In general, teenagers are known to be suffered from confusion of identity when they enter the adulthood from the childhood. In consideration of the fact, the study aims to understand how positive thinking of those teenagers affects their personality strength and their adaptation to school life.
A total of 320 girl students who were first, second and third graders at a girls' middle school in S city of Jeonnam were collected as the study target, and data gained from 297 of them were statistically analyzed. For the reliability of the collected data, Cronbach α factor was confirmed on SPSS 18.0 program, and in order to see correlations among the variables, Pearson correlation analysis was conducted. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was applied to prove how positive thinking affects the personality strength and the school life adaptation. Measuring devices used for the study are summarized as follows.
In order to measure the teenagers' personality strength, what SHIN Hae-woo and KIM Jae-hwan (1992) have standardized was used. For the positive thinking, an index developed by KIM Hyun-jeong, OH Yoon-hee, OH Kang-seop, SEO Dong-woo, SHIN Yeong-cheol and JEONG Ji-yeong (2006) was applied. For the questions to understand the school life adaptation, an index by RYU Eun-hee (1994) was borrowed.
The followings are what has learned from the study.
First, according to the research on the correlations among the personality strength, the positive thinking and the school life adaptation, the one between the personality strength and the positive thinking was observed to be mutually effective. In other words, any stronger personality strength would bring about more positive thinking. Also for the personality strength and the school life adaptation, they were found to be significantly related which proved that those teenagers with stronger personality strength would adapt themselves to the school life even more efficiently.
Second, an investigation on how the positive thinking influences the personality strength and the school life adaptation was carried out. The findings reported that the positive thinking would definitely play a core factor here while subjective satisfaction and goal pursuit, sub-factors of the positive thinking, were understood to play the same role as well.
More researches on the positive thinking have been conducted due to what the concerned study has achieved. The study should be regarded academically significant in that it confirmed positive benefits of positive thinking on the school life adaptation saying that such thinking improves the personality strength by interpreting any possible circumstances that a teenager might face with anytime.