Chapter 2 Review of Related Studies and Literature Review on Related Literature The review of literature of this study focuses

on concepts such as, self-worth protection, self-handicapping, alcohol use and procrastination. On self-worth. According to Jones & Berglas, (1978) as stated in the study of Norem & Cantor (1986), self worth is the opinion you have about yourself and the value you place on yourself. The need to protect self-worth stems primarily from a fear of failure and the implications failure may have on one's self-worth. Students use strategies such as self-handicapping to protect their self-worth. With the need for a positive sense of self-worth being among the highest of human priorities (Covington, 1984; Covington & Beery, 1976), protecting the sense of high self-worth becomes of great importance for students. In some cases, the motive to protect self-worth becomes even more important to students than the need to perform well and students may engage in self-worth protective strategies that may cause the very failures they are trying to avoid (Covington, 1992). For instance, this is the case when students jeopardize their academic standing by procrastinating or by taking on too heavy a course load and virtually ensuring failure. In such cases, the students feel that they are "failing with honor" since their failure reflects little on their ability. Through shifting the reason for failure away from ability, the students can maintain the illusion of their high ability, and therefore, preserve a sense of high self-worth. Their grades as well as aspects of their well being, however, suffer. (Seli et al., 2009). According to Thompson (2004), a characteristic of self-worth protective students is that they perform poorly when they anticipate that poor performance is likely t= reveal low ability, yet perform

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well in situations that involve little threat to self-worth. He found self-worth protection to be an outcome of choking under pressure that is fuelled by evaluative threat. These preemptory attempts serve to control the self-esteem implications of anticipated failure by establishing causes for failure that are not related to ones ability. Rhodewalt and Hill (1995) state that self-handicappers, through their statements and acts, proactively arrange circumstances so that failing performances will not be interpreted in ways that threaten their self-esteem. On self-handicapping. Self-handicapping as a self-protective cognitive strategy refers to the creation of a claim or an impediment by a person prior to performance or an evaluative event (Berglas & Jones, 1978). Such impediments may be either an active behavior (e.g., choosing to study in a disruptive environment) or a lack of behavior (e.g., withdrawing all effort from studying). Typical examples of self-handicapping include procrastination, exaggerated test anxiety, the choice of performance-debilitating circumstances, and excessive drinking of alcohol prior to an evaluative event (Rhodewalt & Davidson, 1986). Through this type of strategic maneuvering, students are able to claim that they failed due to a lack of effort or other controllable reasons rather than due to lack of ability, an uncontrollable reason. On the other hand, if students end up being successful despite employing low effort, this success will be seen as implying high ability. In essence, self-handicapping can be experienced as a no-lose situation by students with a dominant fear of failure. According to Aronson, Wilson, and Akert (2007), self-handicapping behaviors are strategies used by people to create obstacles and excuses for themselves so that, if they do poorly on a task, they can avoid blaming themselves. Thompson (2004) says selfhandicapping refers to the practice of certain individuals to voluntarily claim a

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handicap when future outcomes are uncertain and when no external reason is available for poor performance. A person who is self-handicapping may be described as claiming emotional upset prior to an exam, illness, intentionally sustaining an injury prior to a tennis match, test anxiety, financial worries, having a late night (Thompson, 2004), and an athletes failure to practice for a game (Rhodewalt & Hill, 1995). Such claims serve to blur the link between poor performance and low ability. When a students claims to have been too emotionally upset to study for exam, in the event that the student fails the exam, it is difficult to question his or her ability because of the plausible self-handicapping cause but in the event of success, the students ability is augmented. However, several studies provide evidence that self-handicapping is primarily used in the service of selfprotection instead of self-enhancement (Rhodewalt & Hill, 1995). According to Smith (2002), self-handicapping is a common behavior of less successful students and previous research by Feick and Rhodewalt (1997) found self-handicappers claimed more excuses prior to a test. It is possible that alerting teachers and students to principles of self-handicapping, self-serving bias, and other social psychology principles may lessen their occurrence (Smith, 2005). On procrastination. Procrastination has been described as a behavioral style that reflects self-regulation failure (Ferrari, 2001), and involves delay in the start and/or completion of a task (Ferrari & Tice, 2000). Academic procrastination can be understood as knowing that one is supposed to, and perhaps even wanting to, complete an academic task but failing to perform the activity within the expected or desired time frame (Senecal, Koestner, & Vallerand, 1995). It can also be described as unnecessarily delaying activities that one ultimately intends to complete, especially when done to the point of creating emotional discomfort (Lay & Schouwenburg, 1993; Solomon &

