As I work towards completing my study of online audience measurement tools, I want to share with you a research paper that I completed a little under a year ago. I am an avid fan of Stephen Covey, and his most widely-known book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is a personal favorite. It is the rare type of book that, if one chooses, can create lasting, positive changes in one’s quality of life. Last year, in my Tests and Measurements class, I was assigned the project of creating and validating a new psychological construct. As a psychology major with passions for both research and personal development, I saw this assignment as the perfect opportunity to synthesize the two.
After dozens of hours of research, I conceptualized a construct based off of the first three habits in Covey’s work: Be Proactive
(H1), Begin with the End in Mind
(H2), and Put First Things First
. Covey calls the combination of these habits The Private Victory
(PV), representing a growth in maturity, and the transition from dependence to independence. While I would have liked to have taken the study further by including all seven habits, doing so would have been impossible under to assignment’s time constraints.
Because all of my participants were college students, I chose to determine if the habits could predict effectiveness in a scholastic setting. I validated the PV construct against the Student Readiness Inventory (SRI). The SRI, is a multi-factor assessment designed to predict student performance. A total of 230 student participants from Rollins College took part my study, a significant proportion of the college’s approximately 1,800 Arts & Sciences students.
In my opinion, the study was quite successful. I’m extremely proud of what I accomplished, and believe that its results provide valuable insight into how to improve one’s personal effectiveness. In particular, academic success is highly related to goal-orientation, self-confidence, and commitment. The entire paper is embedded below, and is also available for download on SlideShare.
The Private Victory and the Student Readiness Inventory: Three Habits of Student Effectiveness by Sean Weigold Ferguson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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