Basic psychological needs, achievement goals and well-being among Polish higher-education students: a cross-sectional dataset (N = 699)

This dataset contains anonymised, item-level cross-sectional survey responses from 699 students enrolled in Polish higher-education institutions, collected between September 27 and December 30, 2025, to examine relationships between basic psychological need experiences, achievement goal orientations and subjective well-being. Participants completed the Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction and Frustration Scale (24 items, 1–5), the 3×2 Achievement Goal Questionnaire (18 items, 1–7) and the WHO-5 Well-Being Index (5 items, 0–5); the file provides all individual item responses together with the twelve BPNSF subscale scores (autonomy, relatedness and competence satisfaction and frustration), the six AGQ 3×2 goal-orientation scores (task-, self- and other-approach and -avoidance) and the WHO-5 total, each computed as a raw sum of its items and verified arithmetically for every record. Background variables cover level, year and mode of study, self-reported grade band, gender, type of place of residence, and age in bands. To protect participant confidentiality the dataset was subjected to disclosure control before release: exact age was replaced by four-year bands and the variables identifying field of study, city of study and institution were removed; no direct identifiers were collected. Missing values are coded as "NA" and occur only in the gender variable (11 records). The accompanying Codebook sheet documents all 68 variables, their measurement level, response scales, subscale composition and observed value ranges. The data are suitable for secondary analysis of self-determination-theory and achievement-goal hypotheses, for measurement work on the Polish adaptations of these instruments, and for inclusion in meta-analyses; item wording is not reproduced here and should be obtained from the original published instruments.