Relationship between Attributions for Success and Failure and Self-esteem, Hopelessness and Depression in Secondary School Students

The aim of this research was to examine the correlations between stability, internality, controllability and globality of the causes for good and poor grades, and self-esteem, hopelessness and depression on a sample of 295 first, second and thirdgrade secondary school students. Another objective was to determine whether grade attributions could explain a portion of the variance of self-esteem, hopelessness and depression. The results have shown that stable causes of poor grades are negatively correlated with self-esteem and positively correlated with hopelessness and depression, while the explanations of good grades are positively correlated with self-esteem and negatively with depression. On the other hand, controllability of both poor and good grade causes was positively correlated with self-esteem and negatively with hopelessness and depression. Also, attributing both poor and good grades to global causes has shown negative correlations with self-esteem and positive correlations with depression. Apart from that, it was shown that controllability of poor grade causes, and stability and globality of good grade causes explained a significant portion of the variance of self-esteem. The results have also shown that explaining both poor and good grades by controllable causes explains a significant portion of variance of hopelessness and depression, while controllable explanations of good grades explain only the variance of hopelessness.