Browsing by Author "Burton, Michael David"

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    A study of the relationship between personality characteristics, demographic data, and extracurricular participation
    Burton, Michael David (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1976)
    The problem of this study was to determine if there was a relationship between personality characteristics, demographic data on students, and kind and extent of participation in extracurricular activities, To investigate this problem, a random sample of 388 male and female sophomore students living in residence halls on the campus of VPI & SU were selected to participate in the study. Two instruments were used to collect the data: The FIRO-B, used to measure personality characteristics, and an Activity Interest Index, specially designed for use in this study to collect demographic data on students and record their participation in 278 activities recognized by the Division of Student Affairs at VPI & SU. Of the instruments mailed, 326 (84.1%) completed and returned usable instruments. The data were treated by the Baker Numerical Taxonomy clustering procedure to establish groups of students homogeneous with respect to activity participation. As the clustering procedure would only process 120 cases at a time, a random sample of 120 students was selected from the data for use in the analysis, The clustering procedure grouped eighty-four of the 120 students into nine activity groups. Those thirty-six students not grouped clearly did not belong to any one group, and were deleted from further analysis to retain a parsimoneous grouping of students. A specially written Fortran Program, used to assign the remaining 206 students to one of the established groups, successfully matched 164 of these students. Those students not matched were considered "outliers" and deleted from further analysis because they were not sufficiently similar to those students used to establish the nine activity groups. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used to analyze and compare mean scores on the scales of the FIRO-B, to determine if personality characteristics differed among groups of students having different activity profiles, The resulting p statistic of 0.906 was not significant at the .05 probability level with forty-eight and 1155 degrees of freedom. Therefore, it was concluded that there was no reason to believe that personality characteristics differed between groups of students having different activity profiles. A crosstabulation analysis was carried out on the demographic variables to determine if students having different activity profiles differed according to selected demographic characteristics. The results of the chi-square test for significance at the .05 probability level indicated there was no basis for inferring a relationship between demographic variables and membership in activity groups. The major findings are summarized as follows: 1. There was no statistically significant difference on the mean scores between personality characteristics and activity profiles across groups of students, when grouped by their kind and extent of participation in extracurricular activities. 2. There was no relationship between demographic data and activity profiles of students, when grouped by their kind and extent of participation in extracurricular activities. The results of this study suggest that extracurricular participation is not significantly influenced by personality characteristics or by selected demographic characteristics. Therefore, activity coordinators and student personnel administrators may need new methods of identifying potential participant and non-participant students. The results of this study tend to support the notion regarding the individuality of each student within the collegiate environment and question the transferability of leadership and extracurricular participation from high school to college.