An Investigation of Personality Traits in Relation to ...

An Investigation of Personality Traits in Relation to Intention to Withdraw From College John W. Lounsbury

Richard A. Saudargas

We examined the Big Five (De Raad, 2000) personality traits of Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Extraversion, and Openness, plus the narrow personality traits of Aggression, CareerDecidedness, Optimism, Self-Directed Learning, Sense of Identity, Tough-Mindedness, and Work Drive in relation to intention to withdraw from college. Among 233 university freshmen, all of the traits except Tough-Mindedness and Openness were significantly related to withdrawal intention, with three traits—Sense of Identity, Emotional Stability, and Work Drive—accounting for 22% of the variance in intention to withdraw. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed. This paper addresses the role of personality traits in relation to first-year students’ intentions to withdraw from college. College attrition or dropout has been a documented concern of colleges for over 65 years (Iffert, 1958; Maudal, Butcher, & Mauger, 1974; McNeely, 1937). National U.S. data from the American College Testing Service indicate that 26% of freshmen at four-year colleges and 45% of freshmen at two-year colleges drop out (Sax, Keup, Gillmarten, Stolzenberg, & Harper, 2002). Moreover, results from a survey of 350 colleges and universities by the Council for Student Retention Data Exchange indicate that 42% of entering freshmen drop out during the first year

Lucy W. Gibson

(Montclair State University, 2001). This is not a new problem in higher education—the rate of student departure in American colleges and universities “has remained constant at 45% for over one hundred years” (Braxton 2000, p. 1; see also, Tinto, 1982). In the current study we focused on normal personality traits that can potentially affect the withdrawal process. There is no single theoretical model in the literature on college student retention, withdrawal, or attrition that we were able to draw on to frame our investigation. Rather, our conceptual approach was that of personality trait theory, (Pervin & John, 1997) and has elements in common with work on attrition and retention by Tinto (1975, 1993), Bean and Metzner (1985), and McDaniel and Graham (2001). Our study was motivated not only by a review of findings on distinctive personality traits of college dropouts, but also by research in organizational psychology on employee turnover. Regarding the latter, although it might seem unusual to be applying research from work settings to academic settings (as it did for one reviewer of this article), the topic of student departure is relatively new and there have already been a variety of disciplines involved in research in this area, including finance and economics (St. John, Cabrera, Nora, & Asker, 2000), social psychology (Bean & Eaton, 2000), ecological psychology and industrialorganizational psychology (Baird, 2000),

John W. Lounsbury is Professor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Assessment Resource Associates, Inc. Richard A. Saudargas is Professor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Lucy W. Gibson is Vice President of Assessment Resource Associates, Inc. SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2004

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Lounsbury, Saudargas, & Gibson

sociology (Berger, 2000; Tinto, 2000), discourse analysis (Johnson, 2000), and institutional theory (Laden, Milem, & Crowson, 2000). Moreover, the relationship between school and work is very close in the view of some scholars. For example, Munson and Rubenstein (1992) asserted that “schoolwork is the student’s job” and that the “school is a workplace, the student is learner, and the learner is a worker. It’s as simple as that” (p. 290). Lounsbury, Gibson, Sundstrom, Wilburn, and Loveland’s (2003) recent work confirmed this view by showing very similar personality-performance correlations for common personality traits in student and worker samples. Using an interactionalist perspective, Tinto (1975) posited that students enter college with individual characteristics that play a significant role in the departure decision. Similarly, Bean and Metzner (1985) as well as McDaniel and Graham (2001) emphasized the importance of prematriculation student variables in attrition. In his more recent synthesis of causes of student retention, Tinto (1993) identified the “dispositions of individuals who enter higher education” (p. 37) as one of the roots of student departure. However, the dispositions of individuals are, in essence, personality traits that are defined as relatively enduring dispositions of individuals to behave in consistent ways over time and across situations (cf., Pervin & John, 1997, p. 226). After carefully reviewing the empirical research on Tinto’s interactionalist and revised models, as well as research on all other conceptual models of student attrition and retention, we conclude that the role of personality traits in the departure process has not been systematically investigated. Although, as will be seen below, there are some studies on personality correlates of college

