The relationships between self-compassion, social connectedness, optimism and psychological resilience levels of low-income university students

This research was carried out to investigate psychological resilience of low income university students, in terms of self-compassion, social connectedness and optimism levels. Within this framework, a hypotetical model was suggested based on the psychological resilience literature. It was hypothesized that both self-compassion and social connectedness would predict optimism and then optimism would predict psychological resilience. Thus, it was intended to investigate the predictive power of self-compassion and social connectedness on psychological resilience through optimism.Participants were 495 students attending to the various faculties of Anadolu University in the spring semester of 2010-2011 academic year those indicated that their parents? income level were between 0 ? 1260 TL, they had at least four family members and parents maximumly high school graduated.In data analysis, descriptive statistics and path analysis in the framework of structural equation modeling were utilized. Significance level of .05 was accepted for all analyses. Findings confirmed the hypothesized model proposed in this study. According to results, it was found that both self-compassion and social connectedness have direct effects on optimism and therefore indirect effects on psychological resilience. Furthermore, optimism was found to have direct effect on psychological resilience. As a result, it was found that university students? self-compassion and social connectedness predicted optimism, and optimism predicted psychological resilience.Key Words: Low-income, optimism, psychological resilience, self-compassion, social connectedness.