Fear of Success: The Distribution, Correlates, Reliability and Consequences for Fertility of Fear of Success Among Respondents in a Metropolitan Survey Population.

This study was designed to extend discussion of fear of success beyond the college population, using Horner's original coding scheme to examine the thematic imagery of TAT stories told by a cross-section of the public during a survey interview. The data collected from this sample of the general public contrasted in several ways with data gathered among college students. First, the percentage of respondents who told fear of success stories were generally lower among the noncollege population. The groups with a high incidence of fear of success were those most similar to college students. Other findings of researchers studying college students were corroborated: (1) blacks were significantly less likely to tell fear of success stories than whites; (2) males told fear of success stories to a male cue almost as often as females did to a female cue. In this study, women who both feared success and were traditional had significantly larger families than women who either did not fear success or who feared success but were not traditional. There is now under way a more detailed analysis of fear of success among the currently-married white females in the study, aged 18 to 55. (Author/PC)