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2.1.4 Time Attitude Profile Differences in Personality, Perfectionism, Coping, and Environmental Concerns Among Gifted Slovenian Adolescents
BACKGROUND. Gifted students are often considered homogenous in terms of personality, psychosocial factors, and adaptive functioning. Positive stereotypes of gifted students include being conscientious, open to experience, concerned about the environment, and adaptive perfectionists. Negative stereotypes suggest that gifted students are more sensitive than others, more vulnerable, self-centered, and maladaptive perfectionism. Both the negative and positive stereotypes fail to capture the breadth of functioning in gifted students and there are some authors who argue that gifted and talented students only differ from their peers in the domains in which they are high functioning. In this presentation, we examined attitudes toward time in a sample of gifted adolescents in Slovenia. We conducted cluster analyses to identify interpretable time attitude profiles, and (b) examined profile differences on selected psychosocial constructs,.
METHODS. Participants consisted of 307 gifted students ranging in age from 14 to 18 (61.6% female, n = 189). They were identified using several strategies, including teacher nomination, the Progressive Raven’s Matrices, and the Torrance Test of Creativity. Constructs included academic self-concept, positivity, the Big Five personality traits, adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism, coping strategies, environmental concerns, and environmental attitudes. Academic self-concept was measured with the SDQII (10 items), personality was measured with the NEO-FFI-3 (60 items), coping strategies with the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (36 items), positivity with the Positivity scale (8 items), perfectionism with Scale of Perfectionism for Adolescents (30 items), environmental concerns with Environmental Motives Scale (12 items), and environmental attitudes with the 2-MEV Scale (20 items). Time attitudes were assessed using the 24-item Slovenian version of the Adolescent and Adult Time Inventory Time Attitudes. Scores on the subscales assessing the constructs were internally consistent (.69 – .91) and structurally valid.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. Cluster analyses yielded five clusters, Positives, Negatives, Past Negatives, Present Negatives, and Pessimists, supporting the heterogeneity of time attitudes in these gifted students, and differences were generally in keeping with hypotheses with regard to adaptive and maladaptive time attitude clusters. Positives generally had the highest scores on adaptive constructs (e.g., academic self-concept, positivity, coping strategies, openness to experience) and one of the negative groups generally had the lowest scores on the adaptive constructs, with the reverse for the maladaptive constructs. Effect sizes ranged from small to large. Implications for the diversity of psychosocial functioning in gifted students are discussed.