Investigating the relations of the Six Self-Compassion Components with academic stress across Chinese primary, secondary, and university students in Hong Kong

Investigating the relations of the Six Self-Compassion Components with academic stress across Chinese primary, secondary, and university students in Hong Kong

Investigating the relations of the Six Self-Compassion Components with academic stress across Chinese primary, secondary, and university students in Hong Kong (#644)

Chi-Keung (Alex) Chan ¹ , Wilbert Law ² , Kalina Michalska ³ , Yee-Wan Kwan ¹ , Chui-Shan Yung ¹

School of Arts and Humanities, Tung Wah College, Mongkok, HONG KONG, Hong Kong
The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
University of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA, United States

Background

Academic stress is a global issue that has been frequently found to be inversely associated with well-being of students at various developmental stages across different cultures. One of the possible explanations that lead to higher academic stress among students is performance-goal orientation. Adoption of performance goals leads students to develop contingent self-esteem and be afraid of failures. Previous studies found that self-compassion (SC) is inversely associated with academic stress among medical and college students. Furthermore, the role of the self-judgment component is still controversial for East Asians because of dialectical self-beliefs which allow the co-existence of critical and compassionate attitudes for using distinct types of coping strategies to handle different stressful situations.

Aims

This study aims to investigate the relations of the six SC constituent components with academic stress across Chinese primary, secondary, and university students in Hong Kong, after controlling for performance goals, dialectical self-beliefs, gender, and socio-economic status.

Method

In this study, 83 4^th graders, 121 10^th graders, and 110 sophomores were recruited to complete an online survey which included Self-Compassion Scale for Youth, Educational Stress Scale for Adolescent, Performance Orientation from the Goal Orientation Scale, and Dialectical Self Scale.

Results

The results of the hierarchical regression analyses showed that performance-avoidance goal, self-judgment and isolation components significantly predicted higher academic stress for the combined sample and elementary students. Only self-judgment component significantly predicted higher academic stress for the secondary students and only performance-avoidance goal significantly predicted higher academic stress for the teritary students. These results indicated the internalization of self-judgment to avoid failures from the developmental perspective among Chinese students.

Conclusion

The findings can provide baseline data for developing a longitudinal study to fully understand the dynamic relations of the six SC component with performance-goal orientation and academic stress from a developmental perspective. Practically, this study will provide empirical evidence for developing developmentally appropriate SC-focused intervention programs to support the well-being of Chinese students across grade levels.