Advanced students' adaptation to college

Abstract

Second-, fourth- and sixth-year students (N = 536) in the humanities, sciences and medicine at a metropolitan university in Holland completed a questionnaire. It included standard measures of mental health variables, satisfactions, interpersonal orientations, and assessments of the learning environments. Evidence is presented about the reliability and validity of Crombag's College Adaptation Questionnaire (CAQ) to assess adjustment to student life. Internal consistency of adaptation scores was adequate and the association with social desirability responding was negligible. There were no significant differences between the sexes, major fields of study and cohorts. Strong support for convergent validity was obtained. The more adapted the students were, the less they experienced depressive moods, loneliness, and interpersonal helplessness; and the more they were satisfied with their lives in general, with their interpersonal relations in particular, and the more easily they made new contacts. For women students, the less well adapted they were, the more they reported psychosomatic stress symptoms. Adaptation was only weakly associated with social-risk-taking and very weakly, for men only, with problem drinking. Supporting discriminant validity, adaptation was in general only weakly related to the judgments of various facets of the learning environments (‘instructional climates’) in which the students partook.