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dropout and persistence, they have not used the current dominant model in personality assessment—the Big Five (e.g., De Raad, 2000). There is another important reason for studying personality traits of college students. From a lifespan-developmental perspective, personality traits are antecedent to almost all of the other individual-level variables that are conceptualized as being important and these traits have been empirically verified as being related to withdrawal and retention, including commitment to the college (Tinto, 1975), student life satisfaction (Edwards & Waters, 1982, 1983; Griffin, 1991), attribution theory (Bean & Eaton, 2000), and perceptions of college climate (Baird, 2000). If personality traits are related to student withdrawal, it would mean that estimation of statistical effects for these other individual-level variables should first control for relevant personality traits. Moreover, even approaches that emphasize personenvironment fit or how well different personality traits mesh with different aspects of the college environment or what Astin (1993) terms environmental variables (which includes a wide range of variables such as type of institution, class size, ethnic mix of students, student-faculty ratio, institutional selectivity, type of student residence, religious orientation, use of multiple-choice tests, emphasis on direct learning, type of instruction, and grading policies, to name but a few), would be informed by research showing which personality traits are important in the withdrawal process. As a first step in research on this topic, we examined intention to withdraw from college for three reasons. First, examining intention to withdraw offers institutions the opportunity to change or modify the intention that responding to actual withdrawal does not. Second, our focus on intention to

Journal of College Student Development

Personality Traits and College Withdrawal Intention

withdraw derives from a validated model of employee turnover in the industrial-organizational psychology literature in which intention to quit an organization is the direct antecedent to turnover (Mobley, Griffith, Hand, & Megliano, 1979; Mobley, Horner, & Hollingsworth, 1978). Indeed, a large number of studies have shown a substantive, positive relationship between intention to leave and actual leaving (see Tett & Meyer’s 1993 meta-analytic results). In addition, Miller, Katerberg, and Hulin (1979) report correlations between turnover intentions and actual turnover of .71 and .66 for two samples of National Guard members. Third, analogous to employer turnover research, we conceptualize intention to withdraw as an important part of the student departure decision process and, theoretically, the direct antecedent to actual withdrawal or departure. Although intention to withdraw has not, to our knowledge, been explicitly studied in relation to personality traits of college students, several researchers have investigated various personality traits in relation to college dropout and persistence. In one of the earliest studies in this area, Heilbrun (1962) compared first-year of college dropouts and nondropouts on the Adjective Check List. Compared to nondropouts, he found that dropouts score significantly lower on achievement, endurance, and order, whereas they score higher on affiliation, change, and heterosexuality. In a very similar 1965 study, Heilbrun found that compared to nondropouts, first-year dropouts score significantly lower on deference, succorance, abasement, achievement, order, and endurance, and they score significantly higher on autonomy, exhibition, aggression, and change. Maudal et al. (1974) also studied the Personality Research Form responses of freshmen and found that dropouts were

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higher on change, impulsivity, and succorance than persisters. Pandey (1973) studied 16 Personality Factor responses and found that Black and White students who dropped out of the university were more “assertive, stubborn, and independent” than students who continued. In a study of freshmen who did not return to college after the first year, Glenn, Rollins, and Smith (1990) found that nonreturners score significantly lower on deference and higher on intraceptiveness on the Edwards Personal Preference Inventory. More recently, using the College Adjustment Inventory, Tross, Harper, Osher, and Kneidinger (2002) studied retention of college students after the first year and found that students not continuing scored lower on conscientiousness than students who continued. Taken as a whole, these studies indicate that a number of personality traits are related to persistence versus withdrawal after the first year of college. In almost every case, the direction of the relationship is what would be expected based on the meaning of the personality construct in question. However, these findings are based on four different personality measurement systems comprising a fairly large number of traits. There is a conspicuous lack of construct parsimony in such varied relationships. One of the most significant developments in recent years in the study of normal personality has been the emergence of the Big Five model. Based on numerous factoranalytic and comparative studies, one overarching taxonomy has emerged: The Big Five model represents a unified and parsimonious theoretical framework for normal personality (Costa & McCrae, 1992; Digman, 1990; Wiggins & Trapnell, 1997), which Digman (1997) defined as the “renaissance of a factor model of personality trait

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organization” (p. 1246). Tokar, Fischer, and Subich (1998) reviewed the extant personality literature and concluded that the Big Five taxonomy is robust, generalizable, and comprehensive, which provides a useful “organizational framework for most, if not all, non-trivial personality features.” (p. 117). Numerous empirical studies have verified the overall factor structure and construct validity of the Big Five constructs (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) among a wide variety of research samples (including college students) with generalizability across a broad spectrum of demographic and cultural characteristics of individuals studied (Costa & McCrae, 1994; De Raad, 2000). Accordingly, in an effort to reduce the dimensionality of potential personality relationships in the current study, we assessed the Big Five traits of Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Openness in relation to intention to withdraw from college. Recent research has demonstrated that “narrow” personality traits—that is, personality traits that are narrower in conceptual scope than the broad Big Five traits—can add significant incremental validity to the Big Five personality traits in academic settings (Ashton, 1998; Lounsbury, Sundstrom, Loveland, & Gibson, 2003; Paunonen, 1998; Paunonen, Rothstein, & Jackson, 1999). For example, Lounsbury, Sundstrom et al. (2003) found that the narrow trait of Work Drive added significantly to the prediction of course grade above and beyond the Big Five traits, a finding replicated by Ridgell and Lounsbury (in press) and extended to cumulative grade point average. Many narrow personality traits represent possible unique predictors of withdrawal intention. For the current study, we employed

