humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 20 (1), february 2023, 21-28 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humantias.v20i1.72 the role of emotion regulation and empathy in students displaying cyberbullying mujidin1, sartini nuryoto2, husnul khotimah rustam3, alifiana hildaratri2, daniel ugih echoh4 1faculty of teacher training and education, universitas ahmad dahlan, indonesia 2magister of psychology, universitas ahmad dahlan, indonesia 3faculty of nurse and midwifery, institut teknologi kesehatan dan sains muhammadiyah sidrap, indonesia 4faculty of social science, universiti malaysia sarawak, malaysia corresponding author: mujidin@psy.uad.ac.id introduction bullying is one of the most common social problems worldwide, including in indonesia. bullying behavior is defined as acts of intimidation such as pushing, hitting, kicking, namecalling, teasing in a hurtful way, threats, gossiping, group exclusion, denying friendship, telling lies to isolate others intentionally, and aggression that makes the victim helpless (dardiri et al., 2020). cyberbullying is the most prominent social problem in the 21st century, which originates from digital media such as cell phones, computers, or tablets (muralidharan & la ferle, 2018). cyberbullying is characterized by aggressive actions against individuals or groups who cannot defend themselves or are weak (steffgen et al., 2011). the negative impact of cyberbullying is very distressing for most parties (schultze-krumbholz et al., 2016). therefore, prevention and curation are needed for cyberbullying as an act of violence (utomo et al., 2020) in the 21st century, bullying has evolved into cybercrime via the internet or electronic devices. threatening comments, accessing and misusing data, and distributing personal information on the internet without permission are all part of cyberbullying (kowalski et al., art icle info ab st r act article history received may 7, 2022 revised january 30, 2023 accepted february 10, 2023 anxiety, anger, sadness, and other negative emotions are the harmful effect of bullying, especially in today's digital era. many cases of bullying happen through social media, often associated with cyberbullying. therefore, cyberbullying is increasingly common and requires control as early as possible. this study aims to identify the role of students’ emotion regulation and empathy in cyberbullying behavior. the participants are 64 university students who tend to commit cyberbullying, chosen with the cluster random sampling technique. three measurement tools, cyberbullying scale, emotion regulation scale, and empathy scale, were used in this study. data were then analyzed with multiple linear regression analysis. our finding reveals that emotion regulation significantly predicts cyberbullying, but empathy is not predicting cyberbullying. emotion regulation allows students to keep their composure, control their words and action according to prevailing customs and norms and avoid showing aggression to people. emotion regulation can help students to break the chain of cyberbullying. keywords cyberbullying; emotion regulation; empathy. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humantias.v20i1.72 mailto:mujidin@psy.uad.ac.id 22 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) mujidin et al. (the role of emotion regulation and empathy…) 2014). cyberbullying is an act of oppression by sending or posting messages meant to criticize, offend, belittle, or intimidate someone through electronic or digital media (alavi et al., 2015; van geel et al., 2014). cyberbullying includes posting harsh words, vulgarity, and insults to others; sending repeated malicious and threatening messages; posting gossip aimed at damaging someone's reputation; pretending to be someone else and making posts to tarnish someone's image; sending or posting confidential information and images to embarrass, excluding and removing someone from social media groups, and stalking someone on social media to send threatening messages. cyberbullying has adverse effects, such as increased symptoms of depression and anxiety (navarro et al., 2015). therefore, cyberbullying could also be the cause of suicide among teenagers (van geel et al., 2014). victims of cyberbullying reported more suicidal thoughts than victims of physical or verbal bullying (hay & meldrum, 2010; hinduja & patchin, 2010; schneider et al., 2012). when someone commits cyberbullying, he indirectly commits aggression and immoral actions causing victims of bullying to feel stressed and has suicidal thoughts (kowalski et al., 2014). victims of cyberbullying also feel stress and psychological pressure (sampasa-kanyinga & hamilton, 2015). individuals stressed due to cyberbullying may attempt suicide (gonzález-cabrera et al., 2017). as well as bullying is often associated with suicidal thoughts because individuals feel intimidated by their environment (hinduja & patchin, 2010). this intimidation from bullies reduces self-esteem and increases hopelessness and loneliness in individuals, causing victims to consider their lives worthless and think of ending their lives by suicide. a previous study investigated cyberbullying in children aged 12-14 (mawardah & adiyanti, 2014). meanwhile, this study focuses on individuals aged 20-23 years, a pretty complicated phase as a period of life crisis. individuals begin to worry about other people's opinions or views of themselves, so they easily respond to other people's responses with aggressive actions. individuals can be protected from cyberbullying by implementing empathy (izzah et al., 2019). past studies found that empathy negatively correlates with cyberbullying (sticca & perren, 2013). with empathy, individuals feel the suffering and weaknesses of others, discouraging or preventing them from cyberbullying. empathy was described using four aspects, warmth, tenderness, caring, and pity (park et al., 2022). warmth consists of love and affection given to others. tenderness is indicated by gentle speech, treating someone well, and nurturing behaviors. caring included assistance, appreciation, and sharing. lastly, pity is indicated by pity and sadness when seeing others’ difficulties. this current study contributes more to studying cyberbullying by including emotion regulation as a predictor. anxiety and depression are among the harmful effects of cyberbullying that require psychological intervention, namely by improving the ability to regulate emotions. emotion regulation enables individuals to choose situations, then channel attention to responding to problems calmly (adiyanti et al., 2020). individuals are more likely to accumulate positive emotions to deal with cyberbullying. emotion regulation allows individuals to learn and be flexible in stressful situations like cyberbullying (young et al., 2019). therefore, emotion regulation and empathy may predict cyberbullying among students. method research design this study was conducted using a quantitative approach. a non-experimental quantitative design was applied in this study. emotion regulation and empathy are tested as predictors of cyberbullying. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 23 mujidin et al. (the role of emotion regulation and empathy…) participants the participants of this study were university students. from the data collection, 70 students were taken. seventy students from seven classes consisting of 35 males and 35 females participated in this study. six participants were eliminated because of their inconsistency in filling in the scales. due to the pandemic, the questionnaire was distributed online by contacting a representative of each class. instruments three measurement tools were used in this research: cyberbullying scale, emotion regulation scale, and empathy scale. for each scale, participants would be asked to indicate their response from the following response choices: strongly agree (sa), agree (a), neutral (n), disagree (d), or strongly disagree (sd). favorable items are scored from 5 (sa) to 1 (sd). on the contrary, unfavorable items are scored from 1 (sa) to 5 (sd). cyberbullying scale contains 14 favorable and 14 unfavorable items. the scale was developed based on seven aspects (espelage et al., 2012). the aspects are flaming, harassment, denigration, impersonation, outing, trickery, and exclusion. the item discrimination index ranged from .346 to .811. the reliability coefficient of the scale is .927. emotion regulation scale comprises 19 favorable and 16 unfavorable items. the scale was developed based on five aspects (gullone & taffe, 2012). the aspects are situation selection (i.e., regulating desired emotion), situation modification (i.e., reducing the strong influence of the emotions that arise), attentional deployment (i.e., diverting one’s attention from what elicited the emotion), cognitive change (i.e., making positive reappraisal about the incoming stimulus), and response modulation (i.e., by regulating and displaying appropriate emotional responses. the item discrimination index ranged from .321 to .802. the reliability coefficient of the scale is .939. empathy scale consists of 14 favorable and 15 unfavorable items, developed based on four aspects (totan et al., 2012). the aspects are warmth, tenderness, caring, and pity. the item discrimination index ranged from .373 to .784. the reliability of the scale is .952. data analysis a multiple linear regression analysis was conducted to test the hypothesis. the regression analysis was applied to explore whether the predictors significantly predict cyberbullying. the contribution of each predictor was also examined. results table 1 shows the result of the multiple regression analysis. together, emotion regulation and empathy significantly predict cyberbullying (f=9.547; p<.001). this finding indicates that the research hypothesis is accepted. table 1 hypothesis testing of emotion regulation and empathy on cyberbullying variable f r r square emotion regulation, empathycyberbullying 9.547 .488 .238 table 2 shows that emotion regulation significantly negatively impacts cyberbullying (beta=.486; p<.001). this result indicates the higher level of emotion regulation, the lower cyberbullying will be. conversely, the lower level of emotional regulation, the higher the cyberbullying will be. however, empathy does not predict cyberbullying (beta=036; p>.05). 24 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) mujidin et al. (the role of emotion regulation and empathy…) table 2 hypothesis testing of the contribution of predictors on cyberbullying variable beta p emotion regulationcyberbullying -.486 .000 empathycyberbullying .036 .751 discussion this study aimed to determine the role of emotion regulation and empathy in cyberbullying among university students. emotion regulation has a significant negative effect on cyberbullying. the result indicates that the higher one's emotional regulation, the lower the cyberbullying. conversely, the lower one's emotional regulation, the higher the cyberbullying the finding on the role of emotion regulation in cyberbullying is in line with a previous study that a person who is able to regulate their emotion may avoid cyberbullying (adiyanti et al., 2020). individuals who can control their emotions through social expectations will be able to suppress the desire to attack someone with harsh words on social media. therefore, when an individual comes across their peers or strangers on social media with a different opinion from what they believe, the desire to attack that person personally can be controlled. an individual with good emotion regulation may avoid excessive emotions during an unfavorable situation. emotional regulation is a shield to avoid all forms of cyberbullying, e.g., harsh words (turliuc et al., 2020). emotion regulation plays a vital role in preventing cyberbullying. through emotion regulation, individuals are able to prevent and reduce aggressive behavior so as not to harm others. the ability to regulate emotions includes diverting concentration when coming across unpleasant or hurtful posts about others. the diversion may regulate and control the direction of an action. when a negative emotion is about to burst, the diversion plays a role in defusing that emotion. in line with the study by (wigati et al., 2020), the higher one’s emotional regulation, the less likely one would engage in cyberbullying. an individual tries not to excessively express anger or negative emotions to the bully (méndez et al., 2019). before responding to a bully or being a bully, a person applies effective strategies. the strategies include regulating emotions as desired, reducing the strong influence of the emotions that arise, diverting attention from the things that evoke emotions, changing the way of thinking to be more positive, and regulating and displaying emotional responses as appropriate. a previous study found that emotion regulation cannot manipulate cyberbullying (den hamer & konijn, 2016). this finding contradicts this study in which emotion regulation can influence cyberbullying. these two findings could be due to differences in a cultural context and the diversity of western cultural values. cultural values that instill emotion regulation from an early age could help diminish any form of cyberbullying. individuals can become calmer and better at suppressing their anger when encountering unpleasant posts or comments on social media. for future research, other positive internal regulation variables can be involved. the finding also shows empathy has no significant role in cyberbullying. this result indicates empathy does not affect cyberbullying. a previous study also found that empathy does not play an active role in cyberbullying y (wigati et al., 2020). however, the results of this study contrast the results of previous studies where empathy is effective in mitigating cyberbullying (ang et al., 2017; martínez et al., 2020; schultze-krumbholz & scheithauer, 2013; steffgen et al., 2011). people who do not empathize are more likely to cyberbully. