Poster Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

PsyCap And Character Strength Training For Student Success (#801)

Jennifer Thompson 1
  1. The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, Chicago, IL, United States

This research will examine the training of Psychological Capital on first generation students and students of color in graduate school.  This study will add to the research by further investigating the combination of this training with other Positive Psychology training interventions, such as Character Strengths, gratitude, mindfulness and goal orientation.  The relationship between these training interventions and students outcomes of interest will be examined (Academic PsyCap, GPA, engagement, retention).  This study will employ an experimental, crossover design between semesters. It is proposed that students who complete one training condition will have higher GPA’s than a matched control group, giving support that Positive Psychology interventions are especially helpful to first generation students and students of color.  It is also proposed that students who complete a combination of the trainings will have higher self-assessment scores, thus lending support that interventions which pull on trait-like, stable characteristics (Character Strengths) aid the development of the more state-like Psychological Capital training, which replicates a prior finding (Gavin & Thompson, 2015; Johnson, 2018).  Training phase is complete and final data collection and analysis to be completed in 2018.