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the following criteria to select specific, narrow traits likely to add variance beyond the Big Five: (a) traits with previously established psychometric properties of reliability and construct validity; (b) definition and content not readily subsumed by standard taxonomies of the Big Five (cf. De Raad, 2000); and either (c1) established, empirical relationships showing incremental validity with respect to the Big Five for other variables in the academic setting or (c2) constructs that logically would be expected to be related to withdrawal based on their conceptual importance in theoretical models of college student behavior. Accordingly, in the current study we examined seven narrow personality traits in addition to the Big Five in relation to intention to withdraw: Aggression, CareerDecidedness, Optimism, Self-Directed Learning, Sense of Identity, Tough-Mindedness, and Work Drive. All seven of these narrow traits have been found to be significantly related to college students’ overall life satisfaction and satisfaction with specific aspects of college experience (Lounsbury, Saudargas, Gibson, & Leong, in press) and all but Aggression displayed incremental validity in predicting both life satisfaction and campus-specific satisfaction measures after controlling for the Big Five traits. Moreover, Aggression, Optimism, ToughMindedness, and Work Drive were found to be significantly related to the prediction of academic performance, and two of these narrow traits—Aggression and Work Drive —were found to display incremental variance after controlling for the Big Five traits (Lounsbury, Sundstrom, Gibson, & Loveland, 2003). In summary, we examined the following research questions: 1. Are the Big Five personality traits of



Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Extraversion, and Openness as well as the narrow traits of Aggression, Career Decidedness, Optimism, Self-Directed Learning, Sense of Identity, Tough-Mindedness, and Work Drive significantly related to withdrawal intention? 2. When considered as a set, which of the Big Five traits contribute uniquely to the prediction of withdrawal intention? 3. Do the narrow personality traits add incremental validity beyond the significant Big Five traits in predicting withdrawal intention? 4. When considered together as a set, which personality traits significantly account for variance in withdrawal intention?

METHOD Participants Students enrolled in an introductory psychology course at a large, public Southeastern U. S. state university volunteered to participate in this study. Data were collected from 233 freshman students (41% male, 59% female). Eighty-two percent of the participants identified themselves as Caucasian, 10% as African American, 2% as Hispanic, 1% as Asian, and 5% as other. Eighty-nine percent of the participants were in the 18to 19-year-old age group. With the exception of a slight overrepresentation of females (59% versus 53% in the total population), these demographic characteristics are representative of the entire freshman class at the university where this study occurred.

Procedure After obtaining approval from the univer-


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sity’s institutional review board, participants were solicited to take a personality inventory online. Upon completion of the inventory, participants were provided a feedback report summarizing their personality characteristics and implications for a variety of areas related to being a student, including area of study, social life, managing stress, study habits, living situation, and using campus resources. Students in the introductory psychology course were offered extra credit for participation. All data were collected between March and April of 2004.

Measures Personality. The personality measure used in this study was the Resource Associates’ Adolescent Personal Style Inventory (APSI) for College Students. The APSI is a normal personality inventory contextualized for adolescents and has been used for early, middle, and late adolescents (Jaffe, 1998) from middle school through high school and college. Item contextualization was based on research showing that the validity of general personality scales can be enhanced by minor wording changes to reflect the context of interest (Schmit, Ryan, Stierwalt, & Powell, 1995). Thus, for example, the item, “I have more energy for work than most people,” used to measure Work Drive in employment settings, was phrased, “I have more energy for schoolwork than most students.” Scale development, norming, reliability, criterionrelated validity, and construct validity information for the APSI can be found in Lounsbury, Gibson, and Hamrick (2004); Lounsbury, Gibson, Sundstrom, Wilburn, and Loveland (2003); Lounsbury, Hutchens, and Loveland (in press); Lounsbury, Loveland, and Gibson, (2003); Lounsbury, Steel, Loveland, and Gibson (2004); Lounsbury, Sundstrom, et al. (2003) and Lounsbury,