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 25 mujidin et al. (the role of emotion regulation and empathy…) the implication of the finding of this study, students are expected to improve their emotional regulation to prevent cyberbullying. practicing emotional regulation may lower cyberbullying. therefore, the lecturers and family need to collaborate to enhance students' ability to regulate their emotions. lecturers can provide teaching materials accompanied by the dangers and impacts of cyberbullying, then educate about emotional regulation to prevent cyberbullying practices and be wise in using social media. universities can provide education on the danger of cyberbullying and how to improve students’ emotional regulation. they can provide training or seminar on emotion regulation and cyberbullying to avoid the practice of such behavior. this study has a limitation, which is the possible response bias. several patterns of response that a few respondents did were found. this condition could happen when respondents are in a hurry, unfocused, or deliberately answered normatively. conclusion emotion regulation is a significant predictor of cyberbullying. emotional regulation enables individuals to control themselves and mentally deal with bullies. individuals feel better with emotion regulation, so there is no fear or a collection of negative emotions. individuals have more positive emotions so that they are able to strengthen themselves from various harsh words and intimidation from bullies. in turn, individuals who do not feel oppressed and are calmer to face the challenges ahead will not intend to do cyberbullying. however, this study's finding suggests that empathy has no role in cyberbullying. in other words, empathy is not predict cyberbullying. acknowledgment we want to thank university students who have taken their time and are willing to be our respondents. declarations author contribution. m develops the research idea, supervises the research implementation, and assists in writing the report and publication. sn develops the research idea and supervises the implementation of the research. hkr analyzes the data and drafts the article publication. ah develops research design, implements research in the field, and writes the results. due supervises the drafting and writing the manuscript for publication. funding statement. we use personal funds collectively to commit to production funding and human resources. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references adiyanti, m. g., nugraheni, a. a., yuliawanti, r., ragasukmasuci, l. b., & maharani, m. 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(2019). positive and negative emotion regulation in adolescence: links to anxiety and depression. brain sciences, 9(4), 76. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci9040076 https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci9040076 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 19 (2), august 2022, 122-128 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i2.9 differences in health beliefs and behavior compliance of the patients with chronic renal failure jehan safitri, miranda seftiana, rusdi rusli, muhammad rezki department of psychology, lambung mangkurat university, indonesia corresponding author: j.safitri@ulm.ac.id introduction renal failure is the acute deterioration of renal function (recurrence) and chronic condition. from this condition, kidney disease will develop into a chronic renal failure condition, a progressive and irreversible end-stage disease in which the body's ability fails to maintain the metabolism and balance of fluid and electrolytes, thus occurring uremia (rostanti et al., 2016). according to pranandari and supadmi (2015), chronic renal failure progressively and slowly worsens renal failure. this condition happens since the kidney loses the ability to maintain the volume and composition of body fluid in a normal diet. in indonesia, the number of chronic renal failure patients is rising rapidly, becoming a devastating medical, social, and economic problem for patients and their families (prodjosudjadi & suhardjono, 2009). patients with chronic renal failure need hemodialysis, peritoneal dialysis, and hemofiltration treatment. the length of treatment depends on the causes and extent of the kidney damage (sukarwanto & m., 2014). rostanti et al. (2016) state that behavior compliance is related to long-term treatment, which commonly makes the patients feel worried about their unpredictable illness and disruption in their lives. long hemodialysis often eliminates one’s spirit of life, affecting dialysis compliance (guerra, 2020). ardani et al. (2007) define behavior compliance as the level of patient willingness to carry out the treatment and behavior suggested by their doctor or other people. behavior compliance in the treatment or therapy process begins with a person's belief in the seriousness of his illness, leading to action for treatment even though it is overshadowed by the risks or art icle info ab st r act article history received june 18, 2020 revised july 27, 2021 accepted february 22, 2022 health belief is about a patient’s belief that vulnerability and treatment efficacy can affect health behavior decisions. this research investigated the difference in behavior compliance of patients with chronic renal failure based on gender and health beliefs' contribution to it. the sample of this research was 30 male and 30 female renal failure patients at brigjend h. hasan basry hospital. data was collected by behavior compliance scale and health belief scale. multivariate analysis was used to analyze the data. the results show a significant relationship between male and female patients' health beliefs and behavior compliance. the health belief of male patients is higher than female patients, while the behavior compliance of female patients is higher than males. it can be concluded that health and gender are factors affecting behavior compliance. therefore, paramedics may increase patients' health beliefs to enhance behavior compliance, especially among female patients with chronic renal failure. keywords behavior compliance; chronic renal failure; health belief; patient. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i2.31 mailto:j.safitri@ulm.ac.id humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 123 safitri et.al (differences in health beliefs and behavior compliance of the patients with chronic renal failure) side effects of the action. health belief and behavior compliance behavior are interrelated. non-compliance with medications can be reviewed from doses, ways of taking the drug, time to take medicine, and the period of taking the medication accordingly (gokoel et al., 2020). the physical organ of the kidneys is a sieve or blood filter in the body. blood flows into the kidneys, and the fluids in the blood come out through glomeruli. the kidneys also maintain a fluid balance in the body (kerthyasa, 2013). both kidneys are depressed during inspiration due to the diaphragm contraction (yasmine, 2009). according to kerthyasa (2013), human life aims to achieve a perfect balance. homeostasis involves the work of heart rate, body temperature, metabolic arrangement, death and organization of cells, digestion, and others to achieve balance in the body (paul et al., 2021). not only from within the body, but people also pursue the balance of the surrounding environment, such as working, establishing social relationships, and praying to balance spiritual life. the five dimensions of health are physical, social, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual (maulana, 2009). on the physical dimension, human health is related to practicing positive lifestyles. the physical dimension includes the ability to complete daily tasks, fitness achievement (such as cardiovascular, lung, and gastrointestinal), adequate nutrients, and the accuracy of the body's proportion of fat deposits, free from drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes. the social dimension includes interacting well with others and their environment. emotional, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions include managing stress, expressing emotions appropriately, growing and adapting effectively to change, and believing in strength. the dimensions of health are intertwined to form a healthy, holistic condition. kerthyasa (2013) describes health as a condition when all components of the body, mind, soul, and environment function harmoniously. the body, mind, soul, and environment are mutually supportive; therefore, when the condition is not balanced or not functioning correctly, it will cause pain (chauhan & maheshwari, 2021). the human mind relates to health problems or disease experiences (assegaf, 2011). discomfort in the body results from a negative mental attitude and affects emotions characterized by always lamenting difficulties, grieving because of illness, and not believing in healing. health belief confirms that a person's perception of vulnerability and treatment will affect one's decision on behavior of health (setyaningsih et al., 2016). self-checking is included in the function of personal beliefs about the magnitude of the threat of illness and its transmission and the benefits of recommendations given by health officers (sampa et al., 2020). perceived threat based on belief in the disease seriousness according to the symptoms arose and the person vulnerable to the disease. individuals then assess the benefits of the treatment action and take risks, such as side effects or medical expenses. the differences in adherence behavior among patients with chronic renal failure undergoing hemodialysis have been studied. however, no study yet on health beliefs and gender differences in behavior compliance. previous study at dr. hospital. pringadi medan found that the highest proportion of patients with chronic kidney failure (ckd) was male, 54.7% (ningsih et al., 2012). therefore, this study aimed to investigate the different levels of behavior compliance of male and female patients with chronic renal failure and its correlation with the health belief of the patients in the process of hemodialysis at brigjen h. hasan basry kandangan hospital method participants the population in this research was 93 patients with chronic renal failure that underwent hemodialysis at brigjen h. hasan basry kandangan hospital, 50 male and 43 female, respectively. the research sample was 60 patients consisting of 30 males and 30 females. the inclusion criteria are: (1) patients with chronic renal failure had been diagnosed at least three 124 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) safitri et.al (differences in health beliefs and behavior compliance of the patients with chronic venal failure) months; (2) the patients are undertreatment with hemodialysis 2-3 times a week; (3) the patients aged from 15 to 45 years old. instruments this research used a quantitative method with a questionnaire as the instrument. the data was collected using a likert scale consisting of a behavior compliance scale and a health belief scale. the behavior compliance scale was developed based on the aspects proposed by niven (safitri, 2013). the aspects consist of the level of patients undergoing treatment