The Effect of Proactive Personality on School Connectedness in Vocational College Students: The Chain Mediating Role of Core Self-Evaluation and Coping Self-Efficacy

Abstract

Objective: School connectedness serves as a critical protective factor for academic achievement and mental health among adolescents. However, vocational college students generally report lower levels of school belonging and encounter complex psychological adaptation challenges. Drawing upon social cognitive theory, this study constructed a chain mediation model to investigate the relationship between proactive personality and school connectedness, with a particular focus on the sequential mediating roles of core self-evaluation and coping self-efficacy. Methods: A total of 2,081 vocational college students (66.9% male) completed self-report measures of proactive personality, core self-evaluation, coping self-efficacy, and school connectedness. All instruments demonstrated satisfactory reliability, with Cronbach’s α coefficients ranging from 0.840 to 0.972. Data were analyzed using SPSS 26.0 and PROCESS macro, and the significance of indirect effects was tested using a bias-corrected bootstrap procedure with 5,000 resamples. Results: Correlation analyses indicated that proactive personality was positively correlated with core self-evaluation ( r = 0.510, p < 0.001), coping self-efficacy ( r = 0.860, p < 0.001), and school connectedness ( r = 0.622, p < 0.001). Regression analyses revealed that proactive personality significantly predicted core self-evaluation (β = 0.5098, p < 0.001). Both proactive personality (β = 0.7667, p < 0.001) and core self-evaluation (β = 0.1829, p < 0.001) significantly predicted coping self-efficacy, accounting for 76.43% of its variance. When all predictors were entered simultaneously, core self-evaluation (β = 0.0803, p < 0.001) and coping self-efficacy (β = 0.5169, p < 0.001) remained significant predictors of school connectedness, alongside a significant direct effect of proactive personality (β = 0.1362, p < 0.001). Bootstrap analysis showed that all three indirect pathways were significant: via core self-evaluation alone (effect = 0.0410, 95% CI [0.0201, 0.0635]), via coping self-efficacy alone (effect = 0.3963, 95% CI [0.3334, 0.4607]), and sequentially via core self-evaluation and coping self-efficacy (effect = 0.0482, 95% CI [0.0375, 0.0600]). The total indirect effect was 0.4854 (95% CI [0.4194, 0.5538]), and coping self-efficacy emerged as the predominant mediating mechanism. Conclusion: Proactive personality not only directly and positively predicts school connectedness among vocational college students, but also exerts positive effects through three indirect pathways via core self-evaluation and coping self-efficacy, among which coping self-efficacy emerges as the most prominent mediating variable. These findings provide empirical evidence for the application of the “personality → cognition → belief → behavior” framework of social cognitive theory in the vocational college student population, while also suggesting that enhancing students’ coping self-efficacy may be an effective pathway for vocational colleges to foster school belonging.