The relationship between actual and self-estimated personality traits in psychology students at the University of Malta

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether there is a relationship between selfestimations in personality traits with actual traits measured through an International Personality Item Pool (IPIP). It primarily investigated psychology students enrolled at the University of Malta. There has been a wide array of research regarding the subject but only a handful of papers have focused on students that study psychology. As the study made use of the quantitative approach, an online questionnaire was distributed amongst the students. In total, data from 38 respondents was collected and inputted in SPSS. The results indicate that there is a relationship between the students’ self-estimations and the results obtained from the IPIP test. This has provided information which shows that the students were self-aware of their own individualistic personality traits. On the other hand, the demographic variables age group and gender were not found to affect this relationship. Finally, when looking at the courses separately, only the Bachelor of Psychology (Honours) group was found to have a significant correlation with regards to the relationship between self-estimations and actual traits. This may be due to the fact that the other courses had a small sample size and thus significance was not possible.