Relation Between Locus of Control, Personality Traits and Academic Achievement

Abstract

As the development of the psychology, people conceive the thought to know themselves in depth and curious the relation and consequence of each personality trait will have and how external factors will affect them. Hence after the idea of locus of control was developed, study over locus of control and other characteristics is endless. This article aims to find the relation between locus of control and personal traits when adding the consideration of academic achievement. The author uses data from a study of a group of elder African American female that has age of 65 and older in U.S. collected in between 1999 and 2000. This article focus on the internal control, also known as agency, represent locus of control and personality traits will be represented by self-esteem and self-efficacy. The academic achievement will be reflected by educated time. The method of this article is using STATA regression analysis to see the correlation between each variable. In conclusion, in general the correlation between self-esteem or self-efficacy and internal control become more and more stronger as the education increase, i.e., for high education group, the higher self-esteem or self-efficacy one has, the more internal control one has. This logic is bidirectional. For additional summary in responding the actual influence to self-esteem or self-efficacy and further extended to locus of control brought by education variable, increasing the education level or academic achievement will improve the mental health and efficiency on working or studying to some extent.