The Relationship Between Personality And Proactive Coping Among University Students

1. Coping, Proactive Coping and its Measurement

1.What is coping? What is proactive coping? How is it measured?

2.What is personality? What is the Five Factor Model of personality? How is it measured?

3.How is personality related to coping, and proactive coping in particular?

4.Why is it important to understand how personality relates to coping?

5.What sorts of stressors are university students exposed to?

6.What are the practical applications for university students in understanding how personality relates to coping, and how it relates to proactive coping in particular.

The purpose of this paper is to discover the effects of coping and specifically proactive coping that is very useful for the reduction of stress of the people in difficult circumstances. It is useful to say that proactive coping is one special category of coping. This helps to develop some future-oriented strategy that stops the negative thinking of the people and convert them into positive things i.e. their strengths. The potential stressors would not be able to affect the individual at an amount that it would have done if proactive coping had not been used. Every human being has their own set of personalities. These personalities often influence the individuals to use the proactive coping. The use of Five Factor Model is very important in this context because it helps to understand the context better. In this paper, the Five Factor Model has to be described in order to focus on the relation of personality and proactive coping among the university students. It is to be mentioned that Five factor Model is a very important theory in determining the personality traits of the different individuals. There are five factors in this model which can be described as openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. 

In order to begin the essay, the idea of coping must be clarified so that the topic can be understood better by the readers.

In the modern days, the people experience various things that make them tired in mind they suffer from anxiety and mental tensions very often. This causes stress in their minds and they apply various means to resolve them. These stress situations can occur because of several issues. The way that people apply to reduce and manage the stress situations is called coping. There are many types of coping that exist to manage the different types of stress situations (Bernstein et al., 2013). Every people are different from each other in some way or the other. So, the method of coping is obviously different from each other as well. There are many strategies for coping and different coping strategies work differently for those people (Folkman, 2013). These coping strategies depend on the personalities and individual skills of those individuals. The working power of these coping strategies is thoroughly different as well. It is because there are some coping strategies which do not work like the others because they are not meant for the long-run efficiency but these strategies are designed to work for a shorter period only. The coping strategies help the people two stay calm in difficult conditions and benefit the human beings in different ways (Bernstein et al., 2013).

2. Personality, Five Factor Model and its measurement

Proactive coping is one type of coping that is an affirmative process in fixing the strategies for coping (Carver & Connor-Smith, 2010). In this process, the potential stressors can be comprehended beforehand and they have to be either prevented by the individual or their influence has to be silenced. Many social-cognitive issues are associated with it because it deals with the several factors like the organizational behavior, discrimination among people (Robbins & Judge, 2012). It also includes management of serious things and many others (Skinner & Pitzer, 2012). Many other aspects are associated with this. The process of proactive coping involves many factors like the goal setting for some project, deriving to powerful and active beliefs (Bernstein et al., 2013). This helps to gain the self-improvement of the individuals and the social support as well.

Proactive coping has to be measured by different procedures. The way of measuring the proactive coping is done by a scale that is called the Proactive Coping Inventory (PCI) (Bogdan, Rioux & Negovan, 2012). This inventory had been developed to assess the different proactive approaches to coping and there are seven subscales of it. These are proactive coping, preventive coping, reflective coping, strategic planning, instrumental support seeking, emotional support seeking and avoidance coping (Carver & Connor-Smith, 2010). This inventory has to be applied either by the interviewer or self-administered individual in 15-20 minutes. This scale has been translated into 12 languages and they are German, Dutch, Spanish, Polish, Turkish, Italian, Japanese, Portugese, Hebrew, Russian, Czech and Arabic (Carver & Connor-Smith, 2010).

The scoring is done through the following process in the Proactive Coping inventory. In this process, 1 means ‘not at all true’, 2 means ‘barely true’, 3 means ‘somewhat true’ and 4 means ‘completely true’. The responses to the questions have to be summed up by the interviewer in seven subscales. The range of scores is:-

Subscale	Range of scores
Proactive coping	14-56
Reflective coping	11-44
Preventive coping	10-40
Avoidance coping	3-12
Instrumental support seeking	8-32
Emotional support seeking	5-20
Strategic planning	4-16

Personality is a psychological term that means the set of characteristics a person possesses and the characteristics which are so very unique in them because they vary from individual to individual (Carver & Connor-Smith, 2010). These personality elements are influenced by environments, cognitions, motivations, behaviors and their emotions as a whole. The topic of ‘personality’ has a broad understanding keeping in mind the various things like the perceptions, values and attitudes of the individual human beings. There are many historical traditions to study personality. This can be divided in two major ways which are the Nomothetic and the Ideographic personality (Hambrick & McCord, 2010). There are many theories that can be associated with personality. These theories are a) Type theories, b) Psychoanalytic theories, c) Behaviorist theories, d) Social cognitive theories, e) Humanistic theories, f) Bio-psychological theories and g) Evolutionary theory (Drummond & Brough, 2016).

Many psychologists, over the years have thought that all the personality traits can be assimilated into five factors and these factors can be called as the Five Factor Model of Personality (Chmielewski, & Morgan, 2013).  These five factors are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

Openness to experience

In this trait many factors like emotion, art, unusual and creative ideas, variety of experiences come. It signifies the extent to which a person can be imaginative and how can he welcome creativity (Drummond & Brough, 2016).

Conscientiousness

This trait signifies the extent of self-discipline, dutifulness, competence and thoughtfulness. According to this trait, an individual will focus on his or her behavior. People who are high conscientious in behavior prefer to be planned and hardworking and organized (Drummond & Brough, 2016).

Extraversion

The qualities in the persons with high extraversion are high energy, positive mindset, talkativeness, socially active and assertiveness (Kandler, 2012). The people with lower extraversion are characterized by quietness, solitariness and avoiding of large reunions.

