Moderating role of counselling help-seeking attitudes on the relationship between perfectionism, love style and marital satisfaction among postgraduate students

Counseling services are provided by university counselors to promote students’ wellness. Despite increasing number of postgraduate students’ enrolment, the counseling services do not allocate much attention to them as compared to the undergraduate students. The postgraduate education could be a challenging journey, especially to the students who are married. Focusing on married postgraduate students, this research aims at achieving three objectives. The first objective of this research is to examine the relationship between perfectionism, love styles, and marital satisfaction. The second objective is to explore the latent mean difference in perfectionism, love styles, and marital satisfaction, between positive and negative attitudes toward counseling help-seeking groups. The third objective is to explore the moderating effect of counseling help-seeking attitudes on the relationships between perfectionism, love styles, and marital satisfaction. The research adopted a combination of descriptive, correlational, and ex-post facto research design. The respondents were 327 postgraduate students who were selected using simple random sampling from a research university in Malaysia. An online self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data. Five instruments were used, which are Almost Perfect Scale-Revised for measuring self-perfectionism, Dyadic Almost Perfect Scale for measuring dyadic perfectionism, Love Attitudes Scale-Short Form for measuring love styles, Attitudes toward Seeking Professional Psychological Help Scale for measuring counseling help-seeking attitudes, and Marital Satisfaction Scale for measuring marital satisfaction. The Confirmatory Factor Analysis for the measurement model shows that these instruments are valid with high average variance extracted and high construct reliability. For testing of the hypotheses, the results reported that dyadic perfectionism and love styles are related to marital satisfaction uniquely. The dyadic high standards is positively related with marital satisfaction while dyadic discrepancy is negatively related to marital satisfaction. For love styles, storge is positively related to marital satisfaction. The results also reported the latent mean of perfectionism, love styles, and marital satisfaction differs significantly between the positive attitudes and negative attitudes toward counseling help-seeking groups. For perfectionism, those who have negative attitudes toward counseling help-seeking reported higher latent mean in self-discrepancy, dyadic high standards, and dyadic discrepancy. For love styles, those who have negative attitudes toward counseling help-seeking reported lower latent mean in eros. For marital satisfaction, those who have negative attitudes toward counseling help-seeking reported lower latent mean in marital satisfaction. The results also indicated that counseling help-seeking attitudes did not moderate the relationship between perfectionism, love styles, and marital satisfaction. The direction and magnitude of the relationship between perfectionism, love styles, and marital satisfaction are robust for the positive attitudes and negative attitudes toward counseling help-seeking groups. As the implications for counseling services, the counselors could explore on the dyadic perfectionism and love styles when dealing with clients with marital concerns. The instruments for perfectionism and love styles could be useful for the assessment phase of the counseling process. Counselors need to seek for alternative ways for counseling to reaching out to students with negative attitudes toward counseling help-seeking.

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