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Academic Adjustment Questionnaire for the University Students AI Clinciu,

AM Cazan. (2014). Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences 127, 655-660

Article in Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences · April 2014

DOI: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.03.330

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Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 127 (2014) 655 – 660

PSIWORLD 2013

Academic Adjustment Questionnaire for the university students

Aurel Ion Clinciua*, Ana-Maria Cazanb
a,b
Transilvania University of Brasov, Faculty of Psychology and Sciences of Education, Nicolae Balcescu 56, 500019 Brasov, Romania

Abstract

The aim of this study is to develop a new psychometric instrument to explore adjustment to university requirements. The
participants were 517 first year students from humanities field of Transilvania University of Brasov. Academic Adjustment
Questionnaire (AAQ) is an extension of our School Inadaptation Questionnaire (SIQ) at the university level and it was used in
conjunction with Baker and Siryk’s Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ) and Gadzella’s Student-life Stress
Inventory (SSI) for concurrent validation. The results reveal good psychometric properties for the new created instrument and
narrow relationships between it, SACQ and SSI.

© 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
©
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of PSI WORLD 2013 and their Guest Editors: Dr Mihaela Chraif, Dr Cristian
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Vasile andand
Selection Dr peer-review
Mihai Anitei.under responsibility of Romanian Society of Applied Experimental Psychology.

Keywords: adaptation; stress, first year students, gender; age.

1. Introduction

Used extensively since Darwin, the concept of adjustment is complex and difficult to define, tending to become
an umbrella concept. Simons, Kalichman, & Santrock (1994, p 8) propose the following definition: „Adjustment is
the psychological process of adapting to, coping with, and managing the problems, challenges, and demands of
everyday life”. Students’ adjustment to university environment is an important factor in predicting outcomes and is
crucial to their future achievements. Many researchers (Abdullah, Elias, Mahyuddin and Uli, 2009; Bryant,
Schulenberg, Bachman, O’Malley and Johnston, 2000; Enochs and Roland, 2006; Martin Jr., Swartz and Madson,

* Corresponding author. Aurel Ion Clinciu Tel.: +40-268-318-149; fax: +40-268-470-190.

E-mail address: a_clinciu@yahoo.com

1877-0428 © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of Romanian Society of Applied Experimental Psychology.
doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.03.330
656 Aurel Ion Clinciu and Ana-Maria Cazan / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 127 (2014) 655 – 660

1999; Tinto, 1996; Wintre and Yaffe, 2000) show that adjustment difficulties are found to be the most common
problems among first year students. They are going through an active adjustment phase after entrance in university,
the first six weeks after the first semester being considered the crucial period in determining retention (Molnar,
1993). Gadzella and Carvalho (2006) show that women declare more stressful experiences than men do. Adult
female students combine their schooling with part-time jobs and family obligation, tending to strive for excellence.
The development of a diagnostic instrument for adjustment to college and university can serve as basis for informed
remedial intervention for students experiencing adaptive difficulties. School adaptation is an issue extensively
studied in the past decade (Clinciu, 2003, Clinciu, 2012) which leads to the creation of the School Inadaptation
Questionnaire (SIQ). Its origins are the constructs measured by EPQ-Junior (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975) and it was
generated through the empirical method. The 67 items of the questionnaire measure two relatively distinct
constructs, School Neuroticism (44 items) and Rebelliousness (23 items). School adjustment is considered to be the
expression of the positive reaction of students to the formative pressure of school.
The main objective of this study was to extend the questionnaire SIQ at university level and to verify the utility of
two basic concepts, Neuroticism and Rebelliousness. We also aim to adapt SIQ to the specific of the academic
learning, generating a short, robust instrument, with good psychometric qualities – high reliability and validity.

2. Materials and methods

2.1. Sample

The subjects were 517 students in the first year of humanities: Faculty of Psychology and Sciences of Education,
Faculty of Sociology, Communication and Social Work, Faculty of Law, 101 male and 406 female students, 189
from rural area and 328 from urban area. The participants were investigated with the adapted SIQ for the academic
space (Academic Adaptation Questionnaire - AAQ) and additionally with two instruments destined to measure
student adjustment and stress, Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ) and Student-life Stress
Inventory (SSI). A mini-questionnaire was also used, concerning factual data related to age, gender, parents’
schooling, environment, faculty admission mark, etc. The participants’ mean age was 20.92 years, with a standard
deviation of 4.21. The subjects gave their informed consent to participate in the study.

