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Showing 6 results for Locus of Control


Volume 0, Issue 0 (2-2024)
Abstract

Prepositions are linguistic elements that indicate the physical properties of referent and relatum and the geometry of the manner in which they interact with one another. Numerous studies have shown that prepositions in their abstract usages retain at least one of their spatial geometric features which is testimony to embodiment theory and it also suggests that understanding of abstract usages of prepositions can be better done by first studying the spatial usages of them. In this research we consider and analayse spatial geometry of different usages of Persain preposition /dᴂr/ applying Talmy's approach towards spatial structuring in language. Fourteen distinct usages were extracted from Hamshahri Corpus. The spatial geometry of each usage was analaysed and at least one image schema has been proposed for each usage. As a result of close study of various usages we observed that in all usages either the factor "enclosure" or "locus of control" or both are present in the geometry of  the preposition. In one instance we observed a tertiary reference object for locating the Figure in the scene. An investigation of one spatial geometry ascribed to the preposition /dᴂr/ led to suggesting a volumar schema for "way". Also in some usages the use of metonomy can be seen where part of the real Ground or an entity related to it appears as Ground in the sentence.
 

Volume 3, Issue 2 (6-2015)
Abstract

Aim: Health locus of control includes the degree of a person's belief in the fact that his/her health is controlled by internal or external factors. The aim of this study was to determine the status of health locus of control and its related factors among Iranian pilgrims.
Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed on 600 pilgrims of the holy shrines in Tehran in 2015. People aged over 15 years who had come for pilgrimage to the shrines entered the study by convenient sampling and after consent. The A form of the Multi-dimensional Health Locus of Control scale was used. This form consists of Internal Health Locus of Control (IHLC), Powerful others (PHLC) and Chance External Locus of Control (CHLC). The relation of between age, gender, education, income, marital status and location of residence on each construct was evaluated by t-test, ANOVA and linear regression through SPSS21.
Findings: Among the total pilgrims, 302 were females (50.3%). The mean age of the participants was 33.15±11.06 years. The highest and lowest averages were associated with the internal locus of control (25.60±3.34) and the chance locus of control (18.20±5.13), respectively. There was a significant relationship between educational level and IHLC; between income and education level with CHLC; and between marital status and age with PHLC.
Conclusion: According to our results, most people think that they control their health or life events themselves. People with a higher internal locus of control score have more tendency to practice health promotion and disease prevention and seek health through visiting holy sites and appealing to God.

Volume 7, Issue 3 (7-2019)
Abstract

Aims: Locus of control (LOC) refers to the extent to which individuals believe that they can control events that affect them. Health Locus of Control (HLOC) refers to beliefs that related to how one’s health is affected by oneself, others, or fate; and also it is one of the most broadly measured factors of health beliefs for the scheduling of health education programs. The aim of this study was to assess HLOC among Students at Isfahan University of Medical Sciences.
Materials and Methods: This cross‑sectional study was conducted in 297 students in Isfahan University of Medical Sciences in Iran selected by simple random sampling method in 2018. Data collection was done by the demographic questionnaire and Form “B” of Multidimensional Health Locus of Control (MHLC) scale. Statistical analysis includes (ANOVA, t-test, Pearson test) was performed using SPSS version 20 and p<0.05 was considered statistically significant.
Findings: The mean±SD of three dimensions of HLOC were 26.41±3.98, 16.64±4.36 and 21.67±4.37 for internal, chance and powerful others respectively. There was a significant relationship between internal and powerful others locus of control dimensions with sex (p=0.035, p=0.041). Further, there was not a significant relationship between HLOC dimensions with students’ age, major, parent’s education and occupation.
Conclusion: Since the most scores were relating to an internal locus of control dimension and fewer scores were relating to the chance locus of control dimension, it can be concluded that personal behavioral factors have more influence on students' health and their beliefs about chance, luck or fate has less influence on their health.


