Relations Between Students' Well-Being and Academic Self-Efficacy

Abstract In the research we focus of the relationship between subjective well-being of students and academic self-efficacy. The relevance of the study is justified by the fact that modern psychology focuses on the question of well-being and positive self-perception of people in society that demands high effectiveness in every field of human functioning. Effectiveness related to personal variables, such as self-efficacy, that means people’s judgements about their abilities to achieve goals. For children and adolescents, the main activity is education. School requirements are one of the stress factors for them. The aim of the study was to investigate significant fields of relationship between subjective well-being and academic self-efficacy, variables that mediate the relationship and differences in the relationship of variables between boys and girls. In theoretical part of the study we define the constructs “self-efficacy”, “academic self-efficacy”; we present the model of subjective well-being and find out presumably significant fields of relationship between constructs. Empirical study was based on PISA-2018 database. We included data of questionnaires of Russian students of 15-16 years. We focus on the construct “reading self-efficacy” as an indicator of academic self-efficacy because reading is one of the main skills during education and included in nearly all the domains. Results of empirical study show that there’s weak but significant correlation between subjective well-being and reading self-efficacy. We also find that the effect is fully mediated by general self-efficacy. There are differences between effects for boys and girls. As expected, parent support in education has a significant positive effect on subjective well-being and reading self-efficacy. The further research should be focused on investigation detailed information about gender differences in the effect. Keywords: subjective well-being, academic self-efficacy, reading self-efficacy.