according to the rules and the level of patients in carrying out their recommended or ordered behavior. after a field trial, 32 items can be used for the data collection with good reliability (α = .971). the health belief scale consists of perceived vulnerability, perceived severity, perceived benefits, perceived barriers, cues to action, and self-efficacy (glanz et al., 2008). after a field trial, 43 items can be used for the data collection with good reliability (α = .956). procedure the data collection was conducted in the morning and afternoon after patients underwent dialysis. if the questionnaire was not filled, the patients could continue to the next dialysis session. the authors explained the purpose of the research and ensured the patients did not affect medical service if patients had not been involved in the study. therefore, the patients were voluntarily involved. the authors were guided by the internist, general practitioner, head of the hemodialysis installation, and nurse during the data collection. after filling out the questionnaire, the patient was given follow-up counseling about health beliefs or behavior compliance. data analysis multivariate analysis or manova was applied to analyze the data with spss. multivariate analysis is applied to analyze multi variables in one or more relationships (santoso, 2017). all manova tests are described as a e 1 and relate to all statistic techniques that simultaneously analyze several measurements in an individual. results based on table 1, there is a significant value of interaction of gender with the health belief (p < .05) and with behavior compliance (p < .05). the results indicate differences between health belief and behavior compliance based on gender of the patients. table 1 differences in health belief and behavior compliance based on gender source variable type iii sum of squares df mean square f p gender health belief 12,906.667 1 12,906.667 94.874 .000 behavior compliance 17,035.350 1 17,035.350 83.462 .000 based on table 2, the average value of health belief among male and female patients is 144.50 and 117.17, respectively. these results indicate that based on the average, the health belief of male patients undergoing hemodialysis is higher than female patients. on the contrary, based on the average, the behavior compliance of female patients is higher than male patients, which is 148.20 and 117.83. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 125 safitri et.al (differences in health beliefs and behavior compliance of the patients with chronic renal failure) table 2 statistic description of health belief and behavior compliance based on gender variable gender average standard deviation health belief male 144.50 12.883 female 117.17 15.564 behavior compliance male 117.83 11.086 female 148.20 12.214 table 3 shows health belief of male patients contributes significantly to behavior compliance (f = 6.867; p = .002). it can be concluded that health belief has a significant role in male patients' behavior compliance. table 3 the contribution of health belief on behavior compliance among male patients source dependent variable type iii sum of squares df mean square f p men’s health belief men’s behavior compliance 3,237.750 18 179.875 6.062 .002 woman’s behavior compliance 2,460.000 18 146.667 .957 .549 table 4 shows the contribution of health belief to behavior compliance among female patients is significant (f = 6.6867; p = .037). therefore, it can be concluded that the health belief of female patients significantly contributes to behavior compliance. table 4 the contribution of health belief on behavior compliance among female patients source dependent variable type iii sum of squares df mean square f p woman’s health belief male’s behavior compliance 2,738.667 25 109.547 .531 .855 female’s behavior compliance 4,227.667 25 169.107 6.867 .037 discussion based on the data analysis, health belief contributes significantly to behavior compliance among male or female patients. health belief relates to the behavior of patient's behavior compliance because individuals who feel vulnerable and threatened with a symptom of the disease will decide more quickly on the treatment. individu threatened by the disease symptoms and believe the good of treatment is more significant than the obstacles certainly will not postpone or prevent the treatment process (sarafino & smith, 2014). on the other hand, patients not feeling threatened by the disease will see that obstacles are more prominent, so they probably call off or even prevent them. the analysis shows differences in health beliefs and behavior compliance among patients with chronic renal failure based on gender. male patients with chronic renal failure have higher health beliefs than females, while the behavior compliance of the male patients is lower than that of female patients. the occupation factor may influence male patients to take responsibility for their jobs due to financial issues. males tend not to use health services, especially in adolescence and early adulthood, for those who come from underprivileged 126 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) safitri et.al (differences in health beliefs and behavior compliance of the patients with chronic venal failure) (sarafino & smith, 2014). a male patient can postpone or stop the treatment process due to financial factors though they believe in the effectiveness of treatment. other than health beliefs and gender, several factors affect on behavior compliance of patients to treatment. this factor includes cost, the effectiveness of hemodialysis, patients' perception of vulnerability, relatives' support, and the relationship between patient and medical personnel. this finding aligns with kamran et al. (2014) that behavior compliance is low because of vulnerability, symptoms, low perceived severity, bad lifestyle, perception of drugs, and access to health services. this study's limitation is not all patients met the criteria involved. some patients have unstable conditions, while others refuse to be involved, so only 60 patients with chronic renal failure could be involved. therefore further research with a higher number of samples is needed. conclusion health belief contributes significantly to behavior compliance among male and female chronic renal failure patients undergoing hemodialysis. health belief relates to behavior compliance because individuals who feel vulnerable and threatened with a disease symptom will decide more quickly on the treatment. moreover, there is a difference in health beliefs and behavioral compliance in male and female patients with chronic renal failure. health belief among male patients with chronic renal failure is higher than that of females. in comparison, behavior compliance among female patients is higher than that of males. therefore health beliefs and gender are important in predicting behavior compliance among chronic renal failure patients undergoing hemodialysis. acknowledgment the authors acknowledge lambung mangkurat university for approving the ethical clearance of this study. declarations author contribution. js contributed toward developing the research idea, literature review, data analysis, & drafting of the manuscript. ms contributed toward developing the research idea, literature review, & drafting of the manuscript. rr contributed toward developing the instrument, data analysis, & drafting of the manuscript. mr contributed toward collecting data & finishing the final manuscript. funding statement. the researchers themselves funded the research.. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references ardani, t. a., rahayu, i. t., & solichatun, y. 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(2009). the renal system at a glance. penerbit erlangga. http://www.thejhpb.com/index.php?journal=thejhpb&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=23&path%5b%5d=26 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 19 (2), august 2022, 101-108 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i2.44 work engagement of high-risk occupation employees: the role of selfefficacy and perceived organizational support aulia aulia, atika rahmawati, selvi novia sari faculty of psychology, universitas ahmad dahlan, indonesia corresponding author: aulia@psy.uad.ac.id introduction the united nations international strategy of disaster reduction (unisdr) explained that indonesia was ranked first globally, with 4,535 fatalities caused by natural disasters in 2018. the meteorology, climatology, and geophysics agency (bmkg, 2019) conveyed the data that indonesia has always had a high potential for natural disasters. therefore, the role of an institution in handling disasters that occur in indonesia is crucial. one of the institutions established in the disaster management context in indonesia is national agency for disaster countermeasure, as a non-ministerial government institution responsible and under the president and is led by the head. the national agency for disaster countermeasure focuses on finding, helping, and saving the lost human lives, which are open to being lost, facing danger in shipping and aviation disasters or other disasters. therefore, the work as an employee of the national agency for disaster countermeasure is an occupation with high demands and risks. art icle info ab st r act article history received: november 3, 2021 revised: july 7, 2022 accepted: july 29, 2022 engagement is vital for every employee at work, especially in occupations with high demands and risks, such as national agency for disaster countermeasure employees. this study aimed to test the contribution of self-efficacy and perceived organizational support on work engagement among employees of the national agency for disaster countermeasure. a quantitative correlational approach was applied in this study, with the population being national agency for disaster countermeasure in the special region of yogyakarta and central java employees in a minimum of a one-year working period. eighty-eight national search and rescue agency employees participated in this study after selecting through a purposive sampling technique. the data was collected using the modified utrecht work engagement scale (uwes), self-efficacy scale, and perceived organizational support scale and was then analyzed with multiple linear regression. the results show self-efficacy and perceived organizational support contribute simultaneously to work engagement. self-efficacy positively contributes to work engagement; likewise, perceived organizational support positively contributes to work engagement. therefore, this study concludes that self-efficacy and perceived organizational support contribute to work engagement. moreover, perceived organizational support contributes more to work engagement than self-efficacy. to enhance work engagement among employees of high-risk occupations, perceived organizational support is needed more than self-efficacy. keywords high-risk occupations; perceived organizational support; self-efficacy; work engagement. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i2.44 mailto:aulia@psy.uad.ac.id 102 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) aulia et al. (work engagement of high-risk occupation employees: the role of…) psychologically, individuals' high demands, tasks, and risks will likely make them experience burnout. bakker et al. (2014) stated burnout occurs due to increased job demands. however, when workers have high work engagement, workers will tend to be able to survive and not experience burnout. this argument aligns with what was conveyed by bakker & leiter (2010) that workers with high work engagement will have resilience and are not easily burnout at work, even though their work is categorized as a high-risk occupation (christianty & widyaningtanti, 2016). therefore, work engagement is essential for individuals, especially those who work with high demands or risks. regarding work engagement, schaufeli et al. (2002) describe work engagement as a positive, satisfying state of mind and a condition where individuals are bound to work characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption. vigor is a spirit characterized by energy and high mental resilience, a desire to work, and determination even in the face of adversity. dedication is a reasonably strong involvement in work characterized by enthusiasm, inspiration, pride, and a feeling of being challenged in working. while the last dimension is absorption, it is characterized by a concentration filled with pleasure when doing the work; it seems that time passes quickly, and they feel somewhat challenging to detach from their occupation (schaufeli et al., 2006). gallup (2013) explains that individual engagement in work will affect individual performance, such as low rate of absence, low turnover, low work safety incidents, and increased productivity and profits. in addition, robinson et al. (2004) also reveal that the behaviors shown by individuals with high work engagement include having positive thoughts about work and the organization and having a sense of trust in the organization. similarly, kahn (1990) explains that engaged workers will make various work efforts because they identify themselves with the work. work engagement is influenced by several factors, including personal resources (bakker & demerouti, 2008). furthermore, self-efficacy is an important factor in personal resources (bakker & leiter, 2010). bakker & leiter (2010) revealed that high self-efficacy would also affect high employee work engagement. parallel to the statement, aulia et al. (2019) explained that self-efficacy has a positive relationship with the work engagement of the indonesian army members. tanurezal & tumanggor (2020) found a similar research result among teachers. andamari (2020) also revealed that self-efficacy positively correlates with work engagement. accordingly, high confidence from individuals toward their ability to complete tasks or overcome problems at work will make individuals more motivated to behave and engage with their work. individuals' beliefs determine how they can feel, think, motivate, and conduct (feist & feist, 2009). another factor influencing one's engagement is the organization's role (steers & porter, 1991). organizational factors, in this case, are related to the support such as contributions, care, and welfare provided by the organization to workers, which is called perceived organizational support. saks (2006) stated that work engagement is influenced by perceived organizational support (pos). the results of previous research showed a positive correlation between perceptions of organizational support and the work engagement of the indonesian army members (aulia et al., 2019). similarly, previous research also found that perceived organizational support has a direct and positive relationship with work engagement (sulea et al., 2012; tanudjaja, 2013). organizations that pay attention to and care about employee welfare make employees more developed and engage employees in the company (dabke & patole, 2014). previous research results show that self-efficacy and perceived organizational support affect work engagement. therefore, in this study, the contribution of self-efficacy and humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 103 aulia et al. (work engagement of high-risk occupation employees: the role of…) perceived organizational support to work engagement will be examined in other jobs related to high-risk jobs among the national agency for disaster countermeasure employees. this study is essential as no previous research has been conducted among national agency for disaster countermeasure employees. based on the previous explanation, this study aimed to determine the contribution of self-efficacy and perceived organizational support to the work engagement of the national agency for disaster countermeasure employees in the special region of yogyakarta and central java. method a quantitative approach with a correlational design was applied in this study. the aim was to explore the contribution of each predictor variable to the criterion variable. participants the population in this study were employees of the national agency for disaster countermeasure in the special region of yogyakarta and central java with a minimum oneyear working period. in this study, purposive sampling was applied. therefore, the sample in this study were employees of the national agency for disaster countermeasure who worked in the rescuer or operations and standby section in the special region of yogyakarta and central java. the rescuers were selected as research samples because they had the highest job demands and risks compared to other fields. the sample consists of 88 national search and rescue agency employees representing the special region of yogyakarta and central java rescuers. instruments three scales were used to collect the data in this study. the adopted utrecht work engagement scale (uwes) (aulia et al., 2019), based on vigor, dedication, and absorption dimensions (schaufeli & bakker, 2003), was used to measure work engagement. the adopted uwes has a reliability coefficient of α=.898. the measurement of self-efficacy attributes used the adopted self-efficacy scale (aulia et al., 2019), based on self-efficacy dimensions consisting of level, strength, and generality (bandura, 1997). the adopted self-efficacy scale has a reliability coefficient of α=.873. meanwhile, the perceived organizational support attributes were measured with the adopted perceived organizational support scale (aulia et al., 2019) based on dimensions of justice, supervisor support, and awards from the organization and working conditions (rhoades & eisenberger, 2002). the reliability coefficient of the adopted perceived organizational support scale is α=.913. based on the reliability coefficients of the three scales, the study deduced that the three instruments are reliable and feasible to be used in this study. data analysis multiple regression analysis was applied to analyze the data with spss software. the multiple regression analysis was conducted to explore the contribution of each predictor variable to the criterion variable. 104 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) aulia et al. (work engagement of high-risk occupation employees: the role of…) results the analysis results show the coefficient value of r=.570, f=20.405 (p<.01). these results reveal that self-efficacy and perceived organizational support simultaneously contributed to the work engagement among employees of the national search and rescue agency in the special region of yogyakarta and central java. furthermore, the effective contribution of self-efficacy and perceived organizational support to work engagement is 32.4%. table 1 shows the results of the partial analysis. table 1 product moment correlation variable β t r self-efficacy*work engagement .360 3.953** .437** perceived organizational support*work engagement .374 4.101** .447** self-efficacy affects work engagement, with β=.360 and t=3.953 (p<.01). furthermore, perceived organizational support also affects work engagement, with β=.374 and t=4.101 (p<.01). the analysis was followed by testing the partial relationship between each independent variable and the dependent variable. the pearson product-moment correlation test of self-efficacy with work engagement is r=.437 (p<.01). the result implies self-efficacy has a significant positive relationship with work engagement. meanwhile, pearson's productmoment correlation test of perceived organizational support and work engagement is r=.447 (p<.01). the result means perceived organizational support has a significant positive relationship with work engagement. the analysis process is continued by processing the sample data into categories based on descriptive statistics. table 2 shows the categorization of each variable. the majority of respondents have high work engagement, high selfefficacy, and positive perceived organizational support, with 64.77%, 76.14%, and 62.50%, respectively. table 2 descriptive data variable interval frequency percentage (%) categories work engagement x < 24 2 2.28 low 24 ≤ x < 48 29 32.95 average x ≥ 48 57 64.77 high self-efficacy x < 16 0 0 low 16 ≤ x < 32 21 23.86 average x ≥ 32 67 76.14 high perceived organizational support x < 16 3 3.41 negative 16 ≤ x < 32 30 34.09 neutral x ≥ 32 55 62.50 positive discussion the study results revealed that self-efficacy and perceived organizational support simultaneously contribute to work engagement among national search and rescue agency employees as part of the national agency for disaster countermeasure. this finding explains humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 105 aulia et al. (work engagement of high-risk occupation employees: the role of…) that high job demands do not always cause workers to experience burnout and low work engagement, as bakker et al. (2014). not all jobs with high demands and risks cause workers to experience burnout, so they have low work engagement. furthermore, increasing workers' self-efficacy and positive perceptions of the organization's support can enhance employees' work engagement in high-risk jobs. this study's results correspond to the previous study among the indonesian army that self-efficacy and perceived organizational support were jointly proven to have a relationship with work engagement (aulia et al., 2019) the categorization of work engagement among employees of the national search and rescue agency in the special region of yogyakarta and central java shows that most employees have high work engagement, followed by quiet engage and low work engagement, 64.77%, 32.95%, and 2.28%, respectively. based on this classification, it can be concluded that employees of the national search and rescue agency in the special region of yogyakarta and central java tend to have a reasonably high work engagement. the study results indicate that the high demands and risks of occupation do not always lead individuals to low work engagement. on the contrary, high engagement can minimize the influence of high task demands. bakker & demerouti (2008) stated that work engagement could minimize work demands, leading to burnout. it means the organizations comprising employees with high work engagement can maintain and improve performance, even though the conditions around their work are not conducive. this study's results show high occupational demands and risks of being an employee of the national search and rescue agency in the special region of yogyakarta and central java do not cause burnout, which is the opposite of work engagement. this finding contradicts the previous theories (bakker et al., 2014; bakker & leiter, 2010). the high demands of work and the risk of work do not always affect a person's low engagement in their work. burnout will be lower when individuals have high work engagement, even though individuals work in high demands and risk situations. the results also show that self-efficacy has a positive relationship with work engagement. this study result is in line with a previous study that found self-efficacy positively related to work engagement among norwegian principals (federici & skaalvik, 2011). the results of previous research among bank employees in east china showed that employees with high self-efficacy would be more engaged in their work, make more effort, and be excellent in their duties, which should improve their work (tian et al., 2019). the categorization of self-efficacy among employees of the national search and rescue agency in the special region of yogyakarta and central java shows that most employees have high self-efficacy (76.13%), followed by medium self-efficacy (23.86%). none of the employees has low self-efficacy. thus, the national search and rescue agency in the special region of yogyakarta and central java employees' high self-efficacy indicates they have confidence in their ability to complete every job, from the easy to the most challenging jobs. the strength or weakness of the national search and rescue agency employees' beliefs about their abilities can affect whether they will engage or disengage with their work. as bakker & demerouti (2008) stated, self-efficacy is one factor that affects work engagement. it means that when employees' self-efficacy in carrying out their work is relatively strong, they will more engage with it, and vice versa. the results also show that perceived organizational support positively correlates with work engagement. this finding is in line with saks (2006) that perceived organizational support is one-factor influencing work engagement. the results of this study conform with the previous research results, including a study conducted by aulia et al. (2019) with research samples of indonesian army members that perceived organizational support 106 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) aulia et al. (work engagement of high-risk occupation employees: the role of…) positively correlates with work engagement. perceived organizational support is the degree to which employees believe the organization values their contribution and cares about their well-being (robbins & judge, 2017). when the organization pays attention and cares for the welfare of employees, employees will