MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HOCHIMINH CITY NGUYEN THU HIEN THE IMPACT OF LEARNING MOTIVATION AND PSYCHOLOGICAL HARDINESS ON STUDENT’S QUALITY OF LIFE AMONG ECONOMICS STUDENTS AND TECHNICAL STUDENTS: A CASE STUDY OF LAC HONG UNIVERSITY MASTER OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION THESIS HoChiMinh City – 2010 MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY NGUYEN THU HIEN THE IMPACT OF LEARNING MOTIVATION AND PSYCHOLOGICAL HARDINESS ON STUDENT’S QUALITY OF LIFE AMONG ECONOMICS STUDENTS AND TECHNICAL STUDENTS: A CASE STUDY OF LAC HONG UNIVERSITY Major: Major Code: Business Administration 60.34.05 MASTER OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION THESIS Supervisor: DR TRAN HA MINH QUAN HoChiMinh City – 2010 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude and deepest appreciation to my research Supervisor, Dr Tran Ha Minh Quan for his intensive support, valuable suggestions, guidance and encouragement during the course of my study My sincere thanks are also due to Prof Nguyen Dinh Tho, for the valuable time and the precious material I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Dr Dinh Cong Khai, Dr Vo Xuan Vinh, Dr Nguyen Van Ngai, Dr Nguyen Thi Mai Trang, members of the proposal examination committee, for their valuable comments and suggestions I would like to thank many of my collegues and students at Lac Hong university who helped me during the collection of the data I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all of my teachers at Faculty of Business Administration and Postgraduate Faculty, University of Econimics Ho Chi Minh City for their teaching and guidance during my MBA course I would like to specially express my thanks to all of my classmates, my friends from for their support and encouragement I would also like to avail this opportunity to express my appreciation to Professor Nguyen Dong Phong, UEH Board of Directors for creating MBA program in English Finally, I heartily dedicate this study to my beloved parents and my husband, Duong who have encouraged and supported me during my study i ABSTRACT Exploring the impact of learning motivation and psychological hardiness on student’s quality of life is important to a university For university, it can help them understand their student’s pyschology It will help university build plans to stimulate their student’s learning effectiveness and improve university’s training effectively For students, they will find the important roles of these factors to have a better learning attitude This will help them increase their learning motivation, their psychological hardiness, their quality of life and also improve their learning effectiveness This research objective is to explore the factors including learning motivation and psychological hardiness impacting on student’s quality of life Then it tries to find out whether there are the differences between these impacts among economics students and technical students at Lac Hong University The process research will include two main steps: the pilot research and the main research, the analytic unit is student The pilot research will be qualitative by making deeply interview with students in order to check the content and meaning of words using in the measurement scales The main research will be quantitative with 328 students through qualitative technique of making interview directly The reason is to test the measurement model, the research model and the hypotheses In the context of Lac Hong university, the results show that: Firstly, learning motivation is positively related to student quality of life Secondly, psychological hardiness is positively related to student’s quality of life But psychological hardiness has a higher influence on student’s quality of life than learning motivation ii Thirdly, the impact of learning motivation on student’s quality of life in the economics student group is positive and sinificant but it’s not sinificant in the technical student group This difference has the statistical significance in the case study of Lac Hong University Finally, the impact of psychological hardiness on student’s quality of life is positive and sinificant in the economics student group and the technical student group However this different finding between two groups has not the statistical significance in the context of Lac Hong University Keywords: student’s quality of life, learning motivation, psychological hardiness, Lac Hong university iii CONTENTS Acknowledgement i Abstract ii Contents iv List of Tables vi List of Figures vii CHAPTER1: INTRODUCTION .1 1.1 Research background 1.2 Research objective 1.3 Research scope and research design .3 1.4 Research structure CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW AND RESEARCH MODEL 2.1 Concepts .5 2.1.1 Student’s quality of life 2.1.2 Learning motivation .7 2.1.3 Psychological hardiness 2.2 Research model CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 12 3.1 Research process 12 3.2 The measurement scales .13 3.2.1 The student quality of life measurement 14 3.2.2 The student learning motivation measurement 14 3.2.3 The student psychological hardiness measurement 14 3.3 The pilot research 15 iv 3.4 