Students' Involvement as Indicated by Personality and Graphological Factors

Abstract

This research project was designed to examine the relations of students' involvement to personality or graphological factors. A second purpose concerned possible relations between personality and graphology. Subjects were undergraduate students enrolled in a general education course. Each of 244 subjects completed a personality measure, a use of eight services questionnaire, and a handwriting sample. The personality measure provided scores on each of 11 subscales. The handwriting sample was used to make specific measures of 25 graphological characters per subject. Their intercorrelations were factor analyzed and clustered into 12 factors. Statistically significant, extremely small, canonical correlations between involvement and personality and between involvement and graphological factors were noted. Redundancy analyses identified that 08% of the variance of the involvement variables was explained by the personality variates and .08% by the graphological variates, suggesting an extremely low correlation, only slightly above chance. Lack of relations between personality and graphological factors suggests research on students' involvement might focus on sex, ethnicity, and types of institutions.