Research consistently indicates that early attachment to primary caregivers can have a lasting effect on development that persists into adulthood. While studies have established a positive relation between secure attachment and academic persistence (e.g., Sollenberger et al., 2007), there is a lack of systematic research examining how attachment interacts with other variables linked to persistence. The current study examines how attachment styles interact with other individual factors (gender, ego-resiliency, and trait anxiety) to influence persistence among first- and second-year college students.
A majority of the sample reported a secure attachment. As a result, all categories of insecure attachment were collapsed for the purposes of data analysis. Persistence was operationalized as time spent on an unsolvable puzzle task. To help create the expectation that all tasks were solvable, participants completed two solvable tasks first. Statistics indicate that there were no significant differences in persistence based on attachment. However, it is important to note that meaningful differences among categories of insecure attachment may have been masked by grouping them together. Further, the small sample of insecurely attached participants constrained power.
A similar pattern of findings emerged when comparing those with higher versus lower levels of ego-resiliency. Overall, the sample reported high levels of ego resiliency. Although significant group differences (i.e., higher vs. lower) failed to emerge, the findings were generally consistent with the expectation that higher ego-resiliency was related to more persistence. Linear regression analyses indicated that while the overall model (gender, ego-resiliency, trait anxiety, and attachment) was not significant in predicting persistence, gender did contribute unique variance. Further research more closely examining how specific categories of attachment differentially contribute to models of persistence should be pursued. More effective interventions targeting at risk students can be developed with a better understanding of how individual characteristics relate to persistence.
