Unemployment Anxiety and Its Relationship to Academic Identity among Graduate Students

Abstract

When students suffer from employment anxiety, it affects their behavior, daily life, and even physical and psychological well-being. Experiencing high anxiety may make individuals feel frustrated, undermine their self-confidence, cause them to withdraw from social interactions, and lessen their motivation and aspiration to achieve. Due to fast technological advancement these concerns have aggravated now jobs in all disciplines and all sectors are facing continuous risk because the shrinking of job opportunities especially in academic fields and increasing competition with smart systems and automated equipment. Consequently, unemployment anxiety may become a form of advanced psychological outcome that arises from confusion and deterioration in academic identity.

The research problem was formulated in terms of the question: Is there a relationship between unemployment anxiety and academic identity of graduates?  The purpose of the study is to find the relationship between unemployment anxiety and academic identity. To accomplish the aims of the research, two scales i.e. unemployment anxiety and academic identity scales were constructed.

According to James Marcia (1966, 1980) and Charles Carver and Charles’ (1985) Future Expectations Theory, the two researchers adopted an Academic Identity Integration Theory. Once the two instruments’ validity and reliability were established, they were administered to a sample of graduate students (PhD, Master’s and Diploma students) from scientific and humanities subjects. Researchers took a convenient sample of female and male students from University of Kufa in Iraq.

The result showed that the unemployment anxiety of the research sample was less than average. Unemployment anxiety wasn’t found to be statistically significantly different as per gender. Nevertheless, differences that were statistically significant were found according to academic specialization in favor of scientific students. There were no significant differences according to the degree level. The findings also show that the research sample’s academic identity was at the above-average level. Moreover, it has been identified that there are no statistically significant differences in academic identity based on gender or academic specialization, while there are statistically significant differences according to degree levels in favor of PhD students. In conclusion, the results exhibited a statistically significant negative relationship between academic identity and unemployment anxiety.