Role of Loneliness and Self-efficacy in Psychological Well-being among College Students

Description

Page: 210-214

Pooja Patel¹ and Sandhya Ojha² (Department of Psychology, Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh¹ and Department of Psychology, Sri Agrasen Kanya P.G. College, Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh²)

Loneliness is becoming a complex problem. People are feeling lonely even in a crowd. At present, the problem of loneliness is not only faced by the elderly but also by college-going students. Loneliness affects the entire life of students. The aim of the research is to investigate the role of loneliness and self-efficacy in the psychological well-being of college students. The study sample comprised 400 students (200 boys & 200 girls) from different degree colleges in Varanasi city using a random sampling technique. The age of the subjects ranged from 17 to 22 (mean = 19.61, SD = 1.79) years. The Psychological Well-Being Scale developed by Sisodia and Choudhary (2012); the Loneliness Scale (Jha, 1997); and the Self-efficacy Questionnaire (Murris, 2002) were used to collect the data. The data collected was analyzed using regression (both simple linear regression & stepwise multiple regression) and Pearson’s product-moment correlation. The study’s findings showed that psychological well-being and its dimensions were not significantly related to loneliness (r = -0.19) and significantly positively related to self-efficacy (r = .163**, p < .01). Overall self-efficacy is significantly negatively related to loneliness (r = -.113*, p < .05) and also significant negative correlation with its dimension of academic self-efficacy (r = -.139**, p < .01). Regression analysis showed that overall self-efficacy and its social self-efficacy dimension also significantly predicted psychological well-being.