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Tatum, et al. (2003). When considered as a whole, the research reported in the preceding works shows that the APSI constructs are internally consistent; they display generally high convergence with common traits on other, widely used personality inventories, including the 16 PF, NEO-PI-R, MyersBriggs Temperament Inventory (e.g., the APSI measure of Agreeableness correlates .80 with NEO-PI-R measure of Agreeableness); they significantly predict academic performance (reflected by course grades and cumulative GPA) in all grades from middle school through high school and all class levels in college; and they are significantly related to teacher ratings of behavior, school absenteeism, adjustment, at-risk behavior, sense of community, leadership, satisfaction in variety of areas, vocational interests, career decidedness, and a wide variety of logically related (to specific APSI traits) psychological constructs, such as rule-adherence, vigilance, self-esteem, sensation-seeking, self-actualization, empathy, and so on. Moreover, an adult version of the APSI has been found to be related to job performance, job satisfaction, and career satisfaction in a wide variety of occupations in many different business and industry settings (for further information, contact the first author). The APSI has 118 items represented by statements in which respondents are asked to express agreement or disagreement on a 5-point Likert-type scale (1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neutral/undecided, 4 = agree, 5 = strongly agree). A brief description of the personality traits measured by the collegiate form of the APSI is given below. • Aggression—an inclination to fight, attack, and physically assault another person, especially if provoked, frustrated, or

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aggravated by that person; disposition to become angry and engage in violent behavior. • Agreeableness—being agreeable, participative, helpful, cooperative, and inclined to interact with others harmoniously. • Career Decidedness—the degree to which an adolescent knows what occupational field she or he wants to go into after leaving school. • Conscientiousness—being conscientious, reliable, trustworthy, orderly, and rulefollowing. • Emotional Stability—overall level of adjustment and emotional resilience in the face of stress and pressure. We conceptualized this as the inverse of neuroticism. • Extraversion—tendency to be sociable, outgoing, gregarious, warmhearted, expressive, and talkative. • Openness—receptivity and openness to change, innovation, new experience, and learning. • Optimism—having an optimistic, hopeful outlook concerning prospects, people, and the future, even in the face of difficulty and adversity, as well as a tendency to minimize problems and persist in the face of setbacks. • Self-Directed Learning—inclination to learn new materials and find answers to questions on one’s own rather than relying on a teacher to provide answers; initiating and following through on learning without being required to for a course or prompted to by a teacher. • Sense of Identity—knowing one’s self and where one is headed in life, having a core set of beliefs and values that guide decisions and actions; and having a sense of purpose. Journal of College Student Development


• Tough-Mindedness—appraising information and making decisions based on logic, facts, and data rather feelings, sentiments, values, and intuition. • Work Drive—being hard-working, industrious, and inclined to put in long hours and much time and effort to reach goals and achieve at a high level. Intention to withdraw was measured by a single item: “How likely is it that you will withdraw from school (for whatever reason) in the next 12 months” with responses on a 7-point scale ranging from very unlikely to certain or almost certain. We chose 7 scale

points rather than 5 as used in the personality items to increase the range of numerical values and thus increase item variance for this (while still being able to assign verbal anchors to all points). The online questionnaire also contained demographic questions regarding age, sex, race/ethnicity, and year in school.

RESULTS Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics and intercorrelations among the personality and withdrawal intention variables. All of the personality traits with the exception of

TABLE 1. Descriptive Statistics and Intercorrelations for the Personality and Satisfaction Variables

(1) Agreeableness

(1)

(2)

.—

.31** .22** .07

.14* –.60** .17** .29** .08

.—

.05

(2) Conscientiousness (3) Emotional Stability

(3)

(4)

.14** .06 .—

(4) Extraversion

(5)

.19** .06 .—

(5) Openness

(6)

(7)

–.28** .10

(8)

(9)

(10)

(11)

(12)

(13)

.37** –.45** .17**–.23**

.23** .26** .29** –.05

.35**–.25**

–.26** .24** .60** .33** .41** .09

.14* –.35**

.04

.03

.10

.27** .05

.—

–.17*

.07

.30** .41** .14** –.22** .41** –.09

(6) Aggression

.—

(7) Career-Decidedness

–.18** –.32** –.12 .—

(8) Optimism

.21** .13* .—

(9) Self-Directed Learning

.39** –.29** .08

–.15*

–.30** .25** –.19** .25** .50** –.01

.13

–.15*

.32** .56** –.07

.24**–.35**

.—

.48**–.21**

(10) Sense of Identity

.22** .03 .—

(11) Tough-Mindedness

–.23** .25**–.38** .—

(12) Work Drive

–.11 .—

(13) Intention to Withdraw

–.01 –.26** .—

M

3.67

3.48

3.05

3.69

3.65

2.17

3.25

4.03

3.10

3.97

2.30

2.92

1.43

SD

0.67

0.67

0.79

0.71

0.65

0.84

1.22

0.64

0.70

0.69

0.66

0.73

0.92

Coefficient alpha 0.78

0.79

0.84

0.82

0.74

0.84

0.91

0.87

0.74

0.84

0.78

0.85

.NA

Note. n = 233. *p < .05. **p < .01.


