Designing a casual model for academic adjustment based on personality traits with the mediating role of attribution styles

Academic adjustment is a specific area of ​​the general concept of adjustment that deals with the issue of an individual’s adjustment to the course and field of study, educational environment and its requirements. Therefore, the research sought to design a causal model for academic adjustment based on personality traits with the mediating role of attributional styles.
The research method was descriptive-correlational and of structural equation modeling in particular and the statistical population included all undergraduate students of Islamic Azad University of Marvdasht city, Iran in the academic year 2017-2019. The statistical sample consisted of 600 students who were selected by multi-stage cluster random sampling and answered the questionnaires including Academic Adjustment Scale by Anderson et al., personality traits by McCrae and Costa, and attribution styles by Patterson and Seligman. Data were analyzed by descriptive statistics, structural equation modeling, correlation coefficient, SPSS, and AMOS software.
The results indicated that neuroticism and openness to experience predict academic adjustment in a negative and significant way and extroversion and conscientiousness in a positive and significant way. Neuroticism predicts positive attributions in a negative and meaningful way and agreeableness and openness to experience and conscientiousness in a positive and meaningful way. Neuroticism predicts negative attributions in a positive and significant way and extroversion, openness to experience and conscientiousness in a negative and meaningful way. Positive attributional styles predict academic adjustment in a positive way and negative attributional styles in a negative and significant way. Finally, the results showed that neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness can indirectly and significantly predict academic adjustment through attributional styles.
Based on the research findings, it can be concluded that attributional styles have a significant mediating role in the relationship between personality traits and academic adjustment.