Attributional styles and self-esteem as predictors of psychological well-being of undergraduate students in Anambra State, Nigeria

The psychological well-being of undergraduate students has become a matter of utmost concern to stakeholders in the education sector given the concerns occasioned by increasing rate of depression and suicide in the country. This unsavoury trend has made inroads into the university system given that university education comes with attendant challenges such as having to live away from family, depression, suicidal ideation, dropout rate/dropout tendency, drug abuse and a host of others.Hanging on students’ consistent evaluative judgement on their academic issues and their self esteem, thepurpose of this study was to investigate attributional styles and self-esteem as predictors of psychological well-being of undergraduate students in Anambra State. Three research questions were raised for the study while three hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. Correlational research design was adopted for the study. The population of the study consisted of all the 18, 326 second year undergraduate students for the 2021/2022 academic session in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka and ChukwuemekaOdumegwuOjukwu University, Igbariam in Anambra State. The sample for the study comprised 720 second year undergraduate students for the 2021/2022 academic session obtained through multi-stage sampling procedure.  Three sets of questionnaire ‘Psychological Well-being Questionnaire (PWQ), Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ) and Self-Esteem Scale (SES) were used for data collection. The instruments for data collection were validated by three experts, two from Measurement and Evaluation, the other from educational psychology all in the Department of Educational Foundations, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka.   The reliability of the instruments were established using Cronbach Alpha Method and the alpha co-efficient got were 0.82, 0.80 for and 0.84 for ASQ, SEQ and PWQ respectively. Statistical procedure used for data analysis was multiple regression analysis.The findings of the study revealed that attributional styles and self-esteem significantly predicted psychological well-being of undergraduate students. However, self esteem accounted for a greater proportion of variance in the students’ psychological well-being more than attributional styles.Based on the findings of the study, it was recommended among others thatFederal Government should ensure the employment and deployment of counsellors and psychologists to universities of the Nigerian federation. Such a step will help ensure that the psychological needs of undergraduate students are attended to especially as it concerns their self esteem and attributional styles. Additionally, suggestions for further studies were made