Adaptation of the “Perfectionism questionnaire” to diagnose perfectionist attitudes among first-year technical university students

Abstract

The article describes the procedure and adaptation results of the “Perfectionism questionnaire” by N. G. Garanyan and A. B. Kholmogorova to diagnose perfectionist attitudes among first-year technical university students. A confirmatory factor analysis allows to differentiate three questionnaire scales which are reproduced unchanged in different sex and age samples of university students at a sufficiently high level of reliability. The scales are identified as “High standards and ambitions”, “Selfcritical attitude and the lack of self-confi dence” and “Constant comparison of yourself to those who are most successful”. The values on the scale “High standards and ambitions” are positively correlated with learning motivation, motivation to success, interest in academic disciplines and their importance for education, which may indicate the positive (constructive) character of the constructor in educational activity of students. The indicators of the scale “Self-critical attitude and the lack of self-confi dence”, by contrast, are negatively correlated with learning motivation and motivation to success, and positively done with the difficulty of mastering academic disciplines, which gives the opportunity to put forward the assumption of the negative nature of the component of the perfectionist attitudes. The links between the scale “Constant comparison of yourself to those who are most successful” and both motivation and attitude to academic disciplines are not detected. However, “Constant comparison of yourself to those who are most successful” is significantly correlated with the scale “Self-critical attitude and the lack of self-confidence”. Test norms of the scales to diagnose perfectionist attitudes among first-year technical university students are developed. Refs 37. Fig. 1. Tables 8.