give positive feedback to the organization to carry out their responsibilities. based on the categorization, most of the national search and rescue agency in the special region of yogyakarta and central java employees have perceived organizational support in the positive category, followed by the neutral and negative categories, 62.5%, 34.09%, and 3.40%, respectively. the national search and rescue agency employees in the special region of yogyakarta and central java tend to have a positive perception of all support provided by the organization, which in the end has implications for the high engagement in their work. however, the limited sample in this study impacted the generalization of the results limited only to workers whose types of work were relatively the same as employees of the national search and rescue agency as part of the national agency for disaster countermeasure. therefore, further studies need to be conducted on a broader population and more varied types of work. conclusion among employees of the national search and rescue agency in the special region of yogyakarta and central java, self-efficacy and perceived organizational support simultaneously contribute to work engagement. this study explains that the high confidence of the national search and rescue agency employees in their ability to face difficulties when carrying out their duties and positive perceptions of organizational support is essential to increasing work engagement. thus, having confidence and positive thoughts related to their abilities and towards the organization must be continuously maintained and improved among employees. likewise, self-efficacy positively correlates to the work engagement of the national search and rescue agency in the special region of yogyakarta and central java employees. furthermore, the perceived organizational support positively correlates to the work engagement of the national search and rescue agency in the special region of yogyakarta and central java employees. perceived organizational support has a higher contribution to work engagement than self-efficacy. this study also concludes that not all types of work with high job demands and risks cause workers to be burnout. this study finding shows that the demands of work and the high risk of a job are excellent opportunities for national search and rescue agency employees as part of the national agency for disaster countermeasure. employees will be actively engaged in their work as long as they positively perceive the organizational support and efficacy. acknowledgment the authors want to acknowledge the national search and rescue agency employees for participating as the sample in the study. declarations author contribution. aa: develop research ideas, design study, direct the research process, prepare instruments, reconstruct article, and the revision is under aa's responsibility as a humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 107 aulia et al. 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(2019). self-efficacy and work performance: the role of work engagement. social behavior and personality: an international journal, 47(12), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.2224/sbp.8528. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.4.698 https://doi.org/10.1108/02683940610690169 https://doi.org/10.1177/0013164405282471 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1015630930326 https://doi.org/10.1108/13620431211241054 https://doi.org/10.24912/jmishumsen.v4i2.8635.2020 https://doi.org/10.2224/sbp.8528 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 19 (1), february 2022, 79-86 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://dx.doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i1.19 determinant factors of family welfare among bogor online riders on pandemic covid-19 nikmatul khoiriyah, euis sunarti, melly latifah department of family and consumer science, ipb university, indonesia corresponding author: n.khoiri28@gmail.com introduction in early 2020 world health organization (who) declared corona virus disease 19 (covid-19) as a pandemic and was considered a public health emergency that concerned the world (dong et al., 2020). the virus attacks the lungs with a high transmission rate originated from wuhan, china (yuliana, 2020) and then spread globally, including in indonesia. the quick spreading of the virus has made the number of positive patients in indonesia continue to increase. therefore the indonesian government has begun to implement physical restriction regulations to minimize interaction between communities by limiting the distance of one meter for each individual to reduce the spread of the virus. this physical restriction policy affects people who use online motorbike transportation (hapsari et al., 2021). this policy impacts declining community activity and mobilization in jabodetabek and big cities, resulting in the declining number of passengers on various transportation modes such as airplanes, commuter trains, buses, public transportation, taxis, online taxis, and online motorbikes (hadiwardoyo, 2020). large-scale area restrictions in several areas caused by the pandemic covid-19 make the passenger shuttle feature in the online motorbike application temporarily deactivated. although other services such as food and beverages delivery are still in place, the number of customers decreases, reducing the income of online motorbike drivers and harming their family welfare. a study conducted by art icle info ab st r act article history received june 18, 2020 revised july 27, 2021 accepted february 22, 2022 covid-19 pandemic impacted economic activity, including a decrease in the number of online motorcycle taxi passengers due to large-scale social restrictions. this study aimed to analyze the effect of determinant factors: work source of stress, self-efficacy, coping strategies, and symptoms of stress on the family welfare among online motorcycle taxi drivers. this study also analyzed the differences of all research variables according to years of service (less or more than two years). a cross-sectional design involving 120 online drivers in bogor who were selected by convenience sampling was applied in this study. all research instruments used in data collection have good reliability. data was collected by filling out a structured questionnaire shared with a google form, considering the pandemic conditions. data was analyzed inferentially using spss and smart pls. different test results showed that drivers who worked less than two years had lower earnings before and during the pandemic but performed higher coping strategies than those who worked more than two years. self-efficacy positively affects online motorcycle taxi drivers' family welfare during the pandemic, objectively and subjectively. while work source of stress negatively affects subjective family welfare only. keywords coping strategy; family welfare; online riders; pandemic covid-19; self-efficacy. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://dx.doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i1.7 mailto:n.khoiri28@gmail.com 80 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) khoiriyah et al. (determinant factors of family welfare among bogor online riders on pandemic covid-19) sunarti et al. (2020) showed that the psychological well-being of the family affects family resilience to deal with the covid-19 pandemic. this study explored the determinant factors of family welfare, including work source of stress, self-efficacy, coping strategy, and stress symptoms. stress is a person's response to an imbalance between external and internal events in the face of demands (richardson & rothstein, 2008). the high work demands trigger a person to feel depressed and anxious, but everyone reacts differently to work pressure. workload includes work itself, conflicts between family and work, career development, organizational style, interpersonal relationships, and job roles (wu et al., 2018). riggio (2003) states that work stress is a physiological or psychological reaction to an event that individuals perceive as a threat. a person's confidence in his ability to control situations and produce something beneficial is called self-efficacy. zhao et al. (2015) also stated the importance of self-efficacy to reduce stress and build effective coping strategies. effective coping depends on selfefficacy because it plays an important role in behavior transformation. generally, the coping strategies used in dealing with stress in the workplace focus on problems and emotions. coping strategies that focus on problems are efforts to minimize the pressure by overcoming the problems faced and the environment around the triggers of the pressure. emotional focus coping is applied to cope with stressful situations by regulating their emotions (zakowski et al., 2001). working as an online motorcycle taxi may cause stress in the workplace, affecting the stability of the driver's mind and performance. the stress felt by online motorcycle taxi drivers is thought to affect the welfare of their families because it is directly related to meeting family needs and satisfaction. online motorcycle taxi drivers are workers in non-formal fields. families with unstable (informal) jobs have higher economic pressure, low physical security, welfare, and limited-time managing family resources (sunarti, 2013). therefore, this study aimed to analyze differences and influence of determinant factors including driver characteristics, family characteristics, job characteristics, work source of stress, self-efficacy, coping strategies, and symptoms of stress on family welfare among online motorcycle taxi drivers in the face of the covid-19 pandemic. method research design this study used a cross-sectional design, known as a survey with data collection techniques through field surveys at a certain point and time (notoatmodjo, 2007). the research location was chosen purposively in bogor, west java because it has a large population and has experienced quite high developments in the online transportation sector. the total population of bogor by district is 5.4 million people in 2020 (badan pusat statistik, 2020) and is a support area for capital city. participants the sample of the study is 120 online motorbike drivers in bogor. the average age of online motorbike drivers who became respondents in this study was in the early adult phase, with an average age of 32.46 years. procedure due to the covid-19 pandemic and the current situation, we need to reduce outside activities and restrictions on physical contact. data on family characteristics, online motorbike job characteristics, sources of stress, self-efficacy, coping strategies, stress levels, and family welfare were collected from respondents by filling in online structured questionnaires distributed by social media and carried out from may to june 2020. