ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Grit as a Moderator: The Mediating Role of Self-efficacy and Academic Performance between Conscientiousness and Life Satisfaction among College Students
Provisionally accepted
- 1Software Engineering Institute of Guangzhou, Guangzhou, China
- 2Hanseo University, Seosan-si, Republic of Korea
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In recent decades, academic research has established the significant influence of personality traits on life satisfaction. However, the mediating and moderating mechanisms underlying the relationship between conscientiousness and life satisfaction remain insufficiently understood, warranting further investigation. This study aimed to clarify the moderated mediation mechanism linking conscientiousness, academic self-efficacy, academic performance, grit, and life satisfaction. To this end, an exploratory hypothetical model was proposed, and empirical verification of the model was conducted via a random sampling survey. The respondents of this study were 304 undergraduate and professional students from China. The data analysis tools used in this study included SPSS AMOS Version.26, SPSS Statistics Ver.25 and SPSS PROCESS Macro-Ver.4.2. The results showed that conscientiousness, academic self-efficacy, academic performance, life satisfaction and grit were positively correlated. Grit played a moderating role in the dual mediating relationship from conscientiousness to academic self-efficacy to academic performance to life satisfaction. The research results provided new ideas for explaining the formation mechanism of college students' life satisfaction, and provided more targeted suggestions on using grit to intervene and improve students' happiness in school.
Keywords: academic performance, Academic self-efficacy, conscientiousness, grit, life satisfaction, moderated mediation effect
Received: 14 Jul 2025; Accepted: 03 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Li, Ma and Lee. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jianan Li, lijianan718@163.com
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