Personal and family perfectionism of Taiwanese college students: relationships with depression, self-esteem, achievement motivation, and academic grades

An increasing number of perfectionism studies have been conducted across different countries outside of the Western framework. Using an international egalitarian approach that adopts indigenous frameworks and concepts from the cultural context of the population studied is imperative. This study examines different groups of perfectionists with a sample of 348 Taiwanese college students, emphasizing the collectivistic culture. In particular, this is a follow-up study to further explore characteristics of a group with low standards/high discrepancy--a feeling that they are not good enough despite having low standards--found in a previous study with Taiwanese students. More specifically, this study investigates whether the source of the high discrepancy scores among this group is related to having higher perfectionistic standards from their family. Perfectionism was examined not only from a personal/individualistic perspective, but also from a familistic dimension to reflect Taiwanese collectivistic cultural values. Results partially supported the hypotheses--this group reported having higher family discrepancy, but not family standards, than nonperfectionists. However, this group of participants reported lower academic grades, which implies the possibility of their discrepancy being associated with poorer performance. Four cluster groups--adaptive perfectionists, maladaptive perfectionists, nonperfectionists, and those with low standards/high discrepancy--were compared on their levels of depression, self-esteem, achievement motivation, and academic grades. Maladaptive perfectionists reported the highest depression level, while adaptive perfectionists reported the highest self-esteem. Results also show that aspects of personal perfectionism and family perfectionism related to self-esteem differently among this sample. Findings and implications are discussed with consideration of the collectivistic cultural context in Taiwan.