Understanding the roles of social goals relative to self-compassion and goal disengagement of Filipino college students : a mixed method study

This paper focuses on investigating goal theory perspectives on motivation which are considered at the forefront in learning contexts. Much research has been conducted on self-compassion, social goals and on goal orientations but none yet have been investigated directly linking their associations and their interaction effects on goal engagements particularly goal disengagement. The aim of the present study is to investigate, explore and understand the moderating effect of social goals on selfcompassion and goal disengagement. Using a mixed method concurrent design, 416 college students from a Manila university were invited to provide the data for the multiple regression analyses and 10 students for the focus group discussions during which the contextualization of the themes and categories were analyzed.Using a correlational design, the study found that all the factors of selfcompassion are significantly correlated at p<.05 level of significance. In order to test whether the two factors of social goals (social responsibility and social status) moderate the effect of self-compassion factors on goal disengagement, a three step hierarchical regression was used. The regression analysis revealed that all the self compassion factors are predictors of goal disengagement with mindfulness as the best predictors and the social status goals moderated the effect of isolation, a self-compassion factor on goal disengagement of the students. The qualitative study demonstrated that social goals specifically social responsibility and social status goals yielded similar concepts with that of the social-academic goals theory of Dowson and McInerney. Research on social goals in the local setting is still limited and thus, it is deemed necessary to extend their study.Implications of the study for teachers and for future research are further discussed.