Abstract
Emotion regulation plays an important role in both healthy and problematic adolescent psychological functioning. Emotion regulation tendencies can be assessed with the Affective Style Questionnaire (ASQ; Hofmann & Kashdan, 2010), but its validity in Dutch speaking adolescents has not been investigated so far. Two methods, namely traditional confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the recently developed exploratory structural equations modeling (ESEM), were compared to examine the dimensional structure of the ASQ in a Flemish adolescent sample (N = 1,601). Although, as expected, the ESEM-model fit the data better than the CFA-model, the fit indices indicated that both models did not have an acceptable fit. With a shortened version of the ASQ, model fit improved substantially, but only the ESEM solution provided a good fit. The ESEM results support the use of the adapted ASQ to effectively assess the affective styles of concealing, adjusting and tolerating in Dutch-speaking adolescents.
Highlights
Because emotion regulation plays such an important role in adaptive psychosocial functioning in adolescence, measures that assess individual differences in emotion regulation can provide crucial information about adolescent emotional development
First, we performed an ICM-confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) of the translated version of the Affective Style Questionnaire (ASQ), following the factor structure of the original study (Hofmann & Kashdan, 2010)
We performed an independent clusters model-CFA (ICM-CFA) of the Japanese four-factor model (Ito & Hofmann, 2014), which resulted in slightly better fit statistics than the three-factor model, but the overall model fit was still poor: χ2(98) = 1626.025, p < 0.001; CFI = 0.849; TLI = 0.815; RMSEA = 0.099 [0.094, 0.103]
Summary
Because emotion regulation plays such an important role in adaptive psychosocial functioning in adolescence, measures that assess individual differences in emotion regulation can provide crucial information about adolescent emotional development. The German study used a more recent approach to evaluate the ASQ factor structure: exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) This approach combines CFA and EFA measurement model parts and is less restrictive than CFA (that is, it allows small cross-loadings that are well motivated by the theory), generally resulting in better-fitting models (Asparouhov, Muthén, & Muthen, 2009; Marsh et al, 2009). As the ASQ seems a promising instrument to assess affective styles, we aimed to examine its factor structure in a Dutch-speaking adolescent sample.
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