Volume 9, Issue 3 (7-2007)
Abstract

The locus of control is a construct reflecting beliefs about the control of behavior and life events. According to this perception, people are grouped into two main categories: an internal and external locus of control. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between wheat yield performance, locus of control and wheat growers’ (WG) characteristics. Survey research methodology and two stages of stratified random sampling were used as research and sampling method, respectively. A questionnaire was used as the research instrument and 217 sampled wheat growers (106 and 111 high and low performance, respectively) were interviewed from the eight districts of Shiraz Prov-ince. The validity and reliability of the questionnaire were evaluated and confirmed. De-scriptive and inferential statistics were used for analyzing data, using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS). Based on the findings, yield performance and internal locus of control had a significant and positive relationship. On the other hand, variables such as educational level, accessing information sources, cosmopoliteness achievement motivation and interest in agriculture showed positive and significant relationships with yield per-formance. Regression has revealed that three variables are strong predictors for yield performance in wheat: achievement motivation (%47.3), cosmopoliteness (%2.6) and ac-cessing information sources (%2.1). Educational level and accessing information sources showed a positive correlation, whereas age had a negative and significant relationship with internal locus of control. As a result, it can be said that psychological and behavioral parameters affect farm management and production as well as physical and natural fac-tors.

Volume 12, Issue 2 (5-2021)
Abstract

Locus of Control (LOC) is a psychological construct that deals with people's perception of the extent to which they are in control of what happens to them and it has been proved to play a crucial role in one’s success or failure in various aspects of life. Although LOC is by no means a stable construct, the current body of research had a linear one-shot cause-effect perspective towards it. Hence, framed within a Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST), this case study tries to revisit Iranian university students' LOC through the application of Dynamic Ensemble (DE). To this end, five students from Bojnord university who were attending their General English (GE) course participated in this study. The data collection was done through semi-structured interviews, task-motometers, students' journals, and participant classroom observations during seven classroom sessions. The collected data were qualitatively content analyzed by the application of MaxQDA software. Having analyzed the collected data, several macro-systemic, micro-systemic, and contextual factors were identified as being influential on the students' internality or externality of LOC. Considering the fact that many scholars believe internal LOC is the healthier attribute, this study focuses on the factors which can help teachers lead their students to become internalizers.
 
1. Introduction
Locus of Control (LOC) is a psychological construct, which refers to peoples’ beliefs about the control they have over the situations and experiences affecting their lives (Rotter, 1966). Rotter (1966) introduced a model for LOC with two dimensions namely, internal and external LOC. He asserted internalizers ascribe the reasons for their success or failure to some internal factors such as their own attempts, abilities, activities, and behaviors. In contrast, externalizers think that some external factors like fate, powerful others, and chance or luck, that is out of their control, affect their fate and achievements.
LOC is a multidimensional psychological construct and it has a dynamic nature, which means that it changes over different situations (Ghonsooly & Elahi Shirvan, 2011). This dynamicity underscores the nonlinearity of changes, which means there are almost no predictable cause-effect relations in the systems behavior (Larsen-Freeman, 2016; Waninge et al., 2014).  Thus, in order to get a better and deeper understanding of LOC in interaction with its surrounding environment, this study focuses on the contextual and intra/interpersonal factors which can help a student improve their state of internal LOC.
Research question
How can the underlying variables of  students’ LOC in a course of General English be defined in light of Complex Dynamic System Theory (CDST) through the application of Dynamic Ensemble ?
Dynamic ensemble
Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2016) applied the underlying tenets of CDST in a research study to propose the dynamic ensemble, which is a list of complexity considerations that tries to make CDST easily applicable in the field of applied linguistic research.
2. Methodology
The purpose of this study was to delve deep into the procedural, individual and contextual factors; therefore, in order to allow for the intensive concentration and observation in part of the researchers a limit of five Iranian university students who were attending their GE course (two males and three females) was decided. One of the main aims of this study is to provide evidence for the dynamic nature of LOC . Thus, deviant or extreme case sampling strategy (Dornyei, 2007) was employed in order to select our participants from the highest and lowest scoring students on a specific version of the Internal Control Index (Duttweiler, 1984) which was translated into Persian and validated for the Iranian context by Ghonsooly and Elahi (2010).
On the basis of the main purpose and the qualitative nature of this study, different types of data collection  including interviews, observation, journals, and task-motometers were applied by the researchers to ensure the data collection is done thoroughly and every environmental aspects of the participants were taken into account.
 
