Social Self-Regulation in the Context of Applied Parental Styles and Preferred Styles of Coping in Early and Middle Adolescence – Pilot Study

Abstract

The study was realised as a part of an extensive research plan, which aims at tracing a developmental trend in the development of self-regulation of an individual in the context of coping, self-efficacy and self-esteem, by monitoring selected connections between social self-regulation, applied parental educational styles and preferred strategies of coping in the period of early and middle adolescence. Since this is already a widely held belief this study may be considered unnecessary unless the writers say that this study hopes to provide further empirical evidence to support this belief. In order to execute the above mentioned research plan, we have chosen a quantitative research design realised through a one-time interview survey by using a combination of questionnaire methods: Social selection, optimisation and compensation questionnaire (Social SOC; Geldholf, Little, Hawley, 2012), Parents Perception Scale (Niemiec, Ryan & Deci 1991; adapted Robbins 1994) and Children´s Coping Strategies Checklist (Ayers et al., 1996). This study included 229 respondents aged 13 to 15 (M=14,7; sd=0,712), from which 53.3% were girls (N=122) and 46.7% were boys (N=107). The results of the study generated many findings related to self-regulation and coping strategies with a focus on significant gender differences in social self-regulation and also differences in preferred coping strategies (r=44,21,sd=7,896). From a practical point of view, the study generated valuable conclusions about differences in preferred styles of coping in relation to applied parental educational styles – e.g. the group of respondents with low average scores in Parents Perception Scale had statistically considerably lower score in several fundamental coping strategies (COP_ACT (p<0,001) and COP_SUP (p<0,001)).