The main research 16 CHAPTER 4: RESEARCH RESULT AND FINDING DISSCUSSION 20 4.1 Descriptive statistics of sanple 20 4.1.1 Final sample 20 4.1.2 Characteristics of sample .20 4.1.3 Descriptive statistics 22 4.2 The construct measurement scale 23 4.3 The hypotheses assessment 27 4.4 Finding disscussion 33 4.4.1 Question 33 4.4.2 Question 34 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS .37 5.1 Concluding remarks .37 5.2 Implications of the research 38 5.3 Limitations of the research and further research recommendation 39 References 41 Appendix Appendix Appendix Appendix v LIST OF TABLES Table 3.1: The demographical status of participants 16 Table 3.2: The main measurement scales 17 Table 4.1: Learning group of respondents 20 Table 4.2: Learning brand of respondents 21 Table 4.3: Sex of respondents 21 Table 4.4: Age of respondents 21 Table 4.5: Descriptive statistics 22 Table 4.6: Cronbach’s alpha of student’s quality of life measurement 23 Table 4.7: Cronbach’s alpha of learning motivation measurement .23 Table 4.8: Cronbach’s alpha of psychological hardiness measurement .24 Table 4.9: The Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) result 25 Table 4.10: The final construct of measurement scale 26 Table 4.11: The results of correlation analysis 28 Table 4.12: The multi linear regression analysis on data of 328 responses 28 Table 4.13: The multi linear regression analysis on data of group (economics students) 30 Table 4.14: The multi linear regression analysis on data of group (technical students) 30 Table 4.15: Conclusion about the hypotheses .32 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 3.1: The research process 12 Figure 4.1: The results of linear regression analysis between student’s quality of life and the other factors 32 vii CHAPTER INTRODUCTION 1.1 Research background Due to globalization effect, the world is now smaller, the borders between nations seem to be closer to each other People can business more convenient, easier to get information, or enjoy modern education from many developed countries, etc In Viet nam, when we become an official member of World Trade Organization (WTO), it brings us many opportunities to expand relationships with other countries, exporters can expand their markets, people enjoy more variety of goods, enjoy more chances to study, etc, but it aslo brings us many challenges, for example more competitors, more knowledge needed to be updated Especially, for educational field, it has to deal with a very important role in training and providing the human resource that must be useful for the process of cooporation with foreign partners and ready to catch up with further global changes In this trend, many Vietnamese universities concentrate on finding the methods to improve its quality of training There are many researches about teaching and learning in the world The objective is to find their own ways to improve the effectiveness of student’s learning and the quality of training One trend is to focus on learning motivation and student’s quality of life Reason for this is motivation, study behaviour, student’s quality of life impacting on the training quality and the perceived result of student during the course (Cole et al 2004; Rowold 2007, cited in Tho et al 2009) About learning motivation, if an individual is motivated, he will try hard to complete his task and work hard to achieve goals In otherwise, a person who is not motivated will not try, will not work hard, or will show From the results presented, the findings demonstrated that hypotheses and were supported by the data These meaned that if students had a positive attitude to their learning during their course, or they were willing to control, deal with their problems, and try to maintain their efforts in order to reach their learning goals As the result, they were satisfied with their learning environment or getting a high quality of life at univerity In other words, the quality of life of students at Lac Hong university could be increased if their learning motivation and psychological hardiness were increased The more learning motivation students had, the more quality of life students got (H1) The more psychological hardiness students had, the more quality of life students got (H2) The results of these two hypotheses were presented in Figure 4.1 Figure 4.1: The results of linear regression analysis between student’s quality of life and the other two factors Learning motivation H1: β =0.191 Sig.=0.000 Student’s quality of life H2: β =0.443 Sig.=0.000 Psychological hardiness 4.4.2 Question 2: Are there differences of the impact of learning motivation and psychological hardiness on student’s quality of life compared the economics student group with the technical student group? 