Modeling the Mediating Role of Anxiety Caused by Viral Diseases in the Relationship between Identity Styles and Self-Expression Ability with Students' Achievement Motivation

Background &

The skill of self-expression is a skill that can help people to work efficiently in the face of problems and goals and successes in life. Self-expression is a skill that, in addition to the direct effect it has on the skills of expressing one's interests, also indirectly strengthens interpersonal communication skills as well as cognitive and psychological skills. According to the definition by the American Psychological Association, anxiety is a diffuse, unpleasant, and vague feeling of fear and worry of unknown origin, which affects a person and includes uncertainty, helplessness, and physiological arousal. Due to the unknown nature of this virus and the acute respiratory symptoms of this virus in some people and the fact that this virus has suddenly limited our ability to interact freely, the anxiety experienced by people following the spread of this virus, Corona anxiety is called. This anxiety affects all aspects of human life. The coronavirus epidemic has affected many businesses, schools, and universities. Students are among the groups that have experienced a lot of anxiety due to the Corona epidemic, school closures, and virtualization of education. The purpose of this article was to model the mediating role of anxiety caused by Corona in the relationship between identity styles and the ability to express oneself with students' motivation to progress.

The current research design is a cross-sectional-analytical study in terms of its fundamental purpose. The statistical population of the present study is all female students in the second year of high school in the 3rd district of Tehran, who were studying in the academic year 2011-2014. According to the information of the education department of the 3rd district, the size of the statistical population is 3807 students. Then the sample size was determined using Klein's formula. The value obtained for the sample size was 300 people. The sample was selected by random cluster sampling, in this way, 3 high schools were randomly selected from among all girls' high schools in Region 3, and 250 students were selected by staged cluster sampling, and the link to the questionnaires is in They were allowed to complete the questionnaires. Skewness and kurtosis indices were used to determine the normality of the data. At the level of inferential statistics, Pearson's test was used to determine the zero-order relationship between pairs of variables. Modeling was done using path analysis in Smart PLS 4 software and the fit of the model was checked. Before performing the analysis, necessary pre-processing was done on the data. Missing data were identified in rows and columns, and participants who did not answer even one question were excluded from the analysis, thus 30 data were removed from 400 data. Then single-variable outliers were identified using boxplot and multivariate outliers were identified using Mahalanbis index and 40 outliers were identified, which were removed from the analysis. A total of 330 pre-processed data were included in the analysis.

The findings showed that progress motivation had a positive and significant relationship with the variables of informational, normative, and commitment style (P < 0.01), and self-expression (P < 0.01). Progress motivation showed a negative and significant relationship with the variables of avoidant identity style (P < 0.01) and corona physical anxiety (P < 0.05). Avoidant identity style showed a positive and significant relationship with the mental anxiety of Corona (P < 0.05). No significant relationship was observed between informational, normative, and commitment identity styles and the physical and mental anxiety of Corona. A positive and significant relationship (P < 0.01) was observed between self-expression and all identity styles. A negative and significant relationship (P < 0.01) was observed between self-expression and the mental and physical anxiety of Corona. Corona anxiety did not play a mediating role between means of existence and identity styles with achievement motivation. In this article, research hypotheses that have been analyzed using mediation test and Smart PLS software are reported. In order to investigate the role of identity styles and the ability to express oneself with the mediating role of corona anxiety on students' progress motivation, the path analysis method was used. Before testing the model, the assumptions of the path analysis, including the co-linearity of the variables (variance inflation factor and tolerance index) and the independence of the errors (Watson camera test) were examined. The tolerance index for all variables is greater than 0.4 and the variance inflation index is less than 10. Also, the value of the Watson camera is 1.74, which is less than 4, and it can be said that the assumptions have not been violated. Therefore, according to the obtained indices , it can be concluded that the conditions of the path analysis have been met. In the figures below, the coefficients of the standard path and the significance in the model are presented. The direct paths from identity styles to progress motivation, self-expression to corona anxiety and the path of self-expression to progress motivation are significant (P<0.05). If each of the identity styles increases by one unit, students' motivation to progress increases by 0.54. If self-expression increases by one unit, Corona anxiety decreases by -0.27. If self-expression increases by one unit, the motivation to progress increases by 0.16. The direct paths of identity styles to corona anxiety and corona anxiety to achievement motivation are not significant.

The results showed that progress motivation had a positive and significant relationship with informational, normative, and commitment identity style variables and a negative and significant relationship with avoidant identity style. Also, self-expression has a positive and significant relationship with motivation to progress. According to the research findings, Corona anxiety did not play a mediating role in the relationship between identity styles and motivation to progress. This finding can be explained in this way identity style is a personality variable that is formed in every person from the teenage years, for this reason, it is a fundamental variable in the human body that directly affects motivation and thoughts. Variables related to the conditions and situation in which a person is placed, such as anxiety and stress or life events, cannot mediate its effect on the motivation of progress.