Dating involvement among Turkish adolescents: The role of parental attitudes about dating, social anxiety and social physique anxiety

Abstract

A vast number of research addressed dating involvement during emerging adulthood; however, few studies focused on romantic involvement among adolescents, especially from non-western cultural settings. In cultures, where relational aspects of the self is more pronounced, parental norms about dating and constructs related to social self-consciosness may play an important role in adolescents’ dating involvement. The aim of the present study was to test the predictive role of gender, parental attitutes about dating, social anxiety and social physique anxiety in Turkish adolescents’ dating involevement. Participants of the study were 172 middle adolescents (104 female), ages ranging from 15 to 18 (M = 16.93; SD = .72). A logistic model was fitted to the data to test the research hypothesis. According to the results, both social physique anxiety score and mothers’ dating attitudes were significant predictors of dating behavior, while gender, social anxiety and fathers’ dating attitudes yielded no significant results. Several goodness-of-fit measures suggested that the overall model predicts 26% to 37% of adolescents’ dating involvement.