2.2. Instruments

The Academic Adjustment Questionnaire is the SIQ extension for university level. It is a self-report instrument
scored with 0 and 1, designed to assess the student’s adjustment to the academic learning process. From the pool of
the 67 original items we retained only 24, from which 14 for Neuroticism associated to academic learning and 10 for
Procrastination. More details about the new instrument will be discussed below.
SACQ is a self-report instrument designed to assess the student’s adjustment to college. Baker and Siryk (1999)
assume that beginning of university life requires adjustment to a variety of demands, being a multifaceted process.
Four aspects of adjustment to university are measured: Academic Adjustment which measures how well the
freshman manages to meet the educational demands of the university experience; Social Adjustment which
measures how well the adolescent deals with interpersonal experiences at university; Personal-Emotional
Adjustment which indicates whether the young student experiences psychological or somatic symptoms of distress;
Institutional Attachment which measures the student's commitment towards the university as institution. The sum of
the above four scales yields a full-scale score, which is an index of the overall adjustment to university.
Gadzella’s (1991) Student-life Stress Inventory (SSI) reflects a student’s academic stress on and off campus and
it offers good measurements for academic stressors and reactions to stressors. The academic stressors dimension
yields scores from five stress categories which contain 51 items in a 5-point Likert-type response format:
frustrations, conflicts, pressures, changes, and self-imposed. reactions to stressors yield scores from five categories
describing reactions to physiological, emotional, behavioral, and cognitive stressors. The items are summed for each
subscale to obtain a total score.
 Aurel Ion Clinciu and Ana-Maria Cazan / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 127 (2014) 655 – 660 657

3. Results and discussion

The items selection for AAQ was guided by the requirement to obtain a short scale with a high reliability,
highlighting a normal distribution in the studied population. Several types of analysis were performed, such as
descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis and scale analysis.

Table1. Descriptive statistics and Cronbach’ alphas for Neuroticism, Procrastination and Academic Adjustment
Questionnaire (AAQ) total score.

AAQ Neuroticism AAQ Procrastination AAQ Total

Mean 5.01 3.84 8.85
Standard deviation 3.82 2.73 5.62
Skewness 0.47 0.33 0.35
Kurtosis -0.76 -0.86 -0.61
Alpha Cronbach .844 .771 .864

Table 1 shows higher values of mean and standard deviation for Neuroticism, the scale having four items in
addition compared to the Procrastination scale. Regarding the values of skewness and kurtosis, both constructs
highlight the normal distributions of the studied population. The reliability is very high for the entire AAQ scale
(.864), but also for Neuroticism (.844, respectively), and for Procrastination, although slightly smaller (.771). In
order to verify the factorial validity of the Academic Adjustment Questionnaire, we used the exploratory factor
analysis, using the principal components analysis method, followed by the Varimax method with Kaiser
normalization. Because Kaiser-Mayer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy has a high value (.870) and Bartlett's
Test of Sphericity is significant (p < .001), it can be assumed that the required preconditions for this analysis are
met. The scale analysis (Table 1) confirms the unidimensionality of both constructs retained in the analysis and
provides high levels of internal consistency for Neuroticism, Procrastination and for their aggregated scores.
From the beginning it can be seen that the Rebelliousness factor does not have a correspondence at the university
level for the AAQ, partly because the decision to choose a faculty is a freely assumed option. Although this factor
was identified by the factor analysis, it was eliminated because its scores deviate substantially from the normal
distribution. Table 2 summarizes the communalities, the factor saturations for the general factor revealed by the
principal components method and the saturation for the two factors, Neuroticism and Procrastination. The first
identified factor is Neuroticism and it covers 25% of the variance, the second factor is Procrastination, which covers
10% of the total variance. Two items, 5 and 30, with factorial saturation relatively equal for two factors, were
assigned to the scales for which they had the highest saturation. The correlation between the two factors is medium
and statistically significant (r = .45), showing that although the two factors are distinct, their scores can be
aggregated into an overall score. The correlation of each factor with the overall score of the questionnaire indicates a
more valuable contribution of the scale with a higher number of items (r = .90 for Neuroticism and r = .80 for
Procrastination).
658 Aurel Ion Clinciu and Ana-Maria Cazan / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 127 (2014) 655 – 660

Table 2. Communalities and saturations occurred from principal component analysis and Varimax rotation method for the 24 items of Academic
Adjustment Questionnaire.

