Research Report No. 44
 Self-Control Ability in Thai Children as Related to Educational Curriculum,
Training Skills, and Psychological Components for Effective Citizenship
by
Chancha Suvannathat, Lathongbai Bhuapirom
Kamol Sudprasert, (1990)  
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Objectives 
        1)  To  examine  the  relatedness  of  the  contents  in school  textbooks to the development of self-control. 
        2)  to  investigate  the  relationships  between  family's  and  school's socialization and children's self-control. 
        3)   To   examine   the   interrelatedness   among   children's  psychological   characteristics   in  6  dimensions  (self-restraint,  inhibition,  self-confidence,  tolerance  and forgiveness, emotional- social  maturity,  future  orientation) and the relationships between  these psychological traits and children's self-control ability. 
Research Mothodology 
        The  subjects  consist of 609 Thai children in grades 5 and 8 in  14 public co-educational schools in Bangkok, 55 teachers, 609 mothers, and 609 fathers. 
        Regarding  the  research instruments, the children are given two  four  point  rating  scaled questionnaires concerning their perceived  socialization   as  related  to  self-control,  and  also  ane  other  questionnaire  concerning  their  own  psychological  traits  as main  components  for  self-control  ability, Mothers and fathers are given  separately one same questionnaire concerning their actual training for  children's  development  in self-control. And for teachers, they are  given  another  questionnaire  concerning  their  training skills for  their  own self-control and for the self-control development of their  school children. 
        With  respect  to  treatment  of  data, content analysis method,  various  other  statistical  methods  and  the SPSSx computer program  are used. 
        As  for  the  main findings, it can be concluded that the family  and  school socialization are significantly related to the children's  development  of  self-control  ability.  There  are also significant  interrelatedness   among  6  dimensions  of  children's psychological  characteristics  in  self-control.  There  are also high concordance  between  children's  perceived socialization of their parents and the  parents'  own  report  of  their actual training for children's self- control.   In   addition,  it  is  noted  that  mothers  play a more  significant  role in self-control development for their children than  fathers   and   teachers.  These  mothers  are  found  to  use  more  traditional  way  of  training for self-control by using the external  control  rather than the internal one. And it is also noted that the  teachers try to use some Buddhist principles in controlling themselves. 
        As  for the relations between bio-social variables and different  dimensions in self-control ability of children, it is noteworthy that  school  children  in the sampling who have lower family income obtain  higher  scores  in  all  psychological traits concerning self-control  ability  when  compared with children who have high and middle family  income. And the school children is grade 8 also obtain higher scores  than  these  in grade 5 in some psychological traits in self-control  ability (dimensions 2 and 3). 
        With  regards  to  curriculum content analysis, it is found that  there  is inadequate amount of elements in reading contents which can  lead to self-control development in school children. And the elements which  are  found  related  to  self-control are only confined to the  control in psysical aspect rather than the verbal and mind aspects. 
  


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