The Predictability of Defensive Pessimism in Academic Ambition among Graduate Students at Yarmouk University

Abstract

This study aimed to reveal the predictive ability of defensive pessimism about the academic ambition of graduate students at Yarmouk University in the light of some variables: gender, marital status, work, academic stage, and specialization, where the study sample consisted of (292). Male and female students of the second semester of the academic year 2021/2022, It was selected according to the available method. The scale of academic ambition and defensive pessimism was built by the two researchers to achieve the study objectives, whereas the values of the correlation coefficients for the items of the defensive pessimism scale for construction honesty ranged between (0.38-0.78), The value of the internal consistency coefficient of the defensive pessimism scale was (0.79). Also, the values of the correlation coefficients for the items of the Academic Ambition Scale for Building Honesty ranged between (0.40-0.66), and the internal consistency of the Academic Ambition Scale was (0.83). Where the results of the study indicated that the level of academic ambition among graduate students was high, and the level of defensive pessimism was moderate, the level of defensive pessimism and the variable of specialization predicted the academic ambition, while the other variables did not predict any academic ambition, Where the defensive pessimism variable contributed in the first place with a relative effect, explaining an amount of (6.40) of the total variance, then the specialization variable contributed with a relative effect of (1.70%) of the variance, while the percentage of contribution that explaining the variance for the rest of the variables was not statistically significant at the level of significance (α=0.05).

Keywords: academic ambition, defensive pessimism, graduate studies.