Investigation of the decisional self-esteem and stress levels of high school students with different locus of controls according to some personal, social and parental variables

The purpose of this study was to examine whether decisional self- esteem levels anddecisional stress levels of high school students with different locus of controls differdepending on personal- social characteristics and famial characteristics. For this reason,variables of gender, class level, smoking habit, perception of physical appearance andsupporting level of teacher were taken as personal- social characteristics of high schoolstudents, while variables of educational level of mother, educational level of father,supporting level of mother and supporting level of father were taken as famialcharacteristics. Groups were formed to identfy students with external locus of controland internal locus of control based on the calculations the mean for the sample groupwas 11.85 whereas the standart variation was 4.20. The 1192 students who were 0.5points below and above the mean were taken into consideration. The analyses werebased on 604 high school students in total.This research was conducted in spring semester of 2004- 2005, among 2045 studentsfrom 11 different high schools in Bursa and usable data was obtained from 1796 of all.Data relatede students? decisional self- esteem and decisional stres levels was collectedby means of ?Decision Making Questionaire? (Mann ve Radford, 1993) and the datarelated to students? locus of control levels was collected by means of ?NowickiStrickland Locus Of Control Scale? (Nowicki ve Strickland, 1973). In order to collectdata related to independent variables of the research, ? Personal InformationQuestionaire? was prepared by the reseacher. In this research, Independent Inter Groupt Test and Factoriel Variant Analysis.The results of research showed that decisional self- esteem levels of high schoolstudents with high levels of internal locus of control were significantly high. However,decisional stress levels of high school students with high levles of external locus ofcontrol were significantly high. With respect to gender, males have significantly higherdecisional self- esteem levels compared to females. However, the interaction of genderand locus of control was not significant. Males have lower decisional stress levels. Yetin general the interaction between the locus of control and gender was not foundsignificant regarding decisional stress levels.In considering the perception of physical appearance those students who have positiveperceptions of their own physical appearance have significantly higher decisional stresslevels than those with negative perceptions. Nevertheless, the interaction betweendecisional stress levels and perception of physical appearance was not found significant.Those students with positive self perceptions have lower decisional stress levels thanthose with negative self perceptions. Yet, the interaction between self perceptions andlocus of controls were not significant.On the other hand, decisional self- esteem levels and decisional stress levels of highschool students with different locus of controls did not differ depending on the classlevel, smoking habit, supporting level of teacher. The interactions between thosevariables were not significant either.In addition, the interactions between decisional self- esteem levels and stress levels witheducational level of mother, educational level of father, supporting level of mother,supporting level of father were not statistically significant.