Childhood Memories and College Adjustment

Purpose Attending college is a huge change and culture shock when compared to high school. While many college students plan on succeeding, many can find this hard to do, with poor adjustment leading to outcomes such as poor academic performance, depression, anxiety, and possibly not finishing their degree. Studies on childhood maltreatment in every area except physical abuse have been found to be associated with poor well-being and adjustment, including the personal-emotional subscale adjustment of the Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (Moore, Welsh, & Peterson, 2020). This study, therefore, seeks to examine the associations between childhood memories of home experiences and college adjustment. It is hypothesized that higher scores on the Memories of Home and Family scale (MHFS) will be associated with better adjustment to college as measured by social and academic scales relating to college. Secondly, higher scores on MHFS will be associated with higher scores in self-efficacy. Finally, it is hypothesized that self-efficacy will mediate the relationship between adverse childhood events and college adjustment as well as the relationship between MHFS and college adjustment. Procedure This study was approved by the IRB board of the author’s institution (IRB # 23-020). Recruitment of participants is currently ongoing in two ways: via a student research pool, and via flyers to the general student population in a mid-sized mid-western university. Before participating in the survey, participants are to read the informed consent. Participants who consent then have access to participate in the survey. When data collection is complete it will be cleaned and analyzed. Results Data is still being collected. Currently, 173 participants have responded. Initial results indicate that 74% of the sample are female, 22% are male and 3% are non-binary. Initial analyses of the various scales showed that all the scales - Memories of childhood Family & home experiences scale, ACES scale, social, and academic adjustment scale are moderate to highly reliable ( = .66 -.94). Initial correlations between measures also show that all are significantly correlated in the expected directions (r = .27 - .63, p\u3c.001). Conclusion/Implications This study would add to the literature on college adjustment, especially regarding how memories of childhood experiences (positive or negative) could influence students’ ability to adjust to college