Academic procrastination among international graduate students: The role of personality traits, the Big-Five personality Trait Taxonomy

Academic procrastination is a common behavioral problem among university students. The purpose of this study was primarily to investigate the capability of the Big Five factors of personality (Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Neuroticism, Openness, and Agreeableness) to act as predictors of academic procrastination. In addition, the role of factors such as gender, age, and the level of education were also assessed. Secondly, the purpose was to investigate if students from different ethnic backgrounds experience different levels of academic procrastination. To achieve these objectives, two scales were used to collect the data: the Big Five Inventory (BFI) was used to obtain data regarding personality, and the General Behavioural Procrastination (GP) scale was used to assess academic procrastination. The population of the study consisted of 149 international graduate students at the University of Leicester. Regression analysis results indicate that conscientiousness was the only factor that made a unique contribution to the prediction of academic procrastination. Extraversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, gender, age, and level of education did not make significantly unique contributions to the prediction of academic procrastination. One-way ANOVA, which were conducted to investigate the differences between Kurdish, Turkish, Chinese, and Arab groups, revealed significant differences. However, calculating effect size indicated that the actual difference in mean scores between the groups was quite small.

Keywords:

academic procrastination , the Big-Five , conscientiousness , extraversion , neuroticism , openness , agreeableness