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Rothblum, 1984). Procrastination is viewed as a maladaptive behavior because, among other things, it reduces the time that students have available to complete their academic work. Therefore, students who procrastinate would seem less likely to use the effortful and time-consuming cognitive and metacognitive strategies that lead to greater understanding and achievement. In addition, these strate- gies have been associated with increased levels of motivation, greater volition, and higher levels of achievement that seem to preclude high levels of procrastination. Review of Related Studies Earlier Baer (2002) reviewed a quantitative study on alcoholism among college students. The aim of the study was to determine the factors that led college students to drinking alcoholic beverages. He utilized questionnaire to gather responses from samples of convenience in cross-sectional designs. Evidence from studies of college samples does consistently suggest that alcohol is consumed for several different purposes for different psychological effects in different contexts. A pattern of impulsivity/sensation seeking is strongly related to increased drinking among students (Baer, 2002). This pattern is supported by research into personality, drinking motives, alcohol expectancies and drinking contexts. Social processes appear especially important for drinking in many college venues and may contribute to individual differences in drinking more than enduring personality differences.(Baer et al, 2002) Similarly Martin, Marsh, Williamson, and Debus (2003) conducts a narrative inquiry with 1st-year university students selected as high or low in either selfhandicapping or defensive pessimism. The data confirm previous quantitative research and also provide important qualitative information on the congruencies and differences in goal orientation for self-handicappers and defensive pessimists, the social and academic costs of self-protective behavior, the control students feel they have over their

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self-protective behavior, and the roles of the family and students culture in their tendency to self-protect. Helena Seli, Myron H. Dembo and Stephen Crocker (2009) examined community college students' future-related self-concept, termed "possible selves," in relationship to their current academic behavior with a focus on self worth protective strategies. As demonstrated via hierarchal regression, possible selves added to understanding the students' self-protective behavior above and beyond their underlying motivation. Specifically, a balance between the students' hoped for and feared possible selves were related to a lower occurrence of the most detrimental of self-protective behaviors, selfhandicapping. Further, a balance between hopes and fears was related to a higher occurrence of an effective strategy, reflectivity. Results provided partial support for the notion that possible selves serve as a cognitive link between motivation and behavior and could serve as a foundation for interventions. Berglas and Jones (1978) evaluate the supposition that alcohol use and underachievement may serve as strategies to externalize the causation of poor performance and to internalize the causation of good performance. This strategy may be significantly used by those who have an unstable but not completely negative sense of self-competence. They infer that attribution principles play a key role in the preservation of self-image protection. Specifically, the hypothesis is that an important reason why some people turn to alcohol is to avoid the implications of negative feedback for failure and to enhance the impact of positive feedback for success. Ferrari & Tice (2000) conducted two studies with an experimental design to empirically demonstrate many of the things that Jones and Berglas set out in their original theory. Specifically, Ferrari and Tice found that people who scored high on a

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measure of chronic procrastination were more likely than others to self-handicap by procrastinating, and chronic procrastinators engaged in procrastination only when the task at hand was evaluative and potentially threatening.

Clarry Lay, Steven Knish and Rita Zanatta approached the relation of procrastination and self-handicapping by noting that the self-handicapping of procrastinators with temporal delay may be seen as a subset of self-handicapping overall. That is, a trait self-handicapper may use a wide range of behaviors strategically to protect self-esteem, whereas the procrastinator may be limited to temporal delay (and not always with the motive of protecting self-esteem). They conducted two studies using high school students: one in the classroom during class time, and the other outside of class during a 5-day period prior to an anticipated intelligence test. In both cases, the students were to practice for the test. To heighten the potential for failure, Lay and his colleagues also manipulated the level of difficulty of the practice questions, assuming that the students who got the difficult as opposed to the easy practice questions would expect failure prompting more self-protective handicapping. Finally, they also assessed the students' perceived task ability as this was expected to affect test preparation (i.e., selfhandicappers who perceived themselves as less than competent would anticipate poorer performance and my increase their self-handicapping behavior).

In light of prior study findings, the researchers sought to understand the experiences and factors that led college students to self-handicapping. An increased insight on how ones attribution contributed to their procrastination and drinking. Emergent themes develop, marked by rich description of the quality of internal and external barriers that led college students to abuse alcohol. Definition of Terms

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For a better understanding of the different terms used in this study, they are conceptually and/or operationally defined below: Academic Performance. This refers to performance in curricular activities in school. They can range from homework, examinations, quizzes, subject requirements and class attendance. Alcohol use. The drinking of beverages containing ethyl alcohol. Alcoholic beverages are consumed largely for their physiological and psychological effects. Alcoholic beverages include wines, beers, and spirits. In beers the alcohol content varies from as little as 2 percent to as much as 8 percent; most lager- or ale-type beers contain between 4 and 5 percent. Alcohol use is an impediment used by students to avoid a perceived threat. Attribution. This is how individuals explain causes of behaviours and events. It is like how they perceive the things that are happening. Behavior. Refers to how a person acts or reacts in a given situation. Coping. This refers to thoughts, actions, and regimens used to counteract stress. This can depend from person to person, specifically on how he or she can respond to a stressor and deal with it. Impediment. This refers to something that impedes. It is something that disallows normal functioning and cause a hindrance. Procrastination. Procrastination is the lack of time spent practicing before an upcoming target task. It is conceptualized as a behavioral self-handicap.

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Self-handicapping. This refers to a process wherein individuals avoid effort in order to keep potential failure from harming their self-esteem. Self-handicapping behaviors. This refers to behaviors done by individuals in anticipation of a perceived failure. The behaviors focused on the study are alcohol use as a self-sabotage, procrastination as an anticipatory excuse, and lack of effort brought about by low self-efficacy as a motivational barrier. Self-esteem. This refers to a person's overall sense of self-worth or personal value. Self-esteem is often seen as a personality trait, which means that it tends to be stable and enduring. In the study, a persons self-esteem is considered the predictors of selfhandicapping.