Graduate Students' Fear Of Success And The Relationship With Self-esteem

Fear of success is the fear of negative consequences of success, and this fear may lead individual to abandon the pursuit of success. Horner first proposed this theory in 1968, noting that this fear is more obvious in the female, but there was a wide variety of different conclusions in the follow study. Whether there is fear of success is very meaningful for the graduate. Base on the review of former research and the results of the open-end questionnaire with 48 graduate students, a preliminary framework of fear of success was constructed. And the scale of fear of success of graduate students was accomplished. After the kinds of reliability and validity data was collected,500 graduate students filled out the scale, and then we have a preliminary understanding of fear of success on the status of graduate students. Specific results are as follows:1. Fear of success has four factors at least. There are fear of interpersonal relationship, fear of partner, fear of family and the psychological fear.2. The data of internal consistency reliability, split-half reliability, content validity, construct validity and item analysis of this scale are all up to the general standards of statistics. The scale can be regarded as appropriate tool of estimating fear of success of graduate students.3. Similarity with the findings of Horner, fear of success has significant gender differences. In addition, the differences of age, marriage, major, and family are significant.4. There is a significant negative correlation between fear of success and self-esteem.