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TABLE 2. Results of Multiple Regression Analyses for Significant Big Five and Narrow Traits Predicting Withdrawal Intention Step

Variable

Multiple R

R2

R2 Change

1

Significant Big Five traits (Emotional Stability, Conscientiousness)

.412**

.170**

.162**

2

Sense of Identity

.461**

.213**

.043**

3

Work Drive

.476**

.227**

.014*

Note. n = 233. *p < .05. **p < .01.

Openness and Tough-Mindedness were correlated significantly with intention to withdraw. The traits most highly correlated with withdrawal intention were Sense of Identity (r = –.38, p < .01), Emotional Stability (r = –.35, p < .01), Optimism (r = –.35, p < .01), Work Drive (r = –.26, p < .01), Conscientiousness (r = –.25, p < .01), and Aggression (r = .25, p < .01). The results of a stepwise multiple regression using the Big Five traits as predictors and Intention to Withdraw revealed that Emotional Stability entered the equation first, accounting for 12.4% of the variance in withdrawal intention followed by Conscientiousness, accounting for an additional 4.6% of the variance. Thus, two of the Big Five variables—Emotional Stability and Conscientiousness—produced a multiple correlation of R = .41 (p < .01) with Intention to Withdraw; in other words, 16% of the variance in withdrawal intention was accounted for by these two Big Five traits. To answer the question of whether the narrow personality traits add incremental validity beyond the significant Big Five traits in predicting Intention to Withdraw, a hierarchical multiple regression analysis was performed with Emotional Stability and

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Conscientiousness entered on the first step and in subsequent steps the narrow traits were allowed to enter in stepwise fashion. As can be seen by the results in Table 2, Sense of Identity contributed an additional 4.3% of the variance, followed by Work Drive, which added 1.4% more of the variance in withdrawal intention. These four traits collectively produced a multiple correlation of R = .476 (p < .01), which represents 23% of the variance in Intention to Withdraw. To assess the question of which personality traits significantly accounted for variance in Intention to Withdraw when order of entry was not specified, we ran a stepwise multiple regression analysis with all 12 personality traits serving as predictors. As can be seen in Table 3, Sense of Identity entered first, accounting for 14.3% of the variance, followed by Emotional Stability, explaining an additional 4.7%, and Work Drive accounting for an additional 2.6% of the variance in Intention to Withdraw. Thus, the three traits of Sense of Identity, Emotional Stability, and Work Drive produced a multiple correlation of R = .464, accounting for 21.6% of the variance in Intention to Withdraw.



DISCUSSION The results of this study suggest that normal personality traits, including Big Five as well as narrow traits, are significantly related to student intention to withdraw from college. In each case, the direction of the correlation is consistent with the construct specification of the trait. For example, the negative correlation between Conscientiousness and withdrawal intention is to be expected because students who are more conscientious (and therefore by definition more inclined to reliably meet expectations and do what is expected of them) would be less likely to withdraw from college. The current results provide support for the applicability of the Big Five traits to intention to withdraw insofar as four of them—Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability and Extraversion—were significantly, negatively correlated with intention to withdraw, and two of these traits—Emotional Stability and Conscientiousness—jointly accounted for 17% of the variance in withdrawal intention. The results of this study also support the use of narrower traits than the Big Five in that two of these traits—Sense of Identity and Work Drive—contributed an additional 6% of the variance in predicting withdrawal intention above and beyond the Big Five.

Based on the results of the stepwise multiple regression analysis in which both Big Five and narrow traits were allowed to enter, and from which Sense of Identity, Emotional Stability, and Work Drive accounted for 22% of the variance in withdrawal intention, we tentatively recommend that researchers in this area use “multidimensional composites” (Paunonen & Nicol, 2001), comprised of both broad traits such as the Big Five and narrow personality measures, to maximize their validity in relation to criteria like intention to withdraw. The results of the current study carry implications for all theories of student withdrawal or departure that explicitly include personality traits in their model (e.g., Baird, 2000) or other personological variables such as individual commitments (Tinto, 1993), as well those theories that posit the importance of institutional variables (e.g., Laden et al., 2000) or college environmental factors (e.g., Astin, 1977, 1993). The first implication is that personality measurement should be conducted in a systematic manner using the most up-to-date and broadly supported conceptualization, that we contend is represented by the Big Five model in conjunction with narrow personality traits. More consistent usage of the Big Five and

TABLE 3. Results of Stepwise Multiple Regression for Big Five and Narrow Personality Traits Predicting Withdrawal Intention Multiple R

R2

R2 Change

Sense of Identity

.379**

.143**

.143**

2

Emotional Stability

.436**

.190**

.047**

3

Work Drive

.464**

.216**

.026**

Step

Variable

1

Note. n = 233. *p < .05. **p < .01.