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 81 khoiriyah et al. (determinant factors of family welfare among bogor online riders on pandemic covid-19) instruments family welfare in this study is divided into objective and subjective and is measured using two different measuring instruments. objective welfare was measured using a questionnaire with eight questions and the cronbach alpha of .608 (sunarti, 2001). subjective welfare was measured using a questionnaire based on physical-economic, social, and psychological dimensions with 29 questions and the cronbach alpha of α = .877 (sunarti, 2001). the questions asked are. data scoring for each answer uses a satisfaction level ranging from 1 to 7. sources of online motorbike drivers' work stress were measured using the job stress scale based on the job itself, role management, interpersonal relationships, organization style, career development, and family work conflict dimensions (wu et al., 2018). the scale consists of 20 items with cronbach alpha = .734. the score applied for each answer are 0 = no; 1 = yes. the modified bandura general self efficacy scale (born et al., 1995) measured selfefficacy. the scale consists of 10 items in a likert scale (0 0 = never; 1 = rarely; 2 = often; 3 = always), with the cronbach alpha of α = .868. the ways of coping strategy questionnaire (lazarus & folkman, 1984) used a likert scale (0 = never; 1 = rarely; 2 = often; 3 = always) to measure coping strategy. the questionnaire consists of two dimensions, focusing on problems and emotions with a value of α = .708. stress symptom variables were measured using a questionnaire by mirowsky & ross (2002) with a value of α = .920. questions are measured on a likert scale (0 = never; 1 = rarely; 2 = often; 3 = always), with two dimensions: malaise and mood. data analysis microsoft excel, statistical package for social science (spss), and smart partial least square (smart pls) were used in data processing and analysis. the analysis carried out included descriptive analysis, difference test, and pls effect test, analyzing data based on the research purpose. in pls-sem, the measurement model is often referred to as the outer model, and the structural model is termed the inner model (hair et al., 2014). test the outer model divided into convergent validity, discriminant validity, and composite reliability. testing the measurement model through the loading factor determines the validity of the indicator by looking at the indicators' value convergent validity. each indicator in the model must meet outer loading >.7, average variance extracted (ave) >.5, and a construct said to be reliable if the composite reliability value is above .60. then the inner model test is based on the rsquare test and the significance of t statistics. results table 1 shows the results of the average and different tests of the characteristic variable of online motorbike drivers. the results show a significant difference between drivers who work ≤ 2 years and > 2 years. drivers who work ≤ 2 years have a lower average age than drivers who work > 2 years. overall, the average age of bogor online motorbike drivers is in the early adult category. different test results also show a significant difference in the wife's age of online motorcycle taxi drivers. the wives of online motorbike drivers who work ≤ 2 years have an average age lower than those of online motorbike drivers who work > 2 years. in addition, significant differences were also found in family size per capita income during the pandemic and the income of online motorbike drivers before or during the pandemic. 82 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) khoiriyah et al. (determinant factors of family welfare among bogor online riders on pandemic covid-19) table 1 average and different of demographic data test based on length of time worked family characteristic length of time worked p-value ≤ 2 years >2 years husband’s age (year) 32.19 34.52 .006*** wife’s age (year) 28.72 31.62 .016*** husband’s education (year) 10.72 10.97 .412 wife’s education (year) 10.35 10.74 .675 family amount 3.28 3.98 .000*** income per capita (before the pandemic) 1187114.19 1638320.70 .000*** income per capita (during the pandemic) 361456.78 351623.73 .709 husband’s income (before the pandemic) 3427777.78 6006818.00 .000*** husband’s income (during the pandemic) 897222.22 1142000.00 .046** ***significantly different at p≤ .01; *at p≤ .05; table 2 shows that among six dimensions of work of stress source, the differences among online motorbike drivers who work ≤ 2 years and > 2 years were found only in the dimensions of family-work conflict. there is no significant difference for drivers who worked ≤ 2 years and > 2 years in self-efficacy, stress symptoms, and family welfare. however, there are differences in emotional focus coping strategies for online motorbike drivers who work ≤ 2 years and > 2 years. the average emotion focus coping strategy for online motorbike drivers who worked ≤ 2 years was higher than the average coping strategy for online motorbike drivers who worked > 2 years. table 2 average and different of variables test based on length of time worked variable length of time worked p ≤ 2 years >2 years work of stress source 67.04±15.87 64.39±15.07 .415 job itself 90.74±12.88 90.15±13.06 .777 role management 36.57±35.25 29.55±33.08 .234 interpersonal relationship 25.93±35.35 21.97±32.96 .580 organizational style 68.52±32.96 74.24±27.72 .435 career development 95.11±16.68 89.94±24.05 .410 family-work conflict 73.65±19.87 66.94±23.87 .082* self-efficacy 70.39±18.36 66.97±17.98 .378 coping strategy 67.70±12.89 62.76±14.03 .039** problem focused 68.74±13.59 67.59±16.53 .705 emotion focused 66.65±18.14 57.00±16.51 .002*** stress symptoms 35.94±19.08 31.80±20.73 .317 malaise 35.81±18.70 31.59±20.81 .328 mood 35.81±24.89 32.32±24.38 .407 objective welfare 53.22±28.49 58.37±23.33 .552 subjective welfare 58.44±13.39 65.72±15.55 .678 physic-economic 55.06±15.58 52.09±17.40 .189 social 84.09±14.75 84.14±19.49 .414 psychology 79.07±16.23 79.26±20.05 .891 ***significantly different at p≤ .01; **at p≤ .05; table 3 shows that self-efficacy has a significant positive direct effect on objective family welfare (β = .195; t> 1.96) and on subjective welfare (β = .294; t> 1.96). this result indicates the more self-efficacy, the more objective and subjective welfare of the online motorcycle taxi workers who participated in this study. the source of work stress has a significant negative effect (β = -.218; t> 1.96) on subjective welfare, which means that the humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 83 khoiriyah et al. (determinant factors of family welfare among bogor online riders on pandemic covid-19) higher the source of stress for online motorcycle taxi workers, the family welfare level is getting low. table 3 the results of the sem-pls analysis variable direct effect indirect effect total effect work stress source objective welfare -.091 .013 -.077 self-efficacy  objective welfare .195* -.005 .189 coping strategy  objective welfare -.011 .005 -.006 stress symptoms  objective welfare .020 .020 work stress source  subjective welfare -.218* .007 -.211* self-efficacy  subjective welfare .294* -.074 .220* coping strategy  subjective welfare .174 .023 -.152 stress symptoms  subjective welfare .089 .089 *significance at t>1.96 figure 1 shows each determinant factor's direct and indirect effect on objective and subjective family welfare. sem-pls results show that the r-square value of objective welfare was .150 and subjective well-being was .114. these results indicate that the variables of family characteristics, sources of work stress, self-efficacy, coping strategies, and symptoms of stress affect objective well-being and subjective well-being by 15% and 11.4%, respectively. figure 1. sem analysis discussion currently, non-formal jobs are an alternative work widely chosen by society, including online motorcycle taxis. easy requirements and flexible working time make a lot of people interested in this job. the average age of online motorbike drivers who became respondents in this study was in the early adult phase, with an average age of 32.46 years. even though in non-formal jobs, education level is not the main requirement, half of the respondents in this study complete education until graduating from high school, which means they have a good level of education. based on firdaus and sunarti's (2009) research, a high level of education allows someone to have the ability to be considered more by society. this point of view provides a greater chance to get a job. 84 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) khoiriyah et al. (determinant factors of family welfare among bogor online riders on pandemic covid-19) even though it is categorized as a non-formal job, the income as an online motorbike driver is quite high. the income of online motorbike drivers is 57.5% above the district minimum wage of bogor is rp. 4,169,806.58. however, during the pandemic covid-19, online motorbike drivers’ income has fallen below the district minimum wage of bogor. social restrictions were imposed during the pandemic, impact the number of passengers, and the working hours of online motorbike drivers, so reducing their income. the correlation test results indicate that the source of work stress has a significant positive relationship with stress symptoms. this result shows that the higher the source of stress felt, the higher the stress symptoms experienced. moreover, the results show a significant correlation between self-efficacy with work stress. someone with high selfefficacy tends to like challenges and solve problems to have a low-stress level (alwisol, 2009). someone with low self-efficacy tends to be easily stressed and has doubts about their potential and abilities than someone with high self-efficacy (rodebaugh, 2006). the results showed that the mean value of self-efficacy was at a high index of 68.50%. in this study, self-efficacy has a significant positive effect on subjective welfare. the high self-efficacy of online motorbike drivers during the covid-19 pandemic affects the welfare of their families. moreover, self-efficacy has a direct effect on objective family welfare. the study results show that the overall welfare index, both objective and subjective, is moderate, indicating that the family welfare will be better with good self-efficacy. several previous studies support the findings in this study. previous research stated a significant positive relationship between self-efficacy and psychological well-being (chudzicka-czupała & zalewska-łunkiewicz, 2020). other studies also obtained similar results, that there is a significant positive relationship between self-efficacy and subjective well-being of employees in rehabilitation centers (hanjani et al., 2016). sinidikoro and siswati's (2018) research shows a significant relationship between certified teacher selfefficacy and psychological well-being. the online motorcycle taxi drivers who participated in this study have high selfefficacy, affecting their subjective welfare during the covid-19 pandemic. research conducted by chan et al. (2017) shows that someone who has high self-efficacy tends to be more able to balance between their work and their family. hence, the work is less disturbing to the family and has good psychological well-being. research conducted by cicognani (2011) states that the higher the self-efficacy, the higher the subjective welfare of the family. dunn and o'brien (2013) stated that workers who have high self-efficacy would find it easier to manage work and family balance, improving psychological well-being. limitation of this study: only two variables significantly impact family welfare. selfefficacy affected family welfare, both objective and subjective. while work source of stress significantly affected subjective family welfare. the other variables have no significant relationship with family welfare. further research is expected to use the interview method to reduce the possibility of misunderstanding in understanding the questionnaire. in addition, extracting information from the wife's point of view will further enrich the research data. conclusion self-efficacy and work of source stress affected family welfare among online motorbike taxi drivers. self-efficacy directly affects objective family welfare, while on subjective family welfare, the effect of self-efficacy was found directly and indirectly. therefore the higher self-efficacy, the higher family welfare will be, and vice versa. work source of stress, directly and indirectly, affected subjective family welfare; the higher work source of stress, the lower subjective family welfare will be, and vice versa. among all variables, only coping strategy among online motorbike taxi drivers is impacted by the length of work, in which the longer length of work, the higher the coping strategy. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 85 khoiriyah et al. 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(2015). the study of perceived stress, coping strategy and self-efficacy of chinese undergraduate nursing students in clinical practice. international journal of nursing practice, 21(4), 401–409. