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The British Study of Values: I. Prediction of drop‐out from a psychology degree course
Author(s) -
Gibson H. B.
Publication year - 1979
Publication title -
british journal of social and clinical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.479
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8260
pISSN - 0007-1293
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8260.1979.tb00300.x
Subject(s) - psychology , drop out , degree (music) , absolute deviation , test (biology) , drop (telecommunication) , clinical psychology , social psychology , developmental psychology , statistics , mathematics , engineering , paleontology , telecommunications , physics , economics , acoustics , demographic economics , biology
The British version of the Study of Values (SOV) test was administered to 77 students at the beginning of an honours degree course in psychology. These students had already taken two tests of cognitive ability before admission. Failure to graduate after 3 years was taken as a criterion of drop‐out. It was found that the drop‐outs were not significantly different from the graduates on the measures of cognitive ability, but a measure of tough‐mindedness‐tender‐mindedness derived from the SOV test predicted drop‐out significantly. For both male and female students extreme tender‐mindedness predicted drop‐out, and for males deviation towards either extreme was a significant predictor. These findings can perhaps be interpreted in terms of the deviation hypothesis of Berg (1959).