Fear of success in undergraduates

About this book

These data were collected in part to replicate Horner's original study of fear of success in college students conducted in 1965 (A75). The major purposes of the study were (1) to investigate what aspects of the anticipation of success produce anxiety in women, and (2) to see whether during the six years between the gathering of Horner's and Hoffman's data, there had been a change in achievement orientations, particularly in the motive to avoid success. The participants, 144 female and 101 male undergraduates, were recruited from introductory psychology courses offered in the fall of 1971 at a large midwestern university. Questionnaires were administered to the participants in two separate evening sessions. The instruments included six projective story cues, a test to measure achievement anxiety, some sentence completions, and a forced-choice questionnaire designed to examine attitudes about sex roles and women's achievements. The questionnaire also included items on background, career, and marriage expectations. The Murray Center has computer-accessible data and all completed paper data.