Personality, Social Connectedness and Adjustment to University Life What is this assignment about? During the transition to tertiary studies, many students experience challenges in striving to adjust to novel social and academic settings. At this time a student’s perceived level of social connectedness has important implications for wellbeing and academic performance. Social connectedness is an important predictor of the level of stress students experience at university (Schofield, O’halloran, McLean, Forrester‐Knauss & Paxton, 2016). Likewise, personality traits have also been demonstrated to be predictive of performance at university (Poropat, 2009). For example, research has found a specific role of individual traits such as conscientiousness, which reflects the degree to which an individual is organised, thorough, and disciplined (Morris, & Fritz, 2015). Taken together these findings regarding personality and social connectedness appear to have important implications for students who are at a particularly vulnerable stage of social and academic development. Given the ongoing disruption to socialising caused by restrictions associated with COVID19, now more than ever seems like an import time to investigate the relationships among these factors as students transition to tertiary studies. What is the aim of this lab report? The aim of this study is to explore how personality and social connectedness relate to psychological stress with respect to adjustment in the first year of university. You should utilise BOTH of the below hypotheses. You will also need to select one of the Big-5 traits for hypothesis 1 (H1). H1 YOUR CHOSEN PERSONALITY TRAIT will have a positive or negative relationship with student stress. H2 Social connectedness will have a positive or negative relationship with student stress.
