Codependency: An Evaluation in Terms of Depression, Need for Social Approval and Self-Love/Self-Efficacy

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of the current study is to investigate pre-service teachers’ depression, needs for social approval and selflove/self-efficacy as the predictors of codependency. It is also aimed in this research to compare depression, need for socialapproval, self-love/self-efficacy and codependency according to various variables.Design/Methodology/Approach: The study was conducted on 195 education faculty students (156 females and 39 males) andused the Beck Depression Inventory, the Need for Social Approval Scale, the Spann-Fischer Codependency Scale and the SelfLove/Self-Efficacy Scale to collect data. In the analysis of the collected data, t test, One Way Anova, Pearson Moment-ProductsCorrelation Coefficient and Multiple Regression Analysis were used.Findings: As a result of the analyses, it was found that depression, need for social approval, self-love and self-efficacy variablesexplain 49% of codependency. Depression was found to be the variable making the greatest contribution. Self-efficacy wasfound to be not making any contribution to the model. While gender was found to be leading to no significant difference, theanalyses taking birth order into consideration revealed that the firstborn has higher self-efficacy compared to the others.Conclusions: This research is important in terms of the variables that predict codependency. The findings of the current studyare discussed to shed light for future research on codependency, the need for social approval, depression and self-love/selfefficacy.