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijn.12273 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/s000579670500272x?via%3dihub https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/15/11/2409 https://wellness.journalpress.id/wellness/article/view/21026 https://academic.oup.com/abm/article/23/3/158/4293836 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijn.12273 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 19 (1), february 2022, 23-30 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://dx.doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i1.10 hand grip strength and depression among rural older south africans karl peltzer1,2 1department of psychology, asia university, taiwan 2department of research administration and development, university of limpopo, south africa corresponding author: kfpeltzer@gmail.com introduction depressive disorders, with a prevalence of 12.1% depressive symptoms, are contributing to a large extent to the worldwide disease burden, including in lower-resourced countries (ferrari et al., 2013). in nationally representative surveys in south africa, 9.7% of the population reported major depression in their lifetime (tomlinson et al., 2009), and about a third of older adults (≥65 years) had depressive symptoms (ces-d scores ≥ 10) (tomita & burns, 2013). to deal with the high burden of depression in later life, it has been suggested, in addition to treatment, to decrease the onset of depressive disorder in the community (almeida, 2012; whyte & rovner, 2006). in this context, it would be important if, for example, muscle strength contributes to developing or maintaining depressive symptoms. muscle strength can be objectively measured through handgrip strength (hgs) (ashdown-franks et al., 2019). hgs assessed during middle-age in population-based studies has been shown to predict mortality in older age (buckner et al., 2019). a recent review of eight prospective studies (1 in china and 7 in high-income countries) found that low hgs increases the odds of depressive symptoms among men but not women (huang et al., 2021). a prospective study among ageing adults in ireland showed that hgs was inversely associated with incident depression among females but not males (mcdowell et al., 2018). additional studies are needed to investigate these sex differences (huang et al., 2021). furthermore, several studies also found a positive association between lower hgs and persistent depression (carvalho et al., 2021). however, art icle info ab st r act article history received january 21, 2022 revised february 4, 2022 accepted february 10, 2022 the study aimed to assess the relationship between hand grip strength (hgs) and depressive symptoms among ageing women and men in a longitudinal study in rural south africa. we analyzed longitudinal data from two consecutive population-based surveys in agincourt, south africa, 2014/2015-2018/2019. results indicate that in all, 835 adults of 3268 participants without depression in wave 1 (25.0 percent) had incident depression in wave 2, and 184 adults of 3866 participants who had depression in wave 1 (4.8 percent) screened positive for depression at both wave 1 and 2 (persistent depression). the prevalence of weak hgs was 51.5 percent at baseline. in the fully adjusted model, weak hgs increased the odds of incident depressive symptoms between both sexes (aor: 1.24, 95 percent ci: 1.04-1.47) among women (aor: 1.33, 95 percent ci: 1.05-1.68), but not among men. no models among both sexes, among men and women, showed an increased odds of weak hgs with persistent depressive symptoms. weak hgs was independently associated with the incident, but not persistent depressive symptoms between the two sexes and between women but not between men. keywords hand grip strength; longitudinal study; persistent depression; south africa. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://dx.doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i1.10 mailto:kfpeltzer@gmail.com 24 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) peltzer (hand grip strength and depression among rural older south africans) the relationship between hgs and incident and persistent depressive symptoms in africa has not been researched. consequently, the study aimed to assess the relationship between hgs and incident and persistent depressive symptoms among men and women in a longitudinal study in south africa. method participants we analyzed longitudinal data from two consecutive population-based surveys (haalsi) in agincourt, south africa. full information on the sampling methodology has been reported previously (gómez-olivé et al., 2018). the first survey (november 2014 to november 2015) included 5,059 individuals (≥40 years), with a response rate of 86% (gómez-olivé et al., 2018), and the second survey (october 2018 to november 2019) included 4,176 members of the wave 1 haalsi cohort (595 died during follow-up: 12%, 254 declined participation: 5%, 34 were not found: <1%, and response rate: 94%) (kobayashi et al., 2021a). procedures the study was conducted by trained field workers at the homes of the participants after written informed consent was provided. the study was approved by the “university of the witwatersrand human research ethics committee (ref. m141159), the harvard t.h. chan school of public health, office of human research administration (ref. c13–1608–02), and the mpumalanga provincial research and ethics committee” (gómez-olivé et al., 2018). instruments outcome variable in the first and second survey depressive symptoms were assessed with the “center for epidemiological studies-depression scale eight-item scale (ces-d 8)” (radloff, 1977) or ces-d 20 modified to ces-d 8 (steffick, 2000), (cronbach’s alpha .66 in the first and .79 at the second survey). scores ≥3 on the ces-d 8 indicated depressive symptoms (steffick, 2000). exposure variable hgs was measured with the smedley© digital hand dynamometer (12–0286) (gómez-olivé et al., 2018), and weak hgs was defined as “<30 kg for men and <20 kg for women using the mean value of two hg measurements with the dominant hand” (carvalho et al., 2021; cruz-jentoft et al., 2010). covariates 1. sociodemographic information included country of birth, age, sex, educational level, and a quintile of asset-based household wealth. 2. two items on current smokeless tobacco use and current tobacco use assessed current tobacco use (gómez-olivé et al., 2018). using as a cut-off ≥2 affirmative responses on the 4-item cage scale defined alcohol dependence (a., 1984), (cronbach’s alpha was .82). 3. body mass index (bmi) was measured and classified according to who criteria (who, 2000). 4. hypertension was measured based on the last two of three blood pressure readings and classified based on national committee criteria (chobanian et al., 2003). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 25 peltzer (hand grip strength and depression among rural older south africans) 5. dyslipidemia was defined as: “total cholesterol > 6.21 mmol/l, hdl-c < 1.19 mmol/l, ldl-c > 4.1 mmol/l, triglycerides >2.25 mmol/l,” ever diagnosed or medication use for high cholesterol (gómez-olivé et al., 2018). 6. diabetes was “classified with fasting glucose (defined as > 8 hours) > 7mmol/l (126 mg/dl),” ever diagnosed or medication use for diabetes (gómez-olivé et al., 2018). 7. physical activity and its levels were assessed and classified with the “general physical activity questionnaire (gpaq)” (armstrong & bull, 2006; who, 2009). data analysis the proportion of persons with the incident and persistent depression was calculated and described. the first longitudinal logistic regression analysis excluded those with depression at baseline, including a sample of 4092 participants, to estimate incident depression, and the second logistic regression analysis estimated longitudinal persistent depression. in the logistic regression model, hgs was the main predictor, controlled for sociodemographics, substance use, physical activity, bmi, and chronic conditions. inverse probability weights were applied to account for attrition and mortality at follow-up (kobayashi, morris, et al., 2021b). p <.05 was accepted as significant. all analyzes were performed with statase 15.0 (college station, tx, usa). results participant characteristics by the incident and persistent depression in total, 835 adults out of 3268 participants without depression in wave 1 (25.0%) had incident depression in wave 2, and 184 adults out of 3866 participants who had depression in wave 1 (4.8%) screened positive for depression at both wave 1 and 2 (persistent depression). the prevalence of weak hgs was 51.5%. table 1 shows sample characteristics of participants by the incident and persistent depression. table 1 sample characteristics by the incident and persistent depression, agincourt, south africa, 2014-2019 baseline variables sample incident depression persistent depression n (%) n (%) n (%) age (in years) 40-49 50-59 60-69 70-79 ≥80 884 (17.6) 1358 (27.1) 1274 (25.4) 918 (18.3) 583 (11.6) 159 (24.1) 221 (23.8) 216 (26.2) 134 (25.0) 70 (29.2) 20 (2.7) 47 (3.9) 48 (4.9) 45 (7.0) 22 (7.2) sex female male 2713 (53.6) 2346 (46.4) 457 (25.8) 349 (24.4) 107 (5.0) 77 (4.6) education none 1-7 years 8-11 12 or more 2307 (49.1) 1613 (32.0) 537 (10.7) 585 (11.6) 360 (26.7) 251 (24.3) 89 (23.2) 102 (23.6) 98 (6.1) 64 (5.0) 12 (2.4) 10 (2.0) wealth index low middle high 2047 (40.5) 991 (19.6) 2021 (39.9) 329 (27.1) 146 (23.1) 331 (24.2) 80 (5.5) 38 (5.0) 66 (4.1) alcohol dependence no yes 4988 (98.7) 68 (1.3) 798 (25.2) 8 (18.0) 178 (4.7) 6 (11.5) current tobacco use no yes 4264 (84.4) 790 (15.6) 671 (24.3) 135 (29.8) 155 (4.7) 29 (5.2) body mass index normal under overweight obesity 1719 (36.7) 258 (5.5) 1328 (28.3) 1384 (29.5) 277 (24.8) 37 (29.9) 206 (23.4) 255 (26.2) 58 (4.5) 14 (9.0) 51 (4.8) 53 (4.5) 26 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) peltzer (hand grip strength and depression among rural older south africans) table 1 (continue) sample characteristics by the incident and persistent depression, agincourt, south africa, 2014-2019 baseline variables sample incident depression persistent depression n (%) n (%) n (%) hypertension no yes 2052 (41.6) 2884 (58.4) 340 (25.4) 450 (24.8) 63 (4.0) 117 (5.4) diabetes no yes 4093 (88.0) 559 (12.0) 668 (24.9) 86 (29.4) 143 (4.5) 31 (8.1) dyslipidaemia no yes 2389 (56.2) 1862 (43.8) 394 (25.0) 310 (27.0) 84 (4.5) 77 (5.5) physical activity low moderate high 2221 (44.0) 1143 (22.7) 1674 (33.3) 331 (25.5) 202 (24.8) 300 (24.7) 102 (6.0) 34 (3.6) 63 (4.4) hang grip strength strong weak 2043 (50.8) 1973 (49.2) 360 (23.5) 312 (26.5) 69 (4.1) 73 (5.4) associations between weak hgs and incident depression in the fully adjusted model for individuals with no depressive symptoms at baseline, weak hgs increased the odds of incident depressive symptoms between the two sexes (aor: 1.24, 95% ci: 1.04-1.47), and among women (aor: 1.33, 95% ci: 1.05-1.68). no models among men showed a significant effect of weak hgs on incident depressive symptoms (see table 2). table 2 association between hand grip strength and incident depressive symptoms, agincourt, south africa, 2014-2019 variable unadjusted model model-1 model-2 model-3 cor (95% ci) aor (95% ci) aor (95% ci) aor (95% ci) box sexes weak hgs no 1 (reference) 1 (reference) 1 (reference) 1 (reference) yes 1.18 (1.04, 1.37)* 1.19 (1.01, 1.39)* 1.19 (1.01, 1.40)* 1.24 (1.04, 1.47)* male weak hgs no 1 (reference) 1 (reference) 1 (reference) 1 (reference) yes 1.12 (.90, 1.39) 1.11 (.88, 141) 1.13 (.89, 1.44) 1.14 (.88, 1.49) female weak hgs no 1 (reference) 1 (reference) 1 (reference) 1 (reference) yes 1.26 (1.03, 1.54)* 1.25 (1.01, 1.55)* 1.25 (1.00, 1.55)* 1.33 (1.05, 1.68)* *p <. 05; cor=crude odds ratio; aor=adjusted odds ratio model 1: adjusted for age, sex, education, and wealth status. model ii: adjusted for model 1 variables, plus substance use, physical activity, and body mass index. model iii: adjusted for model i and ii variables, plus dyslipidemia, hypertension, and diabetes. associations between weak hgs and persistent depression table 3 shows logistic regression models with people who had depressive symptoms at baseline and follow-up. in an unadjusted analysis between sexes and between men, weak humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 27 peltzer (hand grip strength and depression among rural older south africans) hgs increased the odds of persistent depressive symptoms. however, in the adjusted analysis, among both sexes, among men and women, no significant associations with persistent depressive symptoms were found (see table 3). table 3 association between hand grip strength and persistent depressive symptoms, agincourt, south africa, 2014-2019 variable unadjusted model model-1 model-2 model-3 cor (95% ci) aor (95% ci) aor (95% ci) aor (95% ci) both sexes weak hgs no 1 (reference) 1 (reference) 1 (reference) 1 (reference) yes 1.35 (1.02, 1.78)* 1.07 (.80, 1.45) 1.06 (.77, 1.45) 1.01 (.72, 1.42) male weak hgs no 1 (reference) 1 (reference) 1 (reference) 1 (reference) yes 1.59 (1.04, 2.42)* 1.21 (.76, 1.91) 1.21 (.75, 1.94) 1.12 (.67, 1.88) female weak hgs no 1 (reference) 1 (reference) 1 (reference) 1 (reference) yes 1.20 (.83, 1.75) .98 (.66, 1.47) .97 (.63, 1.48) .94 (.59, 1.49) *p < .05; cor=crude odds ratio; aor=adjusted odds ratio model 1: adjusted for age, sex, education, and wealth status. model ii: adjusted for model 1 variables, plus substance use, body mass index, and physical activity. model iii: adjusted for model i and ii variables, plus dyslipidemia, hypertension, and diabetes. discussion in this first longitudinal study among people 40 years and older in africa, we found that weak hgs increased the odds of incident depressive symptoms four years later, among both sexes, among women but not among men of ageing adults in south africa. these results are contrary to a recent review that found low hgs increases the risk of depressive symptoms among males but not females (huang et al., 2021), but similar to a longitudinal study among older adults in ireland (mcdowell et al., 2018). possible reasons for these sex differences may be related to the role of estrogen in affecting muscle strength (collins et al., 2019) and the role of estradiol action in the regulation of gene expression that modulates serotonin neurotransmission implicated in depression (gu et al., 2021; hernández-hernández et al., 2019). still, further research is warranted on this issue (gu et al., 2021). in the unadjusted analysis, weak hgs increased the odds of persistent depressive symptoms between the sexes and between men but not women. however, no association was found in adjusted analysis between weak hgs and persistent depressive symptoms, while some other studies showed a positive association between lower hgs and persistent depression (carvalho et al., 2021). overall, findings partially confirm that resistance training to enhance muscle strength in ageing adults may be a beneficial adjunct to prevent depressive symptoms (mcdowell et al., 2018; straight et al., 2016). one of the possible mechanisms to explain the inverse association between hgs and depressive symptoms (gu et al., 2021) may include that hgs reduces the risk of developing depression through enhancing muscle function that reduces inflammation and oxidative free radicals (lindqvist et al., 2017; vezzoli et al., 2019). the limitations of the study include that depression was assessed with a screening questionnaire and not with a diagnostic psychiatric evaluation. furthermore, participants who were negative for depression in wave 1 may have had depression before. 