The Journal of Medical Education and Development

Introduction: One of the normal personality characteristics is having self-esteem and its behavioral consequences which are attributable to external or internal causes, and are effective on the academic achievement of students. The purpose of this study was to compare self- esteem, locus of control and their relation with educational status of university students at Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Sciences in Yazd.

Method: In this cross-sectional study, 300 students of different faculties were evaluated. We used a questionnaire that includes demographic data, Rotter's locus of control standard questionnaire and Cooper- Smith's self-steem standard questionnaire. The data were collected and analyzed by the SPSS-18 software.

Results: The average score of self-esteem was 31.84±8.32 (with a range of 0-50), and the mean score of locus of control was11.59±3.19 (with a range of 0-23). 15.4% of the subjects had internal locus of control and 74.9% had high level of self-esteem. There was no statistically significant relationship between self-esteem and locus of control (p=0.27). There was a statistically significant correlation between locus of control and average score (p=0.046), self-esteem and average score (p=0.02). In this study, age with locus of control, and average score with self-esteem have positive correlations and locus of control with self-esteem has a reverse correlations.

Conclusion : The majority of students that had a high level of self-esteem and an external locus of control has high average score and as the majority of the students who had a high level of self-esteem were studying in the School of Health.