Title:
Floundering or flourishing college students: the role of substance use and prosocial involvement on psychological adjustment
Author:
Julia M. Hernandez
Committee Member:
Carolyn Barry
Committee Member:
Beth Kotchick
Committee Member:
Rachel Grover
Degree Granting Institution:
Loyola University Maryland--College of Arts and Sciences
Place:
Baltimore (Md.)
Publisher:
Loyola University Maryland
Date Created:
2012
Type of Resource:
text
Genre:
thesis
Language:
eng
Format:
application/pdf
Physical Form:
electronic
Digital Source:
born digital
Abstract:
Most American residential college students experience a decrease in direct parental supervision and the absence of responsible adult roles, resulting in their pursuit of novel and intense experiences. It is normative for such students to engage in high levels of prosocial behaviors and moderate levels of risk behaviors, which both have been related to their levels of psychological adjustment. Emerging adults' self-regulation and self-esteem is in formation during this time of individuation, yet little research exists on the intersection of these behaviors and characteristics on college students' psychological adjustment. Thus in the current study, it was hypothesized that (a) engagement in risk behavior (i.e., substance use) would be related in a curvilinear fashion to self-regulation and self-esteem, (b) engagement in prosocial behaviors (i.e., helpfulness toward family, friends, and strangers) would be related positively to self-regulation and self-esteem, and (c) prosocial behaviors would moderate the relations between risk behavior and the two self variables. A religiously and ethnically diverse sample of participants (N = 572) from three public and one religious university completed the following surveys online: a modified version of the Tobacco, Alcohol, Drugs measure in the Add Health Questionnaire, an adapted version of the VIA Inventory of Strengths: Kindness/Generosity Subscale, the Emotional Self-Regulation Subscale, and the Self-Worth Subscale of the Self Perceptions Profile for College Students. Hierarchical regression analysis was performed on self-regulation. The analyses reveals that RB negatively predicted self-regulation (?? = -.14, p = .003), whereas PBS (?? = .12, p = .012) and PBFam (?? = .11, p = .03) positively predicted self-regulation. The posthoc analyses exploring these significant interactions suggested that neither level of the moderator significantly affected the relation between RB and self-regulation. A curvilinear relation was found between RB and self-esteem, and a factorial ANOVA was conducted with RB divided into low, moderate, and high levels and prosocial behaviors divided into low and high.
Subject:
Electronic dissertations
Degree:
Master of Science
Level:
Master
Discipline:
Psychology
Restrictions on Access:
Author has given permission to make this work available online.
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Identifier:
HernandezJM-13
