Psychological structure of professional responsibility of a personality: programme, psychodiagnostics, experiment

Abstract

The fundamental empirical study was carried out according to the act-canonical organisational scheme of preparation, conduct and comprehension of the results of a multidimensional search to identify the facts, patterns and features of the formation of a harmonised psychological structure of professional responsibility of psychology students in its detailed dynamic deployment of component development during their studies at a higher education institution. At the same time, the object format of the study covered a broader context of evolutionary construction, namely the conceptual comprehension of professional responsibility of the individual as an integral trait-quality that synthetically combines a special psycho-existential content of value and meaning orientation, poly-motivation of professional activity, the ability to produce acceptable ways to solve all kinds of life problems of a person and a group, and constant reflexivity of one’s own psychological thought process. In addition, it is argued that the professional responsibility of a psychologist is not only his basic psychosocial property but also the fundamental form of his life and an important channel of self-realisation in the course of almost continuous social interaction that characterises the readiness to be responsible for the consequences of their own efforts, endeavours, actions, and the qualitative and productive fulfilment of their professional obligations and duties, in particular, and to implement the invariants of mental-cognitive, emotional-motivational, conative-volitional and moral-spiritual content in everyday life. It has been proven that the foundations of such responsibility lie in a person’s ability to productively use their own time resources in relationships with others, namely: a) responsibility for an action that has been performed, or retrospective responsibility; b) responsibility “here and now”, or current responsibility; c) responsibility for what needs to be done, or prospective responsibility; and d) absolute responsibility, that is, responsibility correlated with the eternal. The s i t u a t i o n a l stage of reflective thinking involved the theoretical development and methodological justification of the authors programme for empirical research of the accepted conceptualisation. As a result, a two-component set of primary and auxiliary psycho-didactic methods was employed (M.A. Ostashevas indicators of social responsibility and M.V. Savchyns method for studying responsible behaviour through the analysis of holistic life situations), which enabled a differentiated yet systematic study of the component structure of professional responsibility in psychology students. The main methods used were the personal test questionnaire “How responsible are You?” by O.Ye. Furman (2007) and a specially developed questionnaire on the component structure of professional responsibility by A.V. Furman. The latter underwent a multi-stage process of construction and empirical testing to determine the factors of structural organisation of the parametric components of the specified type of responsibility, to establish correlations between them, to create classifications of general and component-specific indicators of this diagnosed phenomenon, among other tasks. This provided grounds for using the questionnaire at both the control and formative stages of the psychological experiment as a reliable and informative diagnostic tool. The m o t i v a t i o n a l stage included the results of the ascertaining stage of the empirical study of the process of formation of professional responsibility of future psychologists of the first (bachelor’s) and second (master’s) levels of training, obtained with the help of four subject-matter relevant psychodiagnostic methods (a personality test, two questionnaires and an expert questionnaire). Thus, it has been found that the complex, decreasing-increasing, i.e., positive-negative, dynamics of the development of the basic components of the above responsibility by years of study are mental and cognitive in the range of averaged absolute values from 60.5, 58.5 and 59.5 to 56.0 and further to 60.0 and 61.5, emotional and motivational – from 70.0 and 71, 0 to 66.5 and 65.0 and then to 68.5 and 70.0, behavioural and volitional – from 67.5 and 66.0 to 63.5 and 63.5 and then to 68.0 and 69.0, and moral and spiritual – from 71.0 to 68.0, 68.5 and 66.5 and then to 70.5 and 72.0 (%). It was found that the general tendency here is to balance the psychological content of these components both as real personal characteristics and as formal psychometric parameters of this integral trait of a psychologist. At the same time, high data scattering and rich variability, as well as expansion or accumulation of individual trajectories of the component formation of this trait, were found. In view of the above, the process of forming the professional responsibility of psychologists in the educational space of modern Ukrainian higher education institutions is assessed as insufficiently controlled and low-efficient. The a c t i o n stage is a full-scale psychoformative experiment focused on optimising the dynamics of the component-by-component development of future psychologists’ professional responsibility. In particular, it has been convincingly shown that the following groups of psycho-didactic conditions contribute to the formation of productive forms and effective contents of the analysed responsibility: complex psychodiagnostic sections, training in the actualisation of psychospiritual resources of personal responsibility, professional role-playing games of a thought-communication nature and a credit-modular educational system. At the same time, the formative experiment systematically confirmed the significant constructive influence of these conditions on the positive dynamics of development-enrichment of the content of the components of professional responsibility of psychology students during their training at different levels of education: a) mental-cognitive: a deep awareness and personal acceptance of responsibility for the intensive content of their own daily educational activities was achieved, which was quantitatively confirmed by the total test and survey data of the average data of the three experimental groups – 29.1% and 24.0%; b) emotional and motivational: high search and cognitive activity, social initiative and poly-motivation of the educational and psychological work responsibly carried out by the successors are ensured, which is confirmed by the similarly given quantitative values – 20.2% and 29.5%; c) behavioural and volitional: the space of prosocially responsible behaviour, self-organisation of professionally important actions and special psychological competences is expanded, which is supported by the above quantitative values – 22.0% and 29.1%; d) moral and spiritual: personal self-actualisation, propaedeutic professional self-improvement and reflective competence of appropriately oriented actions are possible, which is argued by the above scheme with quantitative data – 24.1% and 23.5%. The p o s t - a c t i o n stage of the author’s thought process represents the results of the final reflection of the newly acquired psychological knowledge in four epistemological dimensions – conceptual, programmatic-empirical, diagnostic, and psycho-experimental – which is logically and substantively reflected in the conclusions of the work.