Date
10-2005
Department
School of Education
Degree
Doctor of Education (EdD)
Primary Subject Area
Education, Adult and Continuing; Education, Curriculum and Instruction; Education, General; Education, Higher; Education, Special
Recommended Citation
Tucker, Shirley E., "Introversion and Self-Advocacy: Concomitant Predictors of End-of-Year Attrition Rates for College Freshmen with Learning Disabilities" (2005). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 182.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/182
Abstract
This attrition research investigated the social aspect of two independent variables, introversion and self-advocacy, and explored whether they functioned as a concomitant unit to reliably predict end-of-year attrition rates for college freshmen with learning disabilities. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator categorized subjects dichotomously as introverts or extraverts while the Tucker Self-Advocacy Tool used a continuous scale to indicate the degree of self-advocacy each subject exhibited.
Several statistical procedures facilitated this correlational study: the Fisher's Exact Test compared the percentage of dropouts between the introvert and extrovert groups while a two-sample t-test compared the average self-advocacy score between the group that dropped out and the group that did not dropout. Binomial multivariate logistic regression allowed investigation of the subjects' self-advocacy scores, after adjusting for personality, and whether they might predict attrition for college freshmen with learning disabilities.
Three hypotheses, tested at the .05 confidence level, yielded insignificant statistical results, indicating that non self-advocacy and introversion may not be accurate predictors of attrition for college freshmen who are learning disabled. However, 93% of the extraverts in the study registered for their sophomore year, compared to only 66% of the introverts who re-enrolled. Therefore, further investigation may be warranted with a larger sample size, in the event that the small sample size (n = 20) of this study influenced the failure to find statistically significant results.