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selected narrow traits that demonstrate predictive validity for withdrawal should help reduce the fragmented nature of personality findings in this area we noted earlier and that was observed by Tinto (1993, pp. 44-45). The second implication concerns the estimation of effects for all other variables pertaining to college environmental or institutional characteristics. Because, from the standpoint of individual development and experience, personality precedes all environmental variables in the realm of college student behavior, we do not know whether, or to what extent, significant environmental sources influence withdrawal above and beyond the effect of personality variables. Any researchers who would claim to demonstrate the effects on withdrawal of such variables as institutional commitments, academic performance, extracurricular activities, interaction with faculty, peer relations, or social integration as exemplified in Tinto’s (1993) longitudinal model of institutional departure or Astin’s (1993) long list of environmental variables that affect college student outcomes, must first show empirically what the magnitude of such effects are after controlling for personality traits. This could lead to considerable reduction of the estimated magnitude of effects for environmental variables. For example, Lounsbury, Saudargas, et al. (2004) found that although satisfaction with different aspects of college life accounted for 26% of the variance in global life satisfaction for college students, this figure dropped to a mere 6% of the variance when personality traits were controlled for. In addition, we think it is premature to accept Tinto’s (1993) conclusion that the effects of personality traits depend on the particular college and student body being examined. Research on

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the criterion-related validity of personality traits with respect to academic performance and job performance indicate that there are generalizable personality effects that are not contingent on organizational or individual factors (see., e.g., Barrick & Mount, 1991; Lounsbury, Gibson, et al., 2004; Lounsbury, Gibson, et al., 2003; Lounsbury, Sundstrom, et al., 2003; Paunonen & Nicol, 2001; Salgado, 1997; Tett, Jackson, & Rothstein, 1991). We think it is likely that a number of personality-withdrawal relationships will be observed across different higher education settings irrespective of student characteristics. In fact, one possible explanation of why college student departure rates have remained relatively constant over 100 years is that they are driven primarily by personality traits rather than environmental factors. When a behavioral outcome is relatively consistent over time and across environments that vary on many dimensions (as is the case for different colleges and universities), it is logical to look for relatively constant personological variables, such as personality traits, as the cause for such consistency. We believe that the full range of effects of personality traits in this area of inquiry is yet to be determined within the framework of broad and narrow personality factors and using items and scales contextualized to the college setting. This includes main effects of personality as well as the joint effects of personality-by-environment (or organization or situation) interactions. In this regard, we think it appropriate for future research to revisit Tinto’s (1982) interactional model using a more comprehensive set of personality measures contextualized to the collegiate setting to measure the effects of personality traits and trait-by-environment interactions in the withdrawal process.



The current findings are consistent with some of the main results of previous literature on college student attrition and development. By way of example, we note that two of the major causes of individual departure from college identified by Tinto (1993) are, in our opinion, related to personality traits in the current study significantly related to withdrawal intention. Specifically, the causes he labels “adjustment” and “isolation” are outcomes that are logically related to the personality traits of Emotional Stability and Extraversion, respectively. We also interpret the current findings as being related to Chickering and Reisser’s (1993) seven major developmental vectors or outcomes for college students. These developmental vectors can be seen, in part, as logical outcomes of personality traits (Chickering, personal communication, May 10, 2004). If, as we contend, the significant personality traits in this study are important for college student adjustment and wellbeing, then some of these traits should correspond to Chickering and Reisser’s major dimensions. Indeed, this is case for five of their seven major vectors. Chickering and Reisser’s emphasis on establishing identity is directly related to the trait Sense of Identity; developing purpose is related to Career Decidedness; the dimension they label managing emotions is directly related to Emotional Stability; the vector they term moving through autonomy toward interdependence is related to the traits SelfDirected Learning and Conscientiousness, and their outcome developing mature interpersonal relationships may be derived from Extraversion and Agreeableness. It should be noted that most of the personality traits emerging in this study as being significantly related to withdrawal intention have also been found to be related