34 if Due to the difference of the learning subject, the researcher wanted to explore the differences between economics students and technical students about the relationships between student’s quality of life and the other two factors Hypotheses of H3, H4, H5, H6 were proposed as follows: Hypothesis 3: Learning motivation is positively related to student’s quality of life in the economics student group Hypothesis 4: Learning motivation is positively related to student’s quality of life in the technical student group Hypothesis 5: Psychological hardiness is positively related to student’s quality of life in the economics student group Hypothesis 6: Psychological hardiness is positively related to student’s quality of life in the technical student group From the analysis results of groups, in the group of economics students, learning motivation (β =0.390, sig =0.000) was positive and significant related to student’s quality of life And the relationship between student psychologival hardiness and student’s quality of life was aslo positive and significant (β =0.417, sig =0.000) These results aslo demonstrated that in the group of economics students, the impact of psychological hardiness on student’s quality of life was greater than learning motivation The results from the technical student group showed that learning motivation was positively related to student’s quality of life but it was not sinificant (β=0.112, sig =0.156) This aslo showed that the relationship between psychological hardiness and student’s quality of life was positive and significant (β =0.341, sig =0.000) These meaned that in the group of technical students, there was only psychological hardiness factor that sinificantly impacted to student’s quality of life 35 If compared the two results of two groups, we found that: The impact of learning motivation on student’s quality of life was positive and sinificant in the group of economics students but it was not sinificant in the group of technical students This difference had the statistical significance because the result of t(1)>2 Or the difference of the impact of learning motivation on student’s quality of life between economics students and technical students was significant in the case study of Lac Hong University And the result about the impact of psychological hardiness on student’s quality of life was positive and sinificant in two groups of economics students and technical students However, this difference between two groups had not the statistical significance because the result of t(2)35 tuổi Xin chân thành cảm ơn hợp tác nhiệt tình bạn! APPENDIX Model Summary Model R R Square Adjusted R Square Std Error of the Estimate a 554 307 303 57920 a Predictors: (Constant), psychological hardiness, learning motivation Model Regression Sum of Squares 48.384 ANOVAb Mean Df Square 24.192 F Sig 72.112 Residual 109.030 325 335 Total 157.415 327 a Predictors: (Constant), psychological hardiness, learning motivation b Dependent Variable: Student’s quality of life 000a APPENDIX Model Summary Model R R Square Std Error of the Estimate Adjusted R Square 756a 571 566 38359 a Predictors: (Constant), psychological hardiness, learning motivation Model ANOVAb Sum of Squares Df Mean Square Regression 34.662 17.331 Residual 26.044 177 147 F Sig 117.785 000a Total 60.705 179 a Predictors: (Constant), psychological hardiness, learning motivation b Dependent Variable: Student’s quality of life APPENDIX Model Summary Mode l R R Square Adjusted R Square Std Error of the Estimate 379a 143 132 72692 a Predictors: (Constant), psychological hardiness, learning motivation ANOVAb Model Regression Residual Sum of Squares 12.824 76.621 Df 145 Mean Square 6.412 528 F 12.134 Total 89.444 147 a Predictors: (Constant), psychological hardiness, learning motivation b Dependent Variable: Student’s quality of life Sig .000a The findings This research objective is to explore the factors including learning motivation and psychological hardiness impacting on student’s quality of life, then try to find out whether there are the differences between these impacts among economics students and technical students at Lac Hong University In the context of Lac Hong university, the results show that: Firstly, learning motivation is positively related to student quality of life Secondly, psychological hardiness is positively related to student’s quality of life But psychological hardiness has a higher influence on student’s quality of life than learning motivation Thirdly, the impact of learning motivation on student’s quality of life in the economics student group is positive and sinificant but it’s not sinificant in the technical student group This difference between two groups has the statistical significance in the case study of Lac Hong University Finally, the impact of psychological hardiness on student’s quality of life is positive and sinificant in the economics student group and the technical student group However this different finding between two groups has not the statistical significance in the context of Lac Hong University ... This research objective is to explore the impact of learning motivation, psychological hardiness on student’s quality of life among economics students and technical students at Lac Hong University, ... hardiness among economics students and technical students In this research the population was defined that was all university students who were economics students and technical students at Lac Hong University. .. 847 Cronbach''s Alpha = 0.872 Conclusion: The measurement scales of student’s quality of life, learning motivation and psychological hardiness had Cronbach''s Alpha greater than 0.6 and all Corrected