Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder whose characteristics may persist into adulthood. In higher education, difficulties may become apparent in areas such as organization, time management, sustained attention, planning, and self-regulation, all of which are important for everyday and academic functioning. Self-report questionnaires play an important role in studying these difficulties, as they provide insight into individuals’ perceptions of their own ADHD characteristics and executive functioning difficulties.
The aim of this master’s thesis was to examine the expression of ADHD characteristics and executive functioning difficulties among university students and to investigate the relationships between them. Particular attention was devoted to examining the associations of working memory and inhibition with broader aspects of everyday executive functioning. A quantitative, non-experimental, cross-sectional study was conducted. The self-report questionnaires ASRS, ADEXI, and ESQ-R were used. Due to differences in the number of valid responses to individual questionnaires, the sample size varied across analyses; 157 participants were included in the ASRS analyses, 151 in the ADEXI analyses, and 147 in the ESQ-R analyses.
A total of 36.3% of the participants obtained a positive screening result on the ASRS v1.1 Part A. On the ADEXI, inhibition difficulties were descriptively more pronounced than working memory difficulties, while on the ESQ-R, difficulties in emotional regulation, behavioral regulation, and organization were descriptively more pronounced. Students who indicated that they had previously been diagnosed with ADHD reported greater executive functioning difficulties than students without an ADHD diagnosis; statistically significant differences were found for all examined measures except the ESQ-R emotion regulation domain. Higher levels of ADHD characteristics were positively associated with all examined measures of executive functioning, with strong and very strong associations found for the total ADEXI and ESQ-R scores, respectively. The total scores of the two executive functioning questionnaires were very strongly correlated, while different patterns of associations between their domains indicated differences in the strength of associations among individual areas of executive functioning. In the joint regression model, in which ADEXI and ESQ-R were entered simultaneously, only ESQ-R retained a statistically significant independent contribution to distinguishing between participants with positive and negative ASRS screening results, whereas the independent contribution of ADEXI was not statistically significant.
The findings contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between ADHD characteristics and different aspects of self-reported executive functioning among university students and suggest that ADEXI and ESQ-R assess partially overlapping but differently defined aspects of self-reported executive functioning. The findings may also provide a basis for considering the development of appropriate support measures in higher education settings.
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