Context-related problems and university students' dropout intentions—the buffering effect of personal best goals.

This study investigates the effects of contextual and motivational factors as well as, crucially, their interaction in predicting university students' dropout intentions. We focus on context-related problems in students' degree program as contextual factors and students' personal best goals (PB goals) as motivational factors. The sample of this study comprised 432 university students (74.3% female) enrolled in master's degree programs at Austrian universities. Data was analyzed by means of structural equation modeling and latent moderated structural equation modeling. The results indicated that PB goals were negatively associated with dropout intentions, while context-related problems were positively associated with dropout intentions. In addition, the context-related problems × PB goals interaction effect proved significant and negatively predicted dropout intentions. By showing that the positive relation between context-related problems and dropout intentions can be reversed by increasing PB goals, we provide empirical evidence of the buffering effect of PB goals in the face of context-related problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]