Structure of academic self-handicapping — Global or domain-specific construct?☆

a r t i c l e i n f o Given the well-documented negative effects of academic self-handicapping, researchers should be able to (a) draw valid conclusions about the nature and magnitude of these maladaptive effects, and (b) create efficient intervention procedures that help reduce self-handicapping. To accomplish these goals, reliable knowledge about the structure of academic self-handicapping is needed. In this article, I therefore analyzed the domain specificity of academic self-handicapping by assessing the use of handicapping strategies across different school subjects in two samples of German high school students. In Studies 1 and 2, confirmatory factor analyses revealed better fit indices for domain-specific compared to domain-general models. Moreover, the subject-specific handicapping factors were differentially related to students' subject-specific self-concept, interest, and achievement. I conclude that academic self-handicapping should be seen from a domain-specific perspective yielding important implications for educational practitioners. Students are confronted with numerous challenging tasks which they sometimes fail to accomplish. Such failures and setbacks can lead to feelings of incompetence and worthlessness, and might thus be experienced as a threat to one's self-esteem. Self-esteem threats need to be regulated, and so researchers have defined a variety of strategies people can use in this regard the academic context, a common self-esteem regulation strategy refers to self-handicapping, which is defined " as any action or choice of performance setting that enhances the opportunity to externalize (or excuse) failure and to internalize … success " (Berglas & Jones, 1978, p. 406). Examples of academic self-handicapping include procrastinating, effort withdrawal, and claiming test anxiety or illness (Urdan & Midgley, 2001). There is substantial agreement in the literature that academic self-handicapping has negative effects on important educational processes and outcomes, such as motivation and achievement (e. Revealing the circumstances under which self-handicapping occurs can thus be considered an essential research task. In this regard, it is important to examine if academic self-handicapping represents a global or domain-specific construct. Specifically, does self-handicapping strategies occur only within certain domains (e.g., Math) or does self-handicapping spread across all school-related activities and subjects? This question appears highly relevant for two reasons. First, valid conclusions about the significance and magnitude of relations to important consequences of self-handicapping can only be drawn from an adequate level of specificity. If self-handicapping in Math is negatively associated with performance, but unrelated to performance in other subjects, a domain-general analysis of the relation between self-handicapping and performance would …