3. Results
The findings of this study revealed the dynamic and multidimensional nature of LOC which means it changes over and over under the influence of different situations and circumstances and in relation with some other factors. This finding is in accordance with what Larsen-Freeman (2016) asserted in her seminal paper about non-linearity and complexity of students’ behavior in classroom studies. In fact, analyzing the collected data indicated that during the process of language learning, the students experienced fluctuations in their LOC and these fluctuations occur even during a single class under the influence of different intra/interpersonal or environmental factors which is in line with what Waninge et al. (2014) introduced as the dynamic nature of psychological constructs. The dynamic nature of students’ LOC underscores the nonergodicity of human’s behavior (Lowie &Verspoor, 2019). Application of dynamic ensemble revealed the fact that the student’s LOC was under the influence of many factors.
At the micro-structural considerations level, learner’s beliefs and motivations, their positive and negative attitudes, and the students’ learning expectations affected the students’ internality and externality of LOC. It was recognized that the motivational factors and students’ positive attitudes toward the effectiveness of learning English reinforced students’ internal LOC. Learning English seemed to play an important role in helping the students reach their future goals such as traveling abroad or being accepted in higher level of educational degrees. These sorts of motivating factors helped the students try more and be more self-reliant and it helped them believe today’s struggles would positively affect their future.
In addition, the students’ beliefs about the teacher’s responsibility were among the factors which in most cases led them towards being externalizers. The source of this effect was in the teaching expectations that the students had but they received little or no answer to these expectations on the part of their teacher. The students’ increased knowledge was another motivating factor which helped the students to rely on themselves and consequently become internalizers. This finding is in accordance with what Peek (2016) highlights about the positive effects of students’ knowledge and learning skills on their internal LOC.
At the micro-structural considerations level, cognitive, linguistic, and affective factors influenced the students’ LOC differently. It was indicated that the students with rich background knowledge were more internalizers. However, in some occasions the knowledgeable students preferred to be silent to immune themselves from their classmates’ laughter and judgements.  Furthermore, topical interest in some of the tasks was another reason for making the students internalizer. Also, speaking in front of the others, being laughed at, and negative judgment by teachers as well as classmates were among the affective factors making students’ more externalizers.
 We also found that curriculum design and course assessment were sometimes planned in a way that hurt students’ full concentration on the process of learning (e.g., being tired due to  participation in hard practical classes just before attending their English language classes) and led them towards being externalizers.
 
 
Saeid Askari,
Volume 14, Issue 3 (5-2007)
Abstract

There is little question anymore about the reality of Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder(PTSD) as a disorder. For some, this disorder progressively worsens over time and appears to affect nearly all aspects of life, including work, interpersonal relationships, physical health, and view of self. The severity of PTSD may lead to repeated hospitalizations over the years and may require ongoing outpatient treatment. Moreover, a resurfacing of previously controlled symptoms may appear with old age, as former victims become physically incapacitated, suffer losses, and lose social support systems. So far as, no comprehensive effort has been made to determine the joint effects of a range of factors (e.g. combat exposure, locus of control and social support) on post-traumatic stress and somatic symptoms in a single study comprising of non-clinical samples of Iranian War veterans/combatants who had war exposure during Iran-Iraq conflict. The results of the current study demonstrate that combat stress has potential long-lasting effects that leave soldiers emotionally vulnerable, resulting in post-traumatic stress disorder. The study also reveals the effect of combat stress on somatic complaints. The result regarding social support were in accordance with earlier findings about the positive effects of social support on psychological adjustment. The findings also revealed the importance of locus of control in the development of post-traumatic stress disorder. Participants with external locus of control, scored higher on PTSD and somatic complaints than participants with internal locus of control, interestingly, the hypotheses of an interaction between social support and locus of control were not confirmed. Number of methodological and conceptual problems imposed certain limitations on these conclusions.

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