a more robust and less biased measure of student academic performance, p. 8.

Gupta, S. D., 1977. Tests on multiple correlation coefficient and multiple partial correlation coefficient. p. 7.

James, R. N., 2012. Multi-family Housing, Social Capital, and Charitable Behavior. Does Spatial Connectedness Influence Social Connectedness?, p. 15.

Janese Laster, C. G. V. S. S. M. J. K., 2012. A Student Initiative for Reducing Stress in Medical Students. Stress-Less-Fest, p. 3.

Janese Laster, C. G. V. S. S. M. J. K., 2012. A Student Initiative for Reducing Stress in Medical Students: Stress-Less-Fest. p. 3.

Joshua J. Jackson, D. W. T. B. K. E. W. P. D. H. B. W. R., 2010. What do conscientious people do? Development and validation of the Behavioral Indicators of Conscientiousness (BIC). p. 11.

Michie, F. G. M. B. D., 2001. An Evaluation of Factors Influencing the Academic Self-concept, Self-esteem and Academic Stress for Direct and Re-entry Students in Higher Education. p. 18.

Milyavskaya, M. R. J. K. R. F. L. G. F., 2010. Seeking Social Connectedness. Interdependent Self-Construal and Impression Formation Using Photographic Cues of Social Connectedness, p. 14.

Morrison, P. R., 1983. LIKERT. An APPLESOFT program for the construction, administration, and scoring of Likert scales, p. 2.

Soutter, A. K. O. B. G. A., 2014. The student well-being model. a conceptual framework for the development of student well-being indicators, p. 25.

TOKAEVA LILIANA K., P. S. S. P. S., 2012. THE PSYCHOEMOTIONAL STATUS AND CARDIOVASCULAR SYSTEM FUNCTIONAL STATE OF THE FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF EXAMINATION STRESS. p. 3.