Investigating the Relationship Between University Students’ Psychological Flexibility and College Self-Efficacy

Abstract

<jats:p> For many, college is a period of transition, marked with acute stress, threats to success, and decreases in self-efficacy. For certain groups of students, the risk of these poor outcomes is elevated. In this study, 348 students from a large residential university in the western United States were surveyed to understand the role of psychological flexibility and inflexibility on self-efficacy and the potential moderating impact of year in college and underrepresented racial minority (URM) status. Results indicated that students who are psychologically flexible reported greater college self-efficacy, whereas students who are psychologically inflexible reported lower college self-efficacy. The impact of psychological inflexibility on self-efficacy was moderated by URM status and year in school; psychological inflexibility had a stronger impact on URM students’ self-efficacy than nonminority students, and psychological inflexibility had a greater effect on college students starting college as opposed to students who had been enrolled for multiple years. </jats:p>

Understanding procrastination: A case of a study skills course

“…A recent study by Jeffords et al (2018), showed that psychological flexibility is closely related to self-efficacy. Self-efficacy has often been studied previously, focusing on procrastination with results showing an inverse relationship with procrastination (Howell and Watson, 2007;Steel, 2007;Wolters, 2003).…”

Developing an intervention course to promote students’ well-being and studying in university context

“…To sum up, our course aims to foster students' well-being by enhancing their psychological flexibility as well as their study-skills during the intervention. Recently brief social-psychological interventions have been called for, as mechanisms to improve academic performance [51]. Our intervention tool is a good example of a holistic approach to support studying at the university.…”

“…Poor well-being of university students is a common concern worldwide, and effective tools and practices to increase students' well-being are needed. We designed the intervention course to equip students with tools to enhance their well-being and also to help them to develop their study skills, because well-being should be also taken into account when fostering students learning and studying [11,51,82]. This course was based on the idea of fostering psychological flexibility, which has convincingly been shown to be an essential factor in improving psychological, social and emotional as well as physical wellbeing in many ways [38,45,82].…”

“…Recent pilot studies have also indicated that the theory of psychological flexibility is the core process in explaining procrastination in the higher education context [48,49]. Furthermore, psychological flexibility has also been shown to be related to students' self-regulation in learning [47,50], and it has also been shown to be particularly important for students who are at higher risk of academic failure [51]. Thus, the importance of psychological flexibility is evident in the university context.…”

Psychological Flexibility Research Trends

“…The range of research in 2015-2018 regarding psychological flexibility is presented as follows, Wei, et al (2015) research that explores psychological awareness and flexibility of counselors who take part in training with selfefficacy counseling, the results of the study show a positive relationship between psychological flexibility and self-efficacy. Another study on psychological flexibility and self-efficacy was also carried out by Jeffords, et al (2018) whose results were students who had high psychological flexibility, had high self-efficacy. While students who have low flexibility also have low self-efficacy as well.…”