Agreeableness  

This is a positive psychological trait that shows that the individual has compassion and co-operation with others rather than suspicion and negative attitude (Cobb-Clark & Schurer, 2012). It can be measured from this trait whether the person is trusting and helpful and if he is not short-tempered. People who are low scorers in agreeableness are deemed as rude.

Neuroticism

Persons who score high on neuroticism are considered to be very angry, anxious, depressed and vulnerable (Ormel et al., 2013). This also focuses on the stability of emotions of the individual. The people scoring high in this are emotionally instable as well.

Coping, specifically proactive coping has a strong relation with the personality traits and the Five Factor Model of the personality traits are deeply involved with it (Straud, McNaughton-Cassill & Fuhrman, 2015).  In this case, it can be said that neuroticism reflects a negative thought process in the human beings so neuroticism is correlated with neuroticism in a big way. It can also be pointed out that the people who are high in conscientiousness are much harder in working, objective-oriented and they are very organized in their lifestyles (Carver & Connor-Smith, 2010). Thus, one can assume that conscientiousness is very much affirmatively correlated with proactive coping. The other personality traits like the extraversion and agreeableness can also be attributed to the positive aspects of proactive coping. If a thorough research work is done about the relationship between the personality and coping, one would see that personality is very important factor in understanding of the coping abilities of the human beings, especially proactive coping abilities. The correlations between these two factors are very strong and they are very deeply related (Moring, Fuhrman & Zauszniewski, 2011). It can be considered from the different personality aspects of a person that when he scores high in personality traits like conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness with low scores in neuroticism, he is a person with high level coping abilities. Therefore, it is better to say that when a person is conscientious (success-oriented), extraverted (cheerful), ready to change (agreeable) and not depressed (neurotic), is going to be successful in the works he undertakes and he should be able to avoid the potential stressors and not succumb to them (Straud, McNaughton-Cassill & Fuhrman, 2015).  

It is very important to know that personality and coping are deeply interrelated to each other. This relationship is very significant is determining the various behavioral aspects of the human beings. There are many types of coping which exists to understand the topic better. These types of coping are also deeply related with each other. The different personality traits like conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism and extraversion judges the coping abilities of the human beings. It is because every person faces difficult times and they are all influenced by the potential stressors (Drummond & Brough, 2016). These stressors make them upset and they are negatively motivated. Since, this is not acceptable and they should learn to tackle these situations, coping abilities should be developed to find the solutions to the problems. Difficult times come when people expect it at the least. The coping abilities which are positive in nature motivate the human beings to fight against those odds (Moring, Fuhrman & Zauszniewski, 2011). When a person is success-oriented and goal driven, he should have the abilities to be stand up against the failures. Thus, extraversion and agreeableness also provides positive coping abilities and neuroticism is a negative aspect in the personality traits. These things make the human beings learn about how to cope up with the difficult situations (Straud, McNaughton-Cassill & Fuhrman, 2015).

There are some common stressors which are typically seen among the students. These stressors are very common and affect their mental health because they come under huge stress so they lag behind in their studies and their normal lives. They may face the stress because of some events in their personal lives that they cannot share with anyone. This may be a cause of stress in their lives. They may also have to tackle relationship problems in their personal lives. Some students do not possess IQ level as others so they do not have the same academic intelligence and they suffer from mental anguish because of this reason (Jauk et al., 2013). This creates a sort of stress in their minds. Some students who are not intelligent enough may face harassments in their universities and classes. These harassments create a long-lasting negative impression in their minds that leads them to stressful situations. It is a notable that money has now become a serious fact in education and there is no way out from that. The expense for higher education courses is huge and some students cannot afford this kind of amount. The situation may be that a student wanted to pursue his higher students in Microbiology and then go on to research in that subject for his PhD degree. The tragedy came that he could not do so because of the shortage of money. Only because of this reason that student may have to study a different subject which he may not like that much. His grades would fall down and he can feel stressed because of this reason as well. The National Sleep Foundation has declared that it is essential for everyone to have a proper time of sleep during the day. If the students do not get proper time to sleep because of extra pressure in their studies it will be problematic for them to adjust with the changes and they will feel stress very normally. Students who have poor eating habits also suffer from stresses (Regehr, Glancy & Pitts, 2013).

The studies in the field of coping and personality shows that stressful events occur earlier than the coping process when students of the universities go through certain difficult stressful situations (Sagone & De Caroli, 2014). These stresses would make the university students weaker mentally and this would affect their performance in studies. The coping procedure comes after the stressful events when the university students have to buck themselves up by tackling against those stressful conditions. As it has been discussed earlier, proactive coping is considered to be the most important element in personality and one of the most crucial protective resources as well. Proactive coping prevents the students from getting too stressed and depressed as it promotes the psychological wellness among the students (Drummond & Brough, 2016). The positive elements of proactive coping like conscientiousness, openness to experience; extraversion and neuroticism would be provoked in them so that they can be able to confront with the mental stress and thus overcoming them (Check et al., 2014).  Proactive coping is more important than the traditional coping because it helps to motivate the students to perform better in their academic life and provides them courage to progress with whatever he has (Sagone & De Caroli, 2014). The challenges make them strong while they learn to cope up with the difficult present and prepare for their future.

Conclusion

This paper can be concluded in the way that all the aspects of coping and personality have been highlighted and properly discussed during the essay. It has been found that stressful situations really affect the students’ life and their academic life will be hampered if they suffer from stress. All the major characteristics of coping and proactive coping have been discussed so that these characteristics would help the students in their quest to overcome the stressful situations and hence, get motivated. This motivation due to proactive coping would make them successful in the future. All the positive aspects of the proactive coping have to be maintained by the university students and at a larger aspect, by all the human beings.

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