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to the academic performance of college students (Lounsbury & Gibson, 2004; Lounsbury, Sundstrom, et al., 2003; Ridgell & Lounsbury, in press; Wolfe & Johnson, 1995) as well as campus-specific satisfaction and overall life satisfaction of college students (Lounsbury, Saudargas, et al., in press). Moreover, many of them are related to important outcomes for students after they leave college or university, including job performance (e. g., Barrick & Mount, 1991; Lounsbury, Gibson, et al., 2004; Lounsbury, Gibson,et al., 2003; Salgado, 1997; Tett et al., 1991) as well as job satisfaction and career satisfaction (Boudreau, Boswell, & Judge, 2001; Judge, Higgins, Thoresen, & Barrick, 1999; Lounsbury, Loveland, Sundstrom, et al., 2003; Seibert & Kramer, 2001). Hopefully, future theorizing and research can address the question of how these variables are related and what are the linkages among personality traits, academic performance, life and domain-specific satisfaction, intention to withdraw, withdrawal, and subsequent workplace-related outcomes of job satisfaction, job performance, and career satisfaction.

Practical and Policy Implications From a practical standpoint, there are several potentially useful applications of assessing personality traits of students as they enter college or in their early college years. First, such assessment could lead to early identification of students likely to withdraw and prevention strategies could be developed based on personality results. By way of example, activities and programs could focus on helping students increase their personal sense of identity, career decidedness, or emotional stability, which could involve a number of student service areas, such as the student counseling center, advising, peer mentoring, and career planning, to name but

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a few. This type of approach involves trying to modify a student’s personality trait level (e.g., increase a student’s Sense of Identity or Emotional Stability). Even though there is considerable change in personality traits during college (e.g., Siegler et al., 1990, estimated that only half of the variance in personality traits of college students is stable into later adult life), the stability of personality traits in college invites consideration of strategies designed to lower the likelihood of withdrawal based on enhancing personenvironment fit (cf. Hesketh & Gardner 1993; Magnusson & Endler, 1977). Examples are orientation programs (cf. Buhr, Pelletier, & Wark, 1987), residence hall placement (Pope, 1987), roommate assignments based on similar personality traits (e.g., Fuller & Hall, 1996), and academic advising using a student’s personality attributes to recommend courses and instructors. For example, students with higher levels of self-directed learning might enjoy independent study classes or students scoring lower on Conscientiousness might want to avoid highly regimented courses and teachers or choose less structured courses without an attendance policy that encourage creative self-expression. Also, a student with lower levels of Extraversion might be advised not to take freshman courses that require public speaking, but wait until she or he has adjusted to the overall college environment. The advisor of that student might also suggest that the student join others in low-key activities that would involve the student in interactions with other students. Another possible application would be to consider using personality measures as one screen in the admissions process for prospective college students, which has only been done in a few settings (Allik & Realo, 1997; Levine & Taub, 1979). Personality in-

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ventories are being used extensively by companies to screen candidates for all types of jobs (e.g., Barrick & Ryan, 2003; Furnham, 1992b; Roberts & Hogan, 2001) in a legally acceptable manner from the standpoint of Equal Employment Opportunity uniform guidelines issued by the Federal government (United States Department of Labor, 1978), because personality traits have been found to be significantly related to job performance (see, e.g. Barrick & Mount, 1991; Salgado, 1997; Tett et al., 1991). Another appeal of using personality traits in selection decisions is that, unlike cognitive aptitude or intelligence measures, there are usually no significant differences between different racial or ethic groups on personality scores (Hogan, Hogan, & Roberts, 1996; Hough, Oswald, & Ployhart, 2001). If one accepts the premise that cognitive ability tests have adverse impact on certain ethnic or racial groups (see, e.g., Freedle, 2003; Goldman & Hewitt, 1976; Jencks & Phillips, 1998; Kaplan & Saccuzzo, 2004, Chapter 19; Sacks, 2000), the use of personality measures in the admission process could lead to more ethnic and racial diversity on campus than relying mainly on cognitive ability measures like the SAT or ACT. We say this because research generally shows that cognitive ability or intelligence measures are independent of personality traits (cf. Collis & Messick, 2001; Saklofske & Zeidner, 1995). This means that applicants who would score most highly on say, the SAT, would not likely be the students who scored highly on, say, Conscientiousness, Sense of Identity, or Work Drive. One other advantage of using personality measures in college admissions is that they might be a more cost-effective way of measuring some of the same traits that are ostensibly being assessed by interviewing applicants and reading their personal



