Predicting the Mean Score of Tendency to Addiction Based on Parenting Styles and Cognitive Emotion Regulation of University Students

Higher education is considered a great stage of life in spite of their problems. These problems may lead to the possibility of experiencing and suffering from some social harms, including addiction. The tendency of students towards drugs and their harms is one of the main areas of addiction prevention programs related to students. One of the variables affecting the tendency to addiction is parenting styles which is a set of behaviors that determine the parent–child interactions in different and extended situations. Parenting styles include authoritarian, authoritative and permissive styles. Another variable affecting the tendency to addiction is cognitive emotion regulation. Emotion regulation refers to the processes by which a person experiences emotions and how to express them. Today, addiction tendency is considered an effective factor that has changed the parenting style. This endovear requires improving cognitive emotion regulation in learners. Therefore, according to what was stated, this study aimed to predict the tendency to addiction based on parenting styles and emotional cognitive tension in students.

This study was cross–sectional and the research method was descriptive–analytical of correlational type. The statistical population of this study consisted of all students of Payame Noor University in Gonbad Kavous City, Iran, in the academic year of 2019–2020. There were 3548 students. The sampling method considered the possibility of a drop in respondents and inappropriate responses. Thus, 400 hundred questionnaires were distributed among all university students. Finally, 390 questionnaires were returned and 384 questionnaires were selected for statistical analysis. The inclusion criteria were being a student of Payam Noor University in the city of Gonbad Kavos and studying in the academic year of 2018–2019. The exclusion criterion was incomplete questionnaires. The measuring instruments were the Parenting Style Questionnaire (Baumrind, 1991), Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Garenfeski et al., 2001) and Tendency to Addiction Scale (Weed et al., 1992). Descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (the Pearson correlation coefficient and multivariate regression analysis) were performed in SPSS version 22. The significance level of the tests was set at 0.05.

The results showed that between permissive style (p<0.001, r=0.491), authoritative style (p<0.001, r=–0.523), authoritarian style (p<0.001, r=0.406) and emotional cognitive regulation (p< 0.001, r=0.475) were correlated with addiction tendency. Also, based on the results of multiple linear regression analysis, permissive style (p<0.001, β=0.203), authoritative style (p<0.001, β=0.274), authoritarian style (p<0.001, β=.193), and cognitive regulation of emotion (p<0.001, β=0.315) could predict the mean score of addiction tendency.

According to the results of this study, using the correct parenting styles and improving cognitive emotion regulation can reduce the tendency to addiction in University students.