Are Gifted Students Perfectionistic? A Meta-Analysis

There is a rich literature on perfectionism among gifted individuals, but the results of these individual studies are ambiguous. The present meta-analysis aimed to clarify the nature of the relationship between perfectionism and giftedness by focusing on quantitative studies that compared the perfectionism levels of gifted and nongifted students. Hedge’s unbiased g was used as the effect size metric and a three-level multilevel meta-analytic approach taken to control for dependency among the effect sizes obtained from the same study. The analyses used 63 effect sizes from 14 published studies that indicated there was no significant difference between gifted and nongifted students on perfectionism. The analyses also focused on two moderators: dimensions of perfectionism and grade level. The moderator analysis indicated that perfectionism dimensions were a significant moderator. Gifted students, although not significantly, outscored their nongifted peers on perfectionistic strivings but rated lower on perfectionistic concerns.