essays. It should be pointed out that we are not recommending that personality measures replace cognitive ability tests like the SAT or ACT in the admissions decisions, even though there is extensive criticism of the use of such tests, primarily because of their alleged unfairness to socially disadvantaged groups, and members of certain racial/ethnic groups (see, for example, Cronbach, 1975; Crouse & Trusheim, 1988; Sacks, 2000), and there is a growing trend among American colleges to make such tests optional, with one out of four doing so (CampusProgram. com, 2004). In fact, some colleges have dropped the SAT requirement altogether (FairTest Examiner, 1996; Solomon, 2003). What we are suggesting is that serious consideration be given to using personality measures as one factor, among others, in college enrollment decisions if crossvalidated and replicated research demonstrates that the personality traits of students measured before or upon entrance to college are predictive of withdrawal/dropout. This idea is reinforced by studies showing that personality traits are predictive of collegiate academic performance (Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2003a, 2003b; Flaherty & Reutzel, 1965; Gulo & Lynch, 1973; Lounsbury, Sundstrom, et al., 2003; Paunonen & Ashton, 2001; Robyak & Downey, 1979; Schuerger & Kuna, 1987; Shaughnessy, Stockard, & Moore, 1974; Steininger, 1970). If personality measures come to be used in college enrollment decisions, they will probably be used in addition to some type of cognitive ability measure. We base this conjecture on research demonstrating that personality traits add incremental variance to the prediction of academic performance above and beyond that accounted for by cognitive ability measures (Furnham &


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Chamorro-Premuzic, in press; Furnham, Chamorro-Premuzic, & McDougall, 2003; Lounsbury, Sundstrom et al.; Tracey & Sedlacek, 1989; Wolfe & Johnson, 1995). For those who might resist the notion of using personality measures in enrollment decisions, even given appropriate predictive validity evidence for student retention and academic performance, we contend that one of the main purposes of other procedures used to evaluate applicants and make enrollment decisions—including applicant interviews, written essays, and letters of recommendation, is to make assessments about students’ personality traits with the assumption that these traits are consistent over time and predict important outcomes such as academic performance, adjustment, and persistence (cf. Aamodt, Bryan, & Whitcomb, 1993). It may be that those procedures are less reliable and less valid than personality inventories for assessing the personality traits of college students. Along these lines, research in employment settings has often found to show performance-related validity for job interviews of candidates (e.g., Arvey & Campion, 1982; Hunter & Hunter, 1984; Mayfield, 1964).

Directions for Future Research There are a number of areas for future research that could clarify and extend the results of the current study. The most important next step is to see how the personality traits emerging as important in this study and intention to withdraw relate to actual withdrawal or persistence. This will be important to elucidate a theoretical network for personality traits, withdrawal intention, and withdrawal of college and university students. A longitudinal study with repeated waves of measurement would reveal how personality traits change while

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students are in college and how these changes affect intentions to withdraw and eventual withdrawal/dropout. In fact, we are in the process of developing and testing a model of student withdrawal using a longitudinal design that conceptualizes personality traits as leading to intention to withdraw which is the direct precursor of withdrawal. It would also be interesting to see how participation in campus groups, activities, and events affect and are affected by personality traits and how these contribute to different forms of satisfaction and the withdrawal process. In addition, a broader sample of colleges and more comprehensive samples of students would allow researchers to see whether the current findings are generalizable across different demographic subgroups defined in terms of type of college attended, age, year in school, major, ethnicity, sex, employment, membership in Greek organizations, and religious affiliation, among others.

Study Limitations. Several limitations of the current study should be acknowledged. Future researchers on this topic should try to replicate these findings using a broader range of geographic locations and types of colleges and universities, given that the current study was conducted at a single, large public university in the Southeastern United States. Also, more than 80% of the study participants were Caucasian, which also leaves open the question of replicable findings for different racial/ethnic groups. Then, too, it would be interesting to see if these findings hold up across samples of upper-classmen and graduate students. The possibility of differential gender effects was not examined.

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Another limitation of the current study is that we did not employ a longitudinal design that could have permitted us to look at personality changes over time and subsequent withdrawal or dropout from college. Nevertheless, the results of the current study indicate that four of the Big Five traits as well as key narrow traits are substantially related to intention to withdraw from college. A combination of just 3 of 12 significant traits produced a multiple correlation of .46 with withdrawal intention. Further research on the role of personality traits in the withdrawal or departure process is warranted for several reasons: It can lead to revision of some aspects of extant theoretical models of departure and retention, such as Tinto’s interactionalist model and it can inform other theoretical perspectives such as Chickering and Reisser’s (1993) seven key vectors of college student development. Also, validated research on personality-withdrawal linkages augments the more general literature on the criterion-related validity of the Big Five model and narrow personality traits (e.g., Furnham, 1992a; Hogan, Johnson, & Briggs, 1997). In addition, consideration of personality traits may alter the effect size estimated for many different variables relating to students’ experience in college as well as institutional variables. There are many interesting practical applications of personality measures and personality-by-environment interactions that can be explored in functions ranging from admissions to orientation, advising, residence assignments, counseling, career development, and collegeto-work transition. Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to John W. Lounsbury, Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-0900; [email protected]



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