An investigation of the irrational beliefs of university students according to some variables

SUMMARY This research is a descriptive study, which has been done to investigate the relationship of the irrational beliefs of university students (demand for approval, high self-expectations, blame proness, emotional irresponsibility, anxious overconcern, dependency, helplessness and perfectionism subscales) between parents attitudes, sex, class level, living place and study field of students. The tests were administrated to 560 students attending to different departments in the first and the fourth class at Çukurova University. Irrational Beliefs Test, which is adapted into Turkish on this research, is used to measure the dependent variable of irrational beliefs. Parents Attitudes Inventory, developed by Eldeleklioğlu (1996), is used to measure parents attitude, which is independent variable of this research. Both of the two scales mentioned before has been administrated to university students at the same time, and the relationships between the obtained irrational belief scores with parents attitudes, sex, level of class, living places and study field of students have been determined. T-test is used when the dimension of variable is two. When more than two, then one way ANOVA is used and checked the observed differencies by using Tukey Kramer Test. Signification level is considered as 0,05. According to results, it was showed significantly higher degree with the 0.05 significant level on high-self expectations subscale scores and total scores of irrational believes for authoritarian parents attitude between the groups of authoritarian and democratic parents attitude. It was found that has higher degree on helplessness with the significant level of 0.01, one of the irrational believes, for protective-desirous parents attitude between the groups of protective-desirous and democratic parents attitude; and for authoritarian parents attitude between the groups of authoritarian and democratic parents attitude. It was found higher degree on blame proness at the level of 0.05 for male than female. Demand for approval subscale scores had higher degree with the level of 0.05 for students attending to social sciences than basic and applied sciences. There was no significant differencies between level of class and living places at the significant level of 0,05. n