Items from SIQ Communalities Component saturation Varimax with Kaiser normalization
Factor 1 Factor 2
SIQ 03 .279 .395 .514
SIQ 04 .327 .458 .544
SIQ 05 .258 .502 .317 .352
SIQ 10 .227 .476 .399
SIQ 11 .528 .646 .720
SIQ 12 .469 .587 .683
SIQ 13 .298 .544 .471
SIQ 14 .279 .480 .519
SIQ 15 .336 .486 .538
SIQ 18 .422 .616 .623
SIQ 20 .425 .639 .597
SIQ 22 .309 .453 .524
SIQ 23 .260 .431 .510
SIQ 24 .252 .496 .452
SIQ 26 .509 .599 .713
SIQ 27 .486 .569 .697
SIQ 28 .352 .498 .593
SIQ 30 .248 .495 .371 .333
SIQ 31 .293 .480 .481
SIQ 41 .219 .437 .323
SIQ 43 .254 .303 .499
SIQ 44 .380 .314 .614
SIQ 45 .478 .432 .690
SIQ 46 .476 .478 .682
Note. SIQ is acronym from School Inadaptability Questionnaire. Numbers attached to the 24 items are the position of each item in the
SIQ. For a most clear picture saturations below 0.30 were omitted.

Table 3 shows highly statistically significant and negative correlations with the total scores of SACQ. It is
obvious that high scores on AAQ are not measuring the adjustment, but the academic maladjustment. Neuroticism is
strongly and negatively associated with the Personal-Emotional Adjustment (r = -.46). Procrastination is directly
associated with Academic Adjustment scale from SACQ (r = -.50). Both dimensions of AAQ show small
correlations with Institutional Attachment. Therefore it can be concluded that Neuroticism has a predominantly
affective component and Procrastination has a component more directly related to academic efficiency.
 Aurel Ion Clinciu and Ana-Maria Cazan / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 127 (2014) 655 – 660 659

Table 3. Correlations between Neuroticism, Procrastination and AAQ total score with SACQ and SSI scales and sub-scales.

AAQ Neuroticism AAQ Procrastination AAQ Total

S A C Q total score -.42** -.37** -.47**
Academic Adjustment -.32** -.50** -.46**
Social Adjustment -.31** -.25** -.33**
Personal-Emotional Adjustment -.46** -.23** -.42**
Institutional Attachment -.16** -.12** -.17**
S S I total score .54** .33** .53**
Stressors .48** .35** .50**
Reaction to stressors .52** .27** .48**
Note. N = 428 * p< .05 **p < .01. AAQ is acronym for Academic Adjustment Questionnaire, SACQ for Student Adaptation to
College Questionnaire and SSI for Student-life Stress Inventory

The correlations between the two factors of AAQ and the SSI stress scales are highly statistical significant, which
highlight a close connection between academic adjustment, as it is measured by the AAQ, and stress. It is also
evident that Neuroticism is more strongly associated with the stress scales than Procrastination. The results
presented in Table 3 highlight the concurrent validity and the construct validity of the Academic Adjustment
Questionnaire.

4. Discussion and conclusions

Our study confirms Simons, Kalichman and Santrock (1994) findings that the academic adjustment is involved
when students develop better study habits. Although the adaptive effort is easier to identify in the first semester of
the first study year, it continues throughout the whole academic training. This means that the utility of SACQ cannot
be resumed to the beginning of university life, but also afterwards.
Whether used alone or in conjunction with other similar instruments (i.e. SACQ or SSI), the new instrument
provides a specific expression to the emotional adaptive reaction (through Neuroticism) and to the efficiency of the
academic adaptation (through Procrastination). It can be also important as a tool to evaluate an intervention
programme and to assess the results of counseling. The instrument indicates gender differences which are not
presented in this study, emphasizing higher level of neuroticism, emotionality, and stress for women, the results
being concordant with Gadzella and Carvalho’s (2006) findings. The use of AAQ in conjunction with a Big Five test
would also provide more information regarding the relation between neuroticism as a personality factor and the
academic neuroticism, and regarding the personality determinants of procrastination.
660 Aurel Ion Clinciu and Ana-Maria Cazan / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 127 (2014) 655 – 660

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