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The relationship between achievement goal orientation and coping style: traditional vs. nontraditional college students
College Student Journal, March, 2003 by Emily A. Morris, Peggy R. Brooks, James L. May
The implications of the previously referenced studies are multitudinous in nature. Our purpose is to broaden the body of research applying to traditional and non traditional college students in an effort to increase understanding and awareness of the two groups. The primary focus of the present study was to examine traditional and nontraditional college students' achievement goal orientations and then compare them to the styles of coping utilized. Our goal was to determine if coping styles and achievement goal orientations share a significant relationship, and whether these facilitate a better understanding of the differences between the two groups.
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Based on previous research we hypothesized that a student's goal orientations would be related to the coping styles that he or she utilized. We expected that learning goal orientations would be positively related to task-oriented coping, whereas emotion-oriented coping would be positively related to a performance goal orientation. Furthermore, we predicted that nontraditional college students would more often endorse a learning goal orientation and utilize a task-oriented coping style more frequently than the traditional college student. We additionally expected that traditional college students would more often endorse a performance goal orientation and utilize emotion-oriented coping style more regularly.
Method
Participants were 103 undergraduates from a small northeastern liberal arts college. Nontraditional college students were defined as 22 years of age or older and as having more multiple roles (i.e. parents, spouses, employees), while traditional college students were defined as those between the ages of 18 and 22 who resided on the college campus. Mean age for traditional students was 19.5 years of age, while nontraditional students' mean age was 28.
To assess strategies typically used in coping with stressful situations, the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (Endler & Parker, 1990b) was employed. The CISS measures coping as one of five types: task-oriented coping, emotion-oriented coping, and avoidance-oriented coping that includes social diversion and adds distraction-oriented coping.
For the purposes of this study, task and emotion-oriented coping were examined. The CISS defines task-oriented coping as a style of coping in which an individual purposefully attempts to solve a problem by actively seeking out a solution. Emotion-oriented coping is characterized as a self-focused coping style that generally results in intense emotional responses to stressful situations. The CISS' potential range of scores for task and emotion-oriented coping is from 16-80.
To measure achievement goal orientations in our sample, we used Roedel, Schraw, and Plake's (1994) Goals Inventory. This inventory evaluates students' achievement goal orientation using two distinct goals styles, learning goals and performance goals. The GI describes learning goals as those characterized by a strong desire for mastery and problem solving, whereas performance goals are defined by their focus on outcome over process. Potential scores on the performance goals factor ranges from 5-25, while potential scores on the learning goals factor ranges from 12-60.
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