Date of Award

10-1-2024

Thesis Type

phd

Document Type

Thesis (Restricted Access)

Divisions

education

Department

Department of Educational Psychology and Counselling

Institution

Universiti Malaya

Abstract

Addressing the lack of measurement tools available to assess the strategies adults use to regulate sadness, this mixed-methods study developed and validated adults’ sadness regulation scale (ASRS) within the Yemeni context. In particular, the qualitative study (n = 20 participants) focused on identifying the ASRS factors and items, whereas the quantitative study focused on testing the corresponding psychometric properties. The quantitative study consisted of a pilot study (n = 240 respondents) and the actual data collection (n = 492 respondents). All data from the pilot study were subjected to exploratory factor analysis (EFA), while data from the actual data collection were subjected to confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Based on the qualitative findings, Yemeni adults use 11 strategies to regulate sadness: religious coping, seeking emotional or social support, distraction, cognitive reappraisal, acceptance, adaptive responses to sadness, expressive suppression, substance-based sadness regulation, avoidance, rumination, and dysregulated sadness expressions. Meanwhile, the EFA results revealed eight psychometrically valid and interpretable ASRS subfactors (56 items), which explained 48.697% of the total variance. Based on the CFA results, ASRS appeared to be better represented by the second-order model with seven subfactors and 36 items. Furthermore, concurrent validity, convergent validity, and discriminant validity were partially met in this study. The developed scale recorded Cronbach alpha’s coefficient of 0.78. With that, this study presented significant implications on emotional education interventions that serve to improve adults’ skills in controlling negative emotions and managing their responses to these emotions.

Note

Adults; Emotion regulation; Sadness regulation; Scale development; Reliability; Validity

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