Perceived Teacher Rejection, Coping, and Psychological Maladjustment among College Students

Abstract

The study aimed to investigate the relationship between perceived teacher rejection, coping, and psychological maladjustment among college students. A sample of 214 students consisting of 90 males, and 124 females aged between 17-19 (M= 17.4, SD=.90) years participated. The urdu versions of Teacher Acceptance Rejection Questionnaire TARQ (Malik, 2011), Coping Oriented to Problems Experienced Scale (Nissa & Siddiqui, 2020), and Personality Assessment Questionnaire (Naz & Kausar, 2013) were used. Data was collected using non probability convenient sampling from private and public sector colleges.The study hypothesized that perceived teacher rejection would have a positive relationship emotion focused coping, avoidant coping, and psychological maladjustment. While problem focused coping, would have a negative relationship with psychological maladjustment. It was also hypothesized that coping will mediate the relationship between perceived teacher rejection and psychological maladjustment. Pearson product correlation, revealed that perceived teacher rejection has a significant positive correlation with psychological maladjustment, avoidant coping has a significant positive correlation with psychological maladjustment, while problem focused coping and emotion focused coping had a negative correlation with psychological maladjustment. and mediation analysis showed that coping partially mediated the relationship between perceived teacher rejection and psychological maladjustment. These findings offer insight to how coping can be utilized in college counselling programs to help college students deal with psychological maladjustment.