Predicting the tendency towards high-risk behaviors based on moral disengagement with the mediating role of difficulties in emotion regulation: A Structural Equation Modeling

Types of tendency to high-risk behaviors are common among adolescents. This study aimed to determine predicting the tendency toward high-risk behaviors based on moral disengagement with the mediating role of difficulties in emotion regulation.The method of this study was descriptive-correlational. All secondary school students of Ardabil, who were studying in the year 2018, comprised the population of this research. Two hundred and fifty students were selected from this population through multistage random cluster sampling and they were asked to fill in high-risk behaviors, moral disengagement, and difficulties in emotion regulation questionnaires. The data were analyzed using SPSS and LISREL software. The results showed a role for high-risk behaviors, total moral disengagement score, and its components and the total score of difficulties in emotion regulation. There was also a significant relationship between the difficulties in emotion regulation and the total score of moral disengagement and its components. Also, the proposed model had a good fit, and the fitting indices of the model also confirmed the moral disengagement path to high-risk behaviors with the mediating role of difficulties in emotion regulation. The results indicated that moral disengagement with high path coefficients could be an effective factor in predicting the tendency toward high risk behaviors among students.