Peer Attachment and Academic Procrastination in Chinese College Students: A Moderated Mediation Model of Future Time Perspective and Grit

Abstract

Although prior research has considerably documented the prevalence and correlates of academic procrastination in college students, relatively little is known about the role of longer volitional processes of goal striving, such as grit, on academic procrastination; moreover, the knowledge about direct and interactive effects of social context and personal characteristic on facilitating grit, which in turn mitigate academic procrastination, are still underexplored. Given these gaps in the existing literature, the current study, more exploratory in nature, investigates a moderated mediation model of future time perspective and grit in the association between peer attachment and academic procrastination in Chinese college students. A total of 1,098 undergraduate students (43.2% girls) aged from 18 to 25 were involved in the current study, and participants were asked to fill in a battery of self-report questionnaires. Results indicated that (a) peer attachment was negatively and significantly associated with academic procrastination; (b) grit partially mediated the association between peer attachment and academic procrastination; more precisely, peer attachment was positively associated with grit, which in turn was negatively linked to academic procrastination; and (c) future time perspective moderated the association between peer attachment and grit; more specifically, for students with low levels of future time perspective, the association between peer attachment and grit turned out to be significantly negative. These findings suggest that interventions targeting the enhancement of peer attachment and grit may prevent or reduce academic procrastination, and college students who regard future orientation as pessimistic should be paid specific attention by university-based counseling services.

Uncovering the Moderating Role of Grit and Gender in the Association between Teacher Autonomy Support and Social Competence among Chinese Undergraduate Students

“…Moreover, two-way interaction between teacher autonomy support and consistency was positively associated with social competence; three-way interaction among teacher autonomy support, consistency, and students’ gender was also positively related to social competence. In addition, it should be noted that in the case of significant three-way interaction, the interpretation of a single main effect and two-way interaction is basically incomplete or misleading [ 65 , 69 ]. Statistically, obtaining a significant direct effect of the independent variable or moderators on social competence is not the prerequisite for further interpreting significant interaction terms in the linear regression model [ 65 ].…”

A Structural Equation Model of Perceived Autonomy Support and Growth Mindset in Undergraduate Students: The Mediating Role of Sense of Coherence

“…After negotiating with school principals and teachers, each of the potential participants was asked to fill out a set of online questionnaires (through a QR code generated by Wenjuanwang) in the presence of teachers during class hours. During the period of this survey, one participant was only allowed to submit their responses once, based on their electronic devices' IP and login Wechat accounts (Jin et al, 2019). In the meantime, the duration of completing this survey was recorded automatically, and participants whose completion time was ±3 standard deviations of the mean completion time would be eliminated from the further course of data analysis.…”

“…Moreover, we made some efforts to decrease the possibility of unintentionally skipping questionnaire items. This procedure is suggested by previous online-based research (e.g., Jin et al, 2019;Lan et al, 2019e). To be specific, skipping any questions would prompt a reminder, which allows participants to double check their responses before submission.…”

“…In addition, indirect effects were tested using the bootstrapping approach considering a 95% confidence interval (bootstrap replications: 5,000; Preacher and Hayes 2008). If the confidence interval did not contain zero, these effects were considered statistically significant (Jin et al, 2019;Cui and Lan, 2020).…”

“…according to the national college admission policy. This gives us a valuable opportunity to recruit the participants who originally come from different regions of China and to potentially increase the representativeness of the sample (Jin et al, 2019).…”