The Relationship Between Secondary School Students’ Basic Psychological Needs Satisfaction And Their School Adjustment

School is the main activity place for secondary school students besides the their home.Successful school adjustment is essential for the positive development of secondary school students.It can not only affect the mental health development of secondary school students,but also affect their social adjustment after adulthood.According to the stage-environment fit theory,the satisfaction level of the three basic psychological needs of autonomy,relatedness and competence of middle school students is increasing in adolescence.If these needs are not satisfied,it will have a negative impact on students’ school adjustment.In the past,the study of the relationship between basic psychological needs satisfaction and school adjustment was mainly based on the variable-centered perspective.And the understanding of the relationship between the two was relatively general.Based on the previous studies,this study combines variable-centered and person-centered methods to examine the relationship between basic psychological needs satisfaction and school adjustment in a more comprehensive and detailed manner.This study uses convenience sampling to select 755 junior and senior high school students in a secondary school in Tianjin.Basic Need Satisfaction Scale,Short Grit Scale,Regulatory Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale and School Adjustment Scale were used to conduct a questionnaire survey.The results showed that:1.On the whole,the basic psychological needs satisfaction,grit,regulatory emotion self-efficacy and school adjustment of secondary school students are above the average level;Their basic psychological needs satisfaction,grit,regulatory emotion self-efficacy and school adjustment have significant differences in demographic variables,such as gender and academic phase.Middle school students perform better than high school students.Girls’ basic psychological needs satisfaction and school adjustment are better than boys.2.The variable-centered method found that secondary school students’ basic psychological needs satisfaction was significantly positively correlated with grit,regulatory emotion self-efficacy and school adjustment.Grit was significantly positively correlated with regulatory emotion self-efficacy and school adjustment.Moreover,there was a significant positive correlation between regulatory emotion self-efficacy and school adjustment.3.The person-centered method found that the basic psychological needs satisfaction of secondary school students can be divided into three different latent categories,high-satisfaction,high-relatedness and high-competence,and each category has a high heterogeneity.There are significant differences in the distribution of the latent categories of the basic psychological needs satisfaction of secondary school students in terms of gender and academic phase.4.The variance-centered method found that the basic psychological needs satisfaction of secondary school students have an impact on school adjustment through the mediating effect of grit and regulatory emotion self-efficacy.Based on the person-centered method,it is found that different types of students’ basic psychological needs satisfaction are different in school adjustment,grit and regulatory emotion self-efficacy.The scores of each category in school adjustment and regulatory emotion self-efficacy ranged from high to low: high satisfaction,high-relatedness and high-competence;High satisfaction students have the highest level of grit.