The Mediating Role of Satisfying Basic Psychological Needs and Cyberspace Addiction In The Relationship Between Self-Knowledge and Procrastination In Secondary School Students

Past research shows that academic procrastination among students is a serious problem with significant consequences (Madjid, Prayogo & Shodiq, 2021). Procrastination causes slow decision-making process and delayed behaviors (Rabin, Fogel & Nutter-upham, 2011). In Kim & Seo's (2015) definition, academic procrastination is defined as the intentional delay in starting, continuing, or completing academic assignments, which has a strong relationship with poor performance, lack of academic progress, cheating in exams, and dropping out of school. Also, studies have shown that academic procrastination is related to cyberspace and Internet addiction (Eshghi & Farhadi, 2017; Shahbaziyan & Bahadorikhosroshahi, 2017). Addiction to virtual space, due to the availability of the internet, having attractive and group games and the ability to communicate without introducing yourself to the audience can be one of the reasons for academic procrastination (Shahbaziyan khonig, Hussaynpour Banadig, & Rahnamayi Bastam, 2019). Due to the fact that they devote a long time to cyberspace, teenagers who are dependent on cyberspace experience isolation, the lack of interpersonal relationships, which is one of the basic psychological needs, and they also procrastinate in education, they enjoy less social support, and they are not optimistic about their future education, career or society (Senol-Durak, & Durak, 2011).
According to self-determination theory there are three basic psychological needs in all cultures (Deci & Ryan, 2017). These needs have existed in all ages and are necessary for growth, integration and psychological well-being and behavior change (Ryan & et al., 2011; Ryan & Deci, 2000). These needs include: autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Vansteenkiste, Soenens, & Luyckx, 2006). Autonomy is the need to experience, choose and regulate behavior according to one's own will. The need for competence is the need to be effective in interactions with the environment, as well as expressing the desire to use talents, abilities and skills, as well as pursuing challenges within the limits of one's ability and mastering them (Reeve, 2018). Relatedness is the need to communicate with others, meaning intimacy with others and having the feeling that others are important (Deci & Ryan, 2008). By fulfilling the needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness, teenagers can be motivated internally so that they can study science for its own sake, without trying to satisfy these needs in the virtual space. Adolescent students must grow in an environment that naturally and healthily supports this needs, otherwise they will seek to satisfy these needs in the virtual space and try to fulfill them pathologically .But in the meantime, having self-knowledge and identifying these needs is necessary to properly satisfy basic needs. In other words, lack of self-knowledge causes neglect of basic needs and satisfying them through addiction to virtual space, which leads to academic procrastination.
Self-knowledge is “attention and awareness, bearing the processing of the current experience, reflecting on the current experience and tying it to the past experience, waking up blocked experiences from the past and making sense of them in the shadow of a new point of view, creating a coherent and complete narrative of what has been lived And the formulation of goals and motivations that is in harmony with needs and values” (Ghorbani, 2016, P: 171). As mentioned before, research show the relationship of self-knowledge with various variables, including basic psychological needs and cognitive emotion regulation strategies (Gholamali Lavasani & et al., 2019; Ghorbani, & et al., 2014), the emotional atmosphere of the family and students' self-control (Shekarchi & et al., 2021), adolescent identity (Robenzadeh & et al., 2019) and also with academic help-seeking (Narimani & Rahimzadegan, 2020). But little research has been done in relation to academic procrastination and self-knowledge. Also, a review of past researches showed that no research has been conducted on the mediating role of basic psychological needs and cyberspace addiction in relationship between self-knowledge and academic procrastination. Therefore, present study aimed to investigate the relationship between self-knowledge and academic procrastination with the mediating role of basic psychological needs and cyberspace addiction in secondary high school teenagers. The method of present study was descriptive-correlation of the type of structural equation modeling. The statistical population of the research included all the students of the secondary high school in Malayer city (N= 7450) in Hamadan province. The participants in the research were 515 academically procrastinating students who were selected random clustering from six schools. The sample group filled out a questionnaire including academic procrastination scale (Solomon & Rothblum, 1984), basic psychological needs scale (Deci & Ryan, 2002), cyberspace addiction (Young & Rodgers, 1998) and integrative self-knowledge scale (Ghorbani, Watson & Hargis, 2008). The data were analyzed by Pearson's correlation method and path analysis, using version 26 of the statistical package for social sciences and AMOS-24. The results showed that the direct coefficients of all paths of the model except the effect of autonomy on academic procrastination and relatedness on academic procrastination were significant (P<0.001). Also, the results showed the indirect effect of self-knowledge on academic procrastination with the mediation of basic psychological needs and cyberspace addiction was -0.49, which was significant (P<0.001). Therefore, the mediating role of basic needs was confirmed. This finding is consistent with the research of Foroghi pordanjani & Sharifi (1998). Reflecting on past experiences and making sense of them, which is a form of awareness, is one of the aspects of self-knowledge (Mousavi & Ghorbani, 2006), which satisfies basic needs and prevents addiction to cyberspace. Also, the findings showed that self-knowledge has a positive and significant relationship with autonomy, that is, the direct effect of self-knowledge on autonomy is significant. If the teenager has high self-awareness, he can act autonomously in his activities. This finding is consistent with the research done by Shekarchi & et al. (2021) which showed that the level of self-control of students is largely related to integrative self-knowledge. Conceptually, self-control largely overlaps with the need for autonomy. In this research, the findings showed that self-knowledge has a positive and significant relationship with the need for competence. The higher the self-knowledge, and the more a person knows his feelings, the more his competence need will be satisfied. This finding is consistent with the research of Mousavi and Ghorbani (2006). Competence is the psychological need to be effective in interacting with the environment and reflects the desire to expand abilities and skills and in doing so seek desirable challenges and master them and opportunities for personal growth (Deci & Ryan, 2014). It seems that students who have high self-knowledge experience more competence by engaging in their homework. Also, another finding of present research showed that self-knowledge has a positive and significant relationship with the need relatedness. This finding is in line with the research Narimani & Rahimzadegan (2020). This finding shows that a person can satisfy this innate human need that leads to growth and advancement in the shade of self-knowledge and recognition of the need for interpersonal relationships.  Another finding of present study is that there is a negative and significant relationship between self-knowledge and cyberspace addiction, which means that the lower self-knowledge may causes cyberspace addiction. Low self-knowledge towards oneself and the availability of virtual space causes a tendency to overuse this space. According to the results, autonomy had no significant relationship with procrastination. This finding is inconsistent with previous researches (e.g. Reeve, 2018). The possible reason for this disparity can be seen in the autonomy of students in using cyberspace. In other words, nowadays families support their children's autonomy by providing tools such as computers and personal mobile phones. But this can end at the cost of addiction to their virtual space. Another finding was the negative and significant relationship between competence and procrastination. That is, the more students feel competent, the less procrastination he has. This finding is consistent with Kim & Seo (2015) and Reeve (2018). By doing homework, students increase their sense of competence, and this sense of competence motivates them more to do their academic work, as a result of which academic procrastination disappears. The results of the present study showed that satisfying the need for relatedness does not have a significant effect on academic procrastination. This finding is inconsistent with previous researches (e.g. Reeve, 2018). The reason for this can be satisfying the need for relatedness in a harmful way in cyberspace and also in their other relationships.
Another finding of this research showed that cyberspace addiction is related to academic procrastination. This finding is in line with the researches of Eshghi & Farhadi (2017) and Shahbaziyan & Bahadorikhosroshahi (2017). Excessive use of the virtual space will drain the student's resources and cause the motivation and thoughts to be diverted from education and will lead to academic procrastination.