Department of Social Sciences

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https://escholar.umt.edu.pk/handle/123456789/167

Department of Social Sciences was established in 2008 in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) at UMT. The idea behind the launch of DSS was to cater to the needs of participants who have a keen interest in joining this realm of knowledge.

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Browsing Department of Social Sciences by Author "Iftikhar Ahmad"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    The big five personality inventory: performance of students and community in pakistan
    (University of the Punjuab, 2010) Iftikhar Ahmad
    NEO-FFI as translated in Urdu in the National Institute of Psychology was used on 452 undergraduate students in Pakistan. Item-analysis revealed that the respoase pattern of the students was differentiated across the five response choices for 44 of the 60 items. The mean scores of the respondents were close to a theoretical average of 35 for each scale. Girls scored significantly higher than boys on Neuroticism and Conscientiousness scales. The alpha index for the Neuroticism and Conscientiousness scales was in the .70s for Extraversion scale in the .50s and for Openness and Agreeableness scales in the 40s. The scales evidenced validity across multiple criterions. The translation of the 16 items that yielded undifferentiated responses were revisited by a committee of three faculty members in psychology. The inventory was thereafter administered to a community sample of 320 (male 139, female, 181) who gained 2-3 points in mean scores over the student sample on Neuroticism and Conscientiousness scales. The normative data of the community sample are recommended to be used for every day applications of the inventory in Pakistan.
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    Effect of teacher efficacy beliefs on motivation
    (University of the Punjab, 2011) Iftikhar Ahmad
    The purpose of this investigation was to explore meanings of the construct of teacher efficacy and its effect on teacher motivation. Teacher efficacy comprises Teaching Efficacy (TE) and Personal Efficacy (PE) as two constituent dimensions. The two interact in terms of their effect on teacher motivation. More specifically we sought to find whether teachers would be more motivated when levels of TE and PE were high than when any one or both were low. In-service 227 secondary school teachers completed three quarters of their M.Ed. training at the time of this assessment and had, on average, 5.3 years of teaching experience. They were administered Teacher Efficacy Scale along with three measures of motivation namely Task Motivation, Ability-Effort Attribution and Beliefs about Ability as Incremental Quality. Across the median split of TE and PE scores four levels / groups of teachers were created to compare strength as well as motivation pattern of these groups. One of the findings was that task motivation and effort–attribution predicted TE strongly (p <.01) but PE was predicted with ability attribution and incremental ability percept in the inverse direction (p < .05).Thus PE dimension was found different or independent from TE. However, levels of analysis technique indicated that teachers high on both PE and TE dimensions were motivationally adaptive: They dominantly attributed ‘effort’ as cause of success / failure unlike low PE and high TE groups which displayed a mixed attribution of ‘ability’ and ‘effort’. Motivation was modest where both the dimensions were weak. These findings bring out the significance of both competence or teaching efficacy and confidence or personal efficacy beliefs as reciprocally boosting teacher motivation.
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    Predictive ability of ability-based versus self-report EI measures for academic performance
    (Pakistan Journal of Psychology, 2010) Shumaila Aslam; Iftikhar Ahmad
    The study aims at finding if there is a valid increment for the tests of emotional intelligence (E1) in explaining variance in academic performance ofuniversity students. In this context, the contention was that 'ability-E1' measure would do better than 'trait EJ' measure. A sample of309 undergraduate students who had completed first year of their BA / BSc program was recruited from a local university. End of the first year GPA served as an index of student academic performance. High school marks (12 years ofeducation) ofthe students, a cognitive index, correlated strongly with Mayer; Salovey and Can.so Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) confirming that it embodied ability conceptualization of emotional intelligence tmlike Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i) which is known as following the trait model of E1. The two E1 measures were lIncorrelated. Students ofsocial sciences scored equal to natural sciences on EQ-i and even lower on MSCEIT rejecting our hypothesis that social science students would score more on emotional intelligence. Prediction of academic performance popularly known as GPA was investigated through hierarchical regression analysis using high school marks and E1 tests, in order, as predictors. The incremental prediction made by E1 tests in explaining variance in students' GPA was however found to be modest (< 5%) both by trait-Ei as well as ability-E1 measure, after the major predictor i.e. high school marks, which explained 17 % of the variance in GPA, was controlled. The hypothesis ofincremental prediction ofGPA by the E1 measures was therefore not supported irrespective of the type aT Ef measures.
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    Psychological predictors of college students performance
    (Natioanl Institute of Psychology, 2011) Iftikhar Ahmad