I Believe in You! Measuring the experience of encouragement using the academic encouragement scale

ABSTRACT

To address limitations in conceptualizing and measuring encouragement, the authors developed the Academic Encouragement Scale (AES) to assess the experience of receiving challenge-focused encouragement (directed toward people facing difficult situations) and potential-focused encouragement (helping people realize a potential) within an academic context. Results from 714 college students supported a two-factor structure, corresponding to challenge-focused and potential-focused encouragement. Evidence for the reliability and construct validity of AES scores was provided. The two AES subscales uniquely and positively predicted hope and academic self-efficacy. Challenge-focused encouragement, but not potential-focused encouragement, uniquely and positively predicted campus connectedness. Campus connectedness, but not hope, mediated the relationship between challenge-focused encouragement and academic self-efficacy. In contrast, hope, but not campus connectedness, mediated the association between potential-focused encouragement and academic self-efficacy. Collectively, these findings underscore the distinction between challenge-focused and potential-focused encouragement, as well as the utility of the AES in providing a conceptually complex understanding of encouragement.

KEYWORDS:

• Encouragement
• positive psychology
• social connectedness
• self-efficacy
• hope

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Another alternative model is a bifactor model in which items load on both a general factor and on specific group factors (Reise, 2012). In a bifactor model, the general factor is modeled as orthogonal to the specific factors, and the specific factors are orthogonal to each other. Nevertheless, we did not assess a bifactor model because we did not have any compelling conceptual justification for such a model (Selbom & Tellegen, in press).

2. We also considered an alternative, theoretically plausible mediation model with hope as the outcome and academic self-efficacy and campus connectedness as mediators. The results were broadly similar. Campus connectedness was a significant mediator between challenge-focused (but not potential-focused) encouragement and hope, whereas academic self-efficacy was a significant mediator between potential-focused (but not challenge-focused) encouragement and hope.