A Survey of Gratitude Awareness of Chinese College Students

By doing a questionnaire survey of the gratitude awareness situation among the students of one university in Guangzhou, we had an overview of the gratitude awareness of the students. Based on this survey, it is advocated that college students’ gratitude education should be promoted on the basis of Chinese traditional cultural education; disadvantaged students should be paid more attention; teachers should set good examples; and the gratitude education should be enriched to make it more social; etc.


Introduction
Gratitude, as a traditional virtue and an essential requirement, should be a built-in moral trait of college students who are the elite group of a society.However, in recent years, the gratitude awareness and actions among college students attracted social attention, and aroused researcher's reflection.Nowadays, most post-90s college students are the only child in their families, and they "are active, pursue individuality, and adopt a variety of values" (Niu, 2011).This paper, through a questionnaire survey of the students in a university, has probed into this problem: what kind of value would be selected by the post-90s college students.

Factors
In this questionnaire, the demographic characteristics of the post-90s students have been investigated, including gender, origins, home place, grade, major, family economic situation and family members, etc., which can be analyzed, so that something about the relation between those factors and their influence on gratitude awareness can be unfolded.And an approach can be worked out to be helpful to the gratitude education of college students.

Respondents
The respondents of this questionnaire are the college students in a southern comprehensive university: 230 questionnaires were given, and 224 of them were returned, the response rate is 96%.To make this data analysis more scientific, statistics package for social science (SPSS 11.0) was used in this paper.Analysis types were univariate descriptive statistics and bivariate interactive classification statistics, with Chi-Square Test as an assist.
The description of the demographic, the relation between the demographic characteristics of the respondents is from Table 1.

An Analysis of the Questionnaire and the Conclusion
Through the analysis of this questionnaire, the relation between the demographic factors and the gratitude awareness can be revealed from the four aspects:

The Factor of Homeplace
Students with different demographic factors reach a consensus about the importance of thanksgiving in their growth.As for the lack of gratitude awareness, students from the countryside are more serious, while the students from city take this problem easy.Among the answers of the question "Is gratitude an essential quality of college students?","Yes" takes up over 90%, which is the only all-agreed viewpoint among college students.The post-90s, having been educated on Confucianism under the modern social background, have all been deeply influenced with Chinese culture.They all regard gratitude as an essential quality of a man, which lays the solid foundation for the promotion of gratitude

The Factor of Homeplace and Family Members
The person that is regarded to be thanked the most is mainly parents among the students.But there are still some different opinions, due to the factors of homeplace and family members.
"Parents" are "the people I want to thank the most" of students from city, while there is a little difference of the students from countryside.Analysis indicates that, homeplace is relevant with their object of thanksgiving.The result of X 2 (X 2 = 5.049, p = 0.025 < 0.05) also tells the significance of this relation.The data are showed in Table 3.
"Parents" are still "the person I want to thank the most" among students, whether they are from a family of three or more.At present, college students are Significance X 2 = 5.049, df = 1, p = 0.025 mainly "post-90s" and mostly the only child of their family.In a family of three, parents are the only companion in the child's growth process, so parents are the most important persons in the child's heart.92.7% of the only child chose parents as their object to thank, 88.8% of the students with one sibling chose "parents" as their object to thank, and 97.3% of the students with 2 or more siblings chose parents also.
Analysis indicates that family members are an important factor in this survey.
The result of X 2 (X 2 = 6.753, p = 0.037 < 0.05) shows the importance of this relation.Students with one sibling feel less lonely, and are more independent.Students with 2 or more siblings are more grateful to their parents, because this kind of family, due to the number of children and huge family expenses, costs more.The data showed above are from Table 4.

The Factor of Gender and Homeplace
Students of different sex and homeplace showed a different attitude toward their alma mater.Girls are more emotional and grateful than boys; and students from countryside hold various attitudes.
To the question "Will you come back to visit your alma mater after your graduation?", 55.7% of boys and 72.1% of girls, 81.7% of students from city and 61.6% of the students from countryside chose the answer "Yes, I am concerned.";38.6% of boys and 27.9% of girls, 18.3% of students from city and 36% of the students from countryside chose the answer "I will visit it if it is by chance.";5.7% of boys and 0% of girls, 0% of students from city and 2.4% of the students from countryside are inclined to the answer "No, nothing interests me".
The data tells that there is a relation between gender, homeplace and students' feeling of gratitude to their alma mater.The result of the Chi-Square test is X 2 = 12.471 (p = 0.002 < 0.05) and X 2 = 8.484 (p = 0.014 < 0.05).The data are also showed in Table 5.The difference of gender accords with the psychological gender differences: males are rational and careless; females are sensitive and considerate.The difference between students from city and those from countryside can be traced back to the current social situation.Students from city are all live in good conditions, and with an optimistic world view, while students from countryside had leaded a hard life.After they came to the university, they realized that the academic performance is not the only measurement of being excellent.So they become worried about their future and ascribe this kind of psychological gap to their senior high school, thus the negative emotions grow.

The Factor of Grades
Teachers' teaching methods count a lot, and different kinds of modes of instruction can directly determine the consequence of gratitude education.Students from different grades have different feelings toward teacher's teaching methods.
Example is better than precept.The results indicate that, surprisingly, 50% students of different personality reached an agreement on the answer "not sure", when they were asked the question "Will you hate a teacher because of his bad teaching method of gratitude education?"The relation between grades and teaching methods is close.To the same question, 5.9% of the freshmen, 21.4% of the sophomore and 21.2% of the junior and senior students chose the answer "Yes, I'll not attend his class any more".And 31.4%, 21.2% and 46.2% of these students chose the answer "No, I think though he did not make this class attractive, he did a lot for the preparation".Plus, p = 0.01 < 0.05.Nearly no freshmen would skip classes, because they have just entered university, and are not sure about the gratitude classes.While they become familiar with college life, they become sophomores and are gradually not willing to attend this class.It is well to be reminded that junior and senior students still respect teachers' fruits of labour when they find the teaching method is not that good.Maybe it is because

Table 1 .
The demographic characteristics of the respondents (N = 224).
DOI: 10.4236/psych.2017.8141542448 Psychology education, makes it enforceable.The answers of the question "Do you think the classmates around you are lacking of the sense of gratitude?"vary.There are 53.3% of the students from city and 35.4% of students from countryside choosing the answer "not yet", and the other two options "lacking seriously", and "is lacking" are 46.6% and 64.6% respectively.According to the data, there is a relation between homeplace and the lack of gratitude awareness, which is what the survey told us.The results of X 2 (X 2 = 6.523, p = 0.044 < 0.05) have also indicated the significance of this relation.All the data above come from Table2.Due to China's long time unbalanced economic development, the urban-rural gap is widening.Students from city are more satisfied and happier toward their life than the students from countryside; thus they are more grateful.

Table 2 .
The relation between homeplace and gratitude awareness.

Table 3 .
The relation between homeplace and the object of thanksgiving.

Table 4 .
The relation between family members and the object of thanksgiving.

Table 5 .
The relation between gender, homeplace and the gratitude to alma mater.