The current study was an exploratory and descriptive study and examined the relationship between perceived visibility of disability, attributional style for positive events, attributional style for negative events, psychosocial adjustment to disability, perceived self-advocacy skill, and the multidimensional construct of student adaptation to college, which includes academic adjustment, social adjustment, personal/emotional adjustment, institutional adjustment, and current semester grade point average (GPA) for college students with disabilities. Furthermore, this study investigated the differences between the attributional style for positive events, attributional style for negative events and student adaptation to college for students with disabilities as compared to students without disabilities. The data used for analysis was obtained through an on-line survey administration of the following instruments: a demographic questionnaire containing questions asking participants to rate the perceived visibility of their disability and asking for current semester GPA, the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ; Peterson, Semmel, von Baeyer, Abramson, Metalsky, & Seligman, 1982), the adjustment scale of the Reaction to Impairment and Disability Inventory (RIDI; Livneh & Antonak, 1990), a measure of perceived self-advocacy skill specifically developed by the researcher for the purposes of this study, and the Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ; Baker & Siryk, 1989). Results indicate clearly that when considering the differences between those participants with disabilities and those without disabilities, the non-disabled group scored significantly higher for social adjustment, personal/emotional adjustment, and institutional attachment. In terms of attributional style, the disability group scored higher indicating a more internal, stable, and global attributional style for both positive events and negative events. Further analysis conducted using just the disability group data revealed many significant and practically important bivariate correlations between variables including self-advocacy skill, institutional attachment, personal/emotional adjustment, social adjustment, and overall student adaptation to college. Canonical correlation determined a significant interrelationship between the predictive domains (student characteristics) and the criterion domains (adjustment outcomes) which were explained by a single canonical pair. 16% of the adjustment outcome variance was explained by the student characteristic variables. This explanation was due to a relatively strong relationship between Positive Student Response and Positive Adjustment Outcomes (the single canonical pair). / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Educational Psychology and Learning
Systems in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2007. / Date of Defense: June 25, 2007. / Attributional Style, Adjustment, Disability, Visibility, Self-Advocacy, Adaptation, College, Student / Includes bibliographical references. / Briley Proctor, Professor Directing Dissertation; Deborah Ebener, Outside Committee Member; Huijun Li, Committee Member; Frances Prevatt, Committee Member.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_168195 |
| Contributors | Adams, Katharine Susan (authoraut), Proctor, Briley (professor directing dissertation), Ebener, Deborah (outside committee member), Li, Huijun (committee member), Prevatt, Frances (committee member), Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems (degree granting department), Florida State University (degree granting institution) |
| Publisher | Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, text |
| Format | 1 online resource, computer, application/pdf |
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