Learning self-regulation: an important soft skill for AYAs

Abstract

Background: The ability to self-regulate plays a critical role in accomplishing the developmental tasks in the stages of late adolescence, early adulthood and general psychosocial wellbeing. Aims: As part of the Association of Adolescent and Child Care in India’s multicentric studies on youth behaviour, the current study aimed to understand the effect of self-regulation, total, short-term and long-term as measured by the ASRI in female college-going students. We also studied these scores in relation to sociodemographic factors such as gender, age, sibling status, along with other variables such as perceived control over one’s life on self-regulation abilities. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted using convenience sampling. Participants (n = 354) were in the age groups between 17 to 19 and 20 (late adolescence) to 21 years (young adults), pursuing B.A., BCom., or BSc. in a college in North India. The Adolescent Self-Regulatory Inventory (ASRI) was administered to participants in order to assess both short-term and long-term self-regulation. Permission: Ethical clearance for this project was given by AACCI’s Institutional Ethics Committee. tool used: Moilanen Adolescent Self-regulation Inventory ASRI. The Internal consistency (alpha) for the ASRI was 0.75 for short-term self-regulation scale and 0.80 for long-term self-regulation scales. Confirmatory factor analyses were performed to check for the inventory’s validity, two factors were used, short-term and long-term self-regulation, factors correlated 0.83. Statistical analysis: The data was analysed using the Jeffreys's Amazing Statistics Program (JASP 0.17.2.0). T-tests were conducted to study the effects of age, engagement in extracurricular activities, perceived internet and social media dependence, and substance use on the ASRI. One-way ANOVAs were conducted to determine the effects of sibling status, academic course, and perceived control over one’s life on the ASRI. Additionally, we also used the Kruskal-Wallis test, Mann-Whitney U test, Welch’s test and Levene’s test of equality of variances. The statistical significance of the calculated coefficients was considered at p<0.05. Results: The participants who self- perceived that they had control over their lives had higher scores for overall self-regulation (p=0.002), short-term (p=0.03) and long-term self-regulation (p=.0.004) on the ASRI compared to those who were not sure and those who did not believe that they had any control over their lives. Participants who self -perceived that they were dependent on social media had lower scores on short-term (p=0.01) and long-term self-regulation (p=0.01) on the ASRI compared to those who did not perceive themselves as being dependent on social media. Conclusion: Our sample showed that among all the variables we examined e.g., age sibling status, participation in extracurricular activities and tobacco, alcohol consumption , significant results were found for only two variables that accessed students’ self-perception (control over one’s life and social media usage). This suggests that at the stages of late adolescence and young adulthood, self-perception contributes to self-regulation abilities.