Type of social participation and emotion regulation among upper secondary school students

The article presents the results of research on relationships between types of social participation and emotion regulation. In the study, Gratz’ and Roemer’s (2004) perspective on emotion regulation and Reinders’ and Butz’s (2001) concept of types of social participation were applied. Participants were 1151 students from three types of vocational schools: basic vocational school (n=266), technical upper secondary school (n=644), and specialized upper secondary school (n=241). The results of studies conducted with the use of Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) and Social Participation Questionnaire (SPQ-S 1) indicate that there are small, however, significant, differences in the levels of social participation dimensions and the frequency of particular types of social participation between students from the three investigated types of vocational schools. The level of transitive orientation turned out to be higher among students from the basic vocational schools than among students from the specialized upper secondary schools and the technical upper secondary schools. In each educational group, the level of transitive orientation was significantly higher than the level of moratorium orientation. The hypothesis about the relationship between dimensions of emotion regulation and types of social participation, particularly with respect to the dimension of “lack of emotional awareness”, was confirmed. The most effective style in terms of emotion regulation turned out to be the assimilation type. The highest level of emotion dysregulation proved to be connected with the segregation type.