The Study On The Relation Between Freshmen's Adaptation To College And Social Support

Adaptation is crucial to the development of the children and adolescents. The adaptation to college has great influence on the present physical and psychological development of the students, further impact on the development in their adulthood, and it also has great potential value to the social development. So the adaptation to college has been an important research issue. Factors affecting freshmen's adaptation to college are many, among which social support can not be ignored.The subjects in the research are 956 college students randomly sampled from universities in Wuhan city. The Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire ; Perceived Social Support Scale and Symptom Checklist 90 are used as the tool of the research. With the help of the statistical software SPSS, the overall situation and characteristics of the freshmen's adaptation to college and social support have been investigated and analyzed.The result shows that: (1) There exist distinct differences among students on school adjustment. Only-child students adapt to college better than other student on communication and study; urban students do better then rural students on communication; students from harmonious families do batter than those from unharmonious ones in communication and study ;the adaptation level of student cadres is obviously higher than that of ordinary student. (2) freshman get social support mainly from old friends, family, new peers and teachers, with the old friends being the most important supporting source and the college teachers the least important one. Students from urban areas get much more help from families and old friends than those from rural areas; cadre students perceive more social support than common students, and the support from the classmate and teachers is more perceivable to them. (3)The social support is positively related to theadaptation level of the students. Students of different supporting sources have different performances in adaptation to college, students of peer-supporting source doing best, students of family-supporting source being secondary, and students of ole friends-supporting source the worst. It is worthy to be mentioned that no teacher-supported type of students have been found in the research. Support from families and old friends play an important part in the students adaptation to college, support from the peers can help students get good spiritual state, and the support from teachers can influence the students greatly in the their study.