The present study was to examine the relationship among perfectionism, self-efficacy, and anxiety and explore how the perfectionism as a personality variable and self-efficacy as a cognitive one would affect anxiety level. In order to address these pu...
The present study was to examine the relationship among perfectionism, self-efficacy, and anxiety and explore how the perfectionism as a personality variable and self-efficacy as a cognitive one would affect anxiety level. In order to address these purposes, 620 female high school students, 420 drawn from general high schools and 200 from industrial high schools, were asked to respond to the three questionnaires of perfectionism, self-efficacy, and anxiety.
The instruments used in the study were Han(1993)'s Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (originally developed by Hewitt and Flett, 1991), the Self-Efficacy Scale (Shere, Maddux, Mercandante, Prentice-Dunn, Jacobs, and Rogers, 1982), and Jei (1996)'s STAI(Form Y) T-Anxiety Scale(original1y developed by Spielberger, Vagg, Barker, Dongam, & Westberry, 1980).
The data gathered were analysed by t-test, Pearson's correlation coefficients, and multiple regressional analysis.
The following conclusions were made:
First, female students in general high schools showed higher self-focused and other-focused perfectionism than those in industrial high schools. The former reported higher self-efficacy than the latter, while the result was reversed on the anxiety test.
Second, the subscale of self-focused perfectionism had a negative correlation with anxiety, while social perfectionism had a positive relationship with it. It implied that self-focused perfectionism had positive force to facilitate motivation.
Third, self-efficacy and anxiety had a negative correlation so that the higher one's self-efficacy, the lower anxiety one had.
Lastly, the result of multiple regression analysis showed that the self-efficacy explained 30% of the total variance, while social perfectionism, social self-efficacy, and self-focused perfectionism did 3%, 1.4%, and 0.5% respectively in order.
Based on the result that anxiety level could be various in along with the dynamic relationship of perfectionism tendency and self -efficacy, it was proposed that the perfectionism tendency had several dimensions, not a unilateral concept, and had positive force as well as negative one.