A Study On High School Students' Self-protection Strategies And Its' Influencing Factors

Research on self-protection strategies had been lucubrated in foreign countries about thirty years, while domestic researchers just began to study self-handicapping strategies. Studies about self-handicapping were relatively researched the most, which were mainly about problems of motivation of self-handicapping, influence factors of self-handicapping and self-handicapping's influence on school performance, but studies about defensive pessimism were fewer. Thus, on the basis of previous studies, The 972 subjects are high school students. By adopting the methods of questionnaire investigation, on the one hand , we investigated how they used these two kinds of self-protection strategies, including grade differences and gender differences, On the other hand, we brought achievement goal,academic self-efficacy,anxiety and depression into motivation variables to explore what influence the motivation nature of self-protection strategies of high school students. Besides this, we also made the analysis on the changing trend of the two self-protection strategies from longitudinal aspect when grade improves.The main results and conclusions were as follows:1.The developmental trend about self-protection strategies showed that :Self-handicapping of students in the senior high school was more than junior high school significantly. There was no significant difference among senior high school students. However, there were differences in junior high school students. Students of grade three handicapped more than students of grade one and grade two. In general, defensive expectations and reflectivity strategies use declined across six grade, the levels of them began to decrease and then increased when students are in the junior high school and senior high school. The levels in grade one of the junior high school and grade three of the senior high school were much higher, however, it turned to the lowest in grade two of senior high school.2. Both self-handicapping and defensive reflectivity strategies had no significant gender difference. there were differences between male students and female students of grade two in junior high school, Boys displayed significantly higher defensive expectations strategies use level than girls.3. The analysis of self-protection strategies'influencing factors showed that:(1)The mastery-avoidance goal, performance-approach goal, performance-avoidance goal, anxiety and depression were significantly positive predicator of self-handicapping, The mastery-approach goal and study behavior self-efficacy had a significantly negative predicator of self-handicapping. and The performance-approach goal had much more predictable power to self-handicapping than any other predicator variables, compared with other predicator variables studied in this paper .(2)The performance-avoidance goal,depression and anxiety were significantly positive predicator of defensive expectations strategies, study ability self-efficacy is significantly negative predicator of defensive expectations strategies. study ability self-efficacy had much more predictable power to the defensive expectations strategy than any other predicator variables, compared with other predicator variables studied in this paper .(3) The mastery-approach goal, mastery-avoidance goal, performance-approach goal,study behavior self-efficacy, anxiety and depression were significantly positive predicator of reflectivity strategies, study ability self-efficacy was significantly negative predicator of reflectivity strategies. Depression has much more predictable power to the reflectivity strategy than any other predicator variables, compared with other predicator variables studied in this paper.