Objective and subjective social class, locus of control, and global self-worth in predicting dropout
Abstract
The present study was exploratory in nature, and was designed to assess the relationships between an objective measurement of socioeconomic status (SES), as measured by the Hollingshead Four Factor Index of Social Status, versus a subjective measurement of social class, utilizing the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status (SSS), global self-worth, and locus of control, in regard to early termination from therapeutic services. Sixty-one participants, who were concurrently receiving psychotherapeutic treatment in a university counseling center, completed the aforementioned measures. Results were analyzed via the methods of discriminant function analysis and step-wise discriminant function analysis, in order to ascertain what impact differing assessments of social status, in combination with the aforementioned subjective self-assessments, would best predict whether or not individuals prematurely terminated from treatment. Results indicated that an individual's self-assessment of intrapsychic variables, though intrinsically related to one's sense of self, do not appear to play a significant role in determining an individual's SSS-ladder score, nor in predicting dropout from psychotherapy. A single SES-related variable, Father's Occupational Category, was significantly correlated with dropout by one measure of dropout. Results also provided evidence for a changing relationship between SES, SSS, and dropout, as measured across session cut-offs, in relation to predicting dropout. These findings indicate that the relative importance of SSS versus SES, in predicting early termination, varies as a product of how dropout is measured
Subject Area
Counseling Psychology|Personality psychology|Public policy
Recommended Citation
Ruckdeschel, Daniel Egbert, "Objective and subjective social class, locus of control, and global self-worth in predicting dropout" (2013). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI3601156.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI3601156
