Focus on character strengths leads to positive outcome for a student in their first year at university.
Introduction
Character strengths are mainly the basis of optimum life-long developments as well as thriving. A family of productive traits that are reflected in one’s thought, feelings and behaviors can be said as good characters (Park & Peterson, 2009). However, many researches give a clear result that character strengths are associated to important features of individual as well as social well-beings while different strengths forecast different aftermath.
Discussion
In everyday interaction, people mostly talk modestly and reluctantly about their strengths. This hesitance to talk about the strengths is greatly contemplated in psychology where strengths would have been the issue of very little logical empirical research. In a study by Gustems-Carnicer & Calderón done in 2016, mainly defines, analyzes and evaluates the character strengths along with virtues and coping strategies of the college students. However, positive correlations have been found among the six virtues and three of the coping strategies after the collection of data from ninety-one college students. In 2009, another study done by Lounsbury et al., which researched on the graduate students about their values that are in action character strengths in association with two of the indices academic victories which are student satisfaction as well as grade point average. However, the results are explained from the outlook of the lifespan development, behavior of the college student, and theory of identity, ‘emerging adulthood’, and big five-personality model and personality research on individual’s satisfaction in life. Therefore, this study has further indicated through its analysis of the data collected that character strengths are definitely associated to the academic victory of college students, where their victory is functioning as the student satisfaction as well as performance of their academics (Linley & Harrington, 2006).
Macaskill & Denovan in 2013 did another study where they have resembled positive psychology to aim at developing confidence among the first year students to promote autonomous learning. Character strength has been evaluated taking 214 students of the university on the very first day of this study. However, during conducting this study in around two weeks the students are presented with three top strengths of them, which were provided in the modules of study skills as a piece of their psycho-educational intervention that has been outlined to enhance their self-efficacy and self-esteem. The outcome further indicates that the students are more self-confident after the psycho educational intervention and so an increase in their level of autonomous learning has been found as compared to the control group of 40 students who experienced no such interventions (Macaskill & Denovan, 2013). It can be further said that character strengths were as expected was related with self-efficacy, self-esteem and autonomous learning in the process that are meaningful conceptually. However, it can be said from the studies that character strengths have overall showed a great amount of connection with the academic performance that is teamwork, honesty, perseverance, self-regulation and prudence.
Conclusion
Thus, to conclude the essay it can be said that from the previous researches done on the university students clearly states that focus based on character strengths can guide to positive results for the students in the university. Character strengths however, have been already defined as the optimal long run developments and thriving in an individual.
References
Gustems-Carnicer, J., & Calderón, C. (2016). Virtues and character strengths related to approach coping strategies of college students. Social Psychology of Education, 19(1), 77-95.
Linley, P.A. & Harrington, S. (2006, February). Playing to your strengths. The Psychologist, 19 (2) pp. 86-89
Lounsbury, J. W., Fisher, L. A., Levy, J. J., & Welsh, D. P. (2009). An Investigation of Character Strengths in Relation to the Academic Success of College Students. Individual Differences Research, 7(1).
Macaskill, A., & Denovan, A. (2013). Developing autonomous learning in first year university students using perspectives from positive psychology. Studies in Higher Education, 38(1), 124-142.
Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2009). Character strengths: Research and practice. Journal of college and character, 10(4).
