The dynamics of psychology students' professional self-identity: the results of the empirical research

Abstract

The article presents the results of the research on psychology students’ professional self-identity. The study was aimed to identify the specific character of the links between professional selfidentity parameters (such as self-attitude, academic motivation, level of aspiration, career and life-purpose orientations) of the first-, second-, third-, fourth-year psychology students and to find out the distinctions between these parameters in different years of study at university. The experimental sample consisted of four groups of psychology students from different years of study aged 17-23, the sample size was 137 students (M = 20.3, SD = 1.2). The research methods included “Career Anchors” questionnaire by E. Schein, “Motivation to success” questionnaire by T. Ehlers, the self-test questionnaire for self-attitude diagnosing by V.V. Stolin and S.R. Panteleeva, A.A. Rean and V.A. Yakunin’s technique for diagnosing students’ academic motivation, V.K. Gerbachevsky’s questionnaire for assessing level of aspiration, D.A. Leontiev’s test for determining life-purpose orientations. The statistical analysis was carried out by means of IBM SPSS Statistic 22 (HKruskal-Wallis, ρ-Spearman criteria). According to the research results, the links between psychology students’ professional self-identity parameters change significantly with students’ moving onto the next year of study and the levels of formation of students’ professional selfidentity parameters vary in different years of study.