The explanation of the academic procrastination behaviour of university students with perfectionism, obsessive – compulsive and five factor personality traits

Abstract

The procrastination behaviour which is known as delaying the responsible behaviours that individuals have to carry out has many different dimensions. One of them is adjourning to take into action for academic tasks which are subjectively important to perform or it is the academic procrastination which can be defined as the habit of adjourning and which is very common among students. Due to the procrastination behaviour of students, they cannot use their actual performances in learning process and therefore fail. The understanding of the procrastination behaviours of students affecting their learning process facilitates their skills to cope with academic procrastination behaviour. In this context, academic procrastination is considered to be associated with perfectionism, obsessive – compulsive and five factor personal traits and the academic procrastination behaviours will be tried to be explained in the present research. The research group was comprised of 265 students from different universities, departments and classes. In the present research, in order to determine the tendency to academic procrastination of the students, the “Aitken Academic Procrastination Scale” developed by Aitken (1982) and adapted into Turkish by Balkıs (2007); in order to determine their tendency to perfectionism, “Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale” developed by Frost, Marten, Lahart and Rosenblate (1990) and adapted into Turkish by Özbay and Mısırlı – Taşdemir (2003); in order to determine their obsessive – compulsive personal traits, the “Padua Inventory” developed by Sanavio (1988) and adapted into Turkish by Beşiroğlu (2005); and in order to determine the five factor personal traits of the students, “Five Factor Model Personality Scale” developed by Bacanlı, İlhan and Arslan (2007) were used. The data collected in the present research will be tested using the path model. As a result of the analysis, it was determined that perfectionism, obsessive- compulsive and five factor personality traits are important variables that explain the academic procrastination behaviour.