Strategies of Self-Improvement for Students with Different Agency Levels

The relevance of the issue is due to the importance of studying the psychological mechanisms and factors of personal self-development. The goal of this research was to identify factors of students' choice of self-improvement strategies: acquisition, rejection, transformation, and restriction, dep ending on the students’ agency levels. Our study involved students from several universities in Russia and Kazakhstan, with a total of 271 people aged 17 to 27, mostly female, with an average age of 19.5 (SD=1.5) years. As diagnostic tools, we developed an original technique, "Square of self-improvement" and also used M.A. Shchukina’s questionnaire, “Level of personal autonomy development.” The processing was performed with the φ* criterion (Fisher's angular transformation). As a result, it was found that s tudents with high levels of agency prefer three strategies: acquisition, disposal, and transformation. Among students with low levels of agency, fewer participants choose the "transformation" strategy, whereas the number of students who prefer "acquisition" increases. The process depends on intrinsic value as an indicator of the agency. We have found that manifestations of the "acquisition" strategy vary between students with higher and lower agency levels, and these are qualitative differences. The study led us to the conclusion that the choice of self-improvement strategies is largely determined by the person’s level of agency, i.e., their capability to be the masters and shapers of their lives and their self-development. The results obtained can be used in professional training (to plan trajectories of individual self-development) and in psychological consultancy at universities.