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.
Highlights
Academic procrastination, defining as an intended delay of study-related action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay (Steel, 2007), has sparked the research interests of social scientists in the last decades
Age was negatively associated with grit and future time perspective, and positively associated with academic procrastination; gender was positively linked to peer attachment, and negatively associated with future time perspective and academic procrastination; socioeconomic status (SES) was positively associated with peer attachment and academic procrastination, and negatively linked to grit
After controlling for age, gender, and SES, there was a significant mediation effect found in the prediction of academic procrastination, B = −0.04, SE = 0.02, p < 0.001, 95% CI [−0.07, −0.01], whereby peer attachment was positively associated with grit, which in turn was negatively associated with academic procrastination
Summary
Academic procrastination, defining as an intended delay of study-related action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay (Steel, 2007), has sparked the research interests of social scientists in the last decades. Academic procrastination poses a serious threat to students’ academic achievement and subjective well-being (Kim and Seo, 2015; Steel and Klingsieck, 2016) Along with these negative effects, in the last decades, an escalating body of research has documented the correlates of academic procrastination among undergraduate students in different cultural contexts (Steel, 2007; Zhang et al, 2018; Chen, 2019), leading to a more nuanced understanding of this phenomenon. College students who fail to achieve better academic performance are more likely to encounter additional stress from sociocultural and parental expectations Given this significance, further investigation into the correlates of longer volitional processes of goal striving and related factors is valuable in terms of university-based counseling services with researchbased suggestions for interventions
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