28 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) peltzer (hand grip strength and depression among rural older south africans) conclusion weak hgs was independently associated with the incident, but not persistent depressive symptoms between the two sexes and between women but not between men. results suggest that improving hgs may help in reducing the development of depressive symptoms, in particular among women. funding “haalsi (health and aging in africa: a longitudinal study of an indepth community in south africa) is sponsored by the national institute on aging (grant number 1p01ag041710-01a1) and is conducted by the harvard center for population and development studies in partnership with witwatersrand university. the agincourt hdss was supported by the wellcome trust, uk, (058893/z/99/a, 069683/z/02/z, 085477/z/08/z and085477/b/08/z), the university of the witwatersrand and south african medical research council.” references a., e. j. 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21). allah demonstrates his greatness by creating human beings in pairs of their kind so that their souls become calm and at peace with each other. every married couple hopes for a harmonious marriage to feel the most comfort, peace, and self-actualization (srisusanti & zulkaida, 2013). in developmental psychology, marriage is one of the developmental tasks of early adulthood (hurlock, 2003; santrock, 2014). most newlywed indonesian couples choose to live with their parents or in-laws (lestari, 2012). their reasons for living with parents or parents-in-law include financial barriers or parents' requests to be accompanied (haryati, 2017). especially in pamekasan regency, like the rest of madura, has a matrilocal marriage culture in which newly married couples live with the woman's parents in the same house (sa'dan, 2016). however, azis (2017) argues that this culture is not absolute and must be followed by all married couples, especially in the current era. a husband may bring his wife to live apart from his parents as part of his responsibility and as a husband who has complete control over the responsibility for providing physical and spiritual support for his children and wife (sa'dan, 2016). art icle info ab st r act article history received july 27, 2021 revised december 01, 2021 accepted march 10, 2022 new families living with parents-in-law are facing a challenging marital satisfaction issue. this study aimed to determine the effect of marital adjustment and religiosity on marital satisfaction simultaneously and partially. this quantitative study employs data collection techniques using marital satisfaction, marital adjustment, and religiosity scales. 90 muslim husbands or wives who lived in their parents-in-law’s houses participated in this study. participants' characteristics were fewer than five years of marriage, first marriage, and living in the pamekasan regency. multiple linear regression was used to test hypotheses. the result shows a significant effect of marital adjustment and religiosity on marital satisfaction. while partially, the marital adjustment has a significant effect on marital satisfaction. whereas religiosity also has a significant effect on marital satisfaction. even though marital adjustment and religiosity affect marital satisfaction simultaneously, marital adjustment partially affects marital satisfaction higher than that of religiosity. as an implication, families living with parents-in-law need to enhance their marital adjustment to achieve marital satisfaction. keywords marital adjustment; marital satisfaction; religiosity. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i2.31 mailto:ainunnadhira32@gmail.com 130 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) nadhirah & khotimah (marital satisfaction among families living with parents-in-law: …) previous studies on the marital satisfaction of couples living with their parents or parents-in-law found differences in marital satisfaction between couples living together and couples living separated from their parents or parents-in-law. a couple who lives in the same house as their in-laws experience hardship in marital satisfaction (saputra et al., 2014). couples who live apart from their parents or parents-in-law report higher levels of satisfaction and happiness because there is no direct intervention from them (muhid et al., 2019). every couple united in marriage expects good qualities that will lead to marital satisfaction. marital satisfaction refers to a couple's subjective feelings of happiness, satisfaction, and enjoyment in their married life (olson et al., 2011). marital satisfaction focuses on the quality of the marriage rather than marital stability, which is thought to be one of the main reasons for divorce (li & fung, 2011). married couples who achieve marital satisfaction are more likely to stay married, despite the strong personal factors that drive the marriage (garcía & gómez, 2014). meanwhile, if marital satisfaction is disrupted, the dynamics of social relationships between husband and wife will also be disrupted (navid et al., 2018). two factors influence marital satisfaction, including factors that existed before the marriage and those that existed after the marriage (duval & miller, 1985). individual character is shaped by factors existing before marriage and is challenging to be modified. in contrast to the factors that exist in the post-marriage period, individuals can aim to improve existing factors such as marital adjustment. marital adjustment includes four components: adjustment to the partner, sexual, financial, and to the spouse's family (hurlock, 2003). the couple's success in adjusting to marriage and their ability to deal with household problems influence perceived marital satisfaction (hurlock, 2003). marital adjustment is a holistic and longtime process. the marital adjustment process can be thoroughly investigated from time to time (scorsolini-comin & dos santos, 2012), not only between husband and wife but also with the couple's family, so that the couple feels positive support from their extended family (abbas, 2019). the early period of marriage is a process for in-laws and daughters-in-law to adjust to each other after what was originally two foreign parties who were then united in a marital relationship (saputra et al., 2014). given various demands, particularly marital adjustments, the first five years of marriage are a critical initial period determining a marriage's success (duval & miller, 1985). in addition to marital adjustment, religiosity is considered to influence marital satisfaction. several previous studies have found a link between religiosity and marital satisfaction (istiqomah & mukhlis, 2015; khairiyah & aulia, 2017). according to olson et al. (2011), one of marriage's strengths is spiritual well-being, which includes religious beliefs that assist couples in dealing with various life issues. people with a high level of religiosity have a higher level of marital satisfaction (hurlock, 2003). religious commitment and practice are two components of religiosity that can lead to marital satisfaction (aman et al., 2019). in married life, religiosity influence individual thought patterns and behavior (mokoginta, 2014) and effectively help address problems and painful experiences so that individuals can achieve marital satisfaction (dowlatabadi et al., 2016). even though people have difficulty making marital adjustments, religiosity plays a role in the formation of marital satisfaction (marni, 2018). as matrilocal married culture exists in pamekasan regency, this study aimed to discover the effect of marital adjustment and religiosity on the marital satisfaction of families living with parents-in-law. specifically, this study aimed to determine the extent to which adjustment and religiosity influence marital satisfaction among muslim families who live in their parents-in-laws' houses in pamekasan regency. humanitas indonesian psychological journal 131 nadhirah & khotimah (marital satisfaction among families living with parents-in-law: …) method research design this research is a quantitative study to explore the effect of marital adjustment and religiosity on marital satisfaction. the data was collected online through a google form from june to july 2021. the participants fill out the demographic data first to ensure they fit the subject criteria, then fill out the questionnaire for about 15-20 minutes. participants the characteristics of this study's participants were a husband or wife who lives in their parents-in-laws' house, the first marriage with the length of marriage fewer than five years, muslim, lives in the pamekasan regency and were willing to participate indicated by filling out the consent form. a non-probability sampling with accidental sampling was applied to select participants. ninety participants were involved in this study. table 1 shows the demographic data of participants. table 1 demographic data all participants are muslim; the majority are female (55.6%) and have a university education (75.6%). in terms of marriage length, mostly less than a year (32.2%), while the age at marriage is 25-27 years. instruments the marital satisfaction scale, adapted from iffah (2018), developed based on ten aspects of marital satisfaction (fowers & olson, 1993), was used to measure marital satisfaction. the scale consists of fifteen items, with five ideal distortion items. the instrument is a likert scale with four answer options: (1) strongly disagree, (2) disagree, (3) agree, and (4) strongly agree. the item discrimination index is between .536 and .796 with reliability =.939. meanwhile, the marital adjustment scale was used to measure marital adjustment, developed based on four aspects of marital adjustment (hurlock, 2003). the instrument is a characteristic type frequency percentage gender male 40 44.4 female 50 55.6 educational level elementary school 1 1.1 senior high school 21 23.3 college 68 75.6 < 1 year 29 32.2 age of marriage 1-2 years 23 25.6 2-3 years 10 11.1 3-4 years 13 14.4 4-5 years 15 16.7 age at the time of marriage 19-21 years 15 16.7 22-24 years 25 27.8 25-27 years 37 41.1 28-30 years 11 12.2 31-33 years 2 2.2 132 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) nadhirah & khotimah (marital satisfaction among families living with parents-in-law: …) likert scale with four answer options: (1) strongly disagree, (2) disagree, (3) agree, and (4) strongly agree. the scale consists of 22 items, with an item discrimination index ranging from .371 to .706 and reliability =.892. the religiosity scale was developed to measure religiosity based on five dimensions of religiosity (stark & glock, 1970). the instrument is a likert scale with four answer options: (1) strongly disagree, (2) disagree, (3) agree, and (4) strongly agree. the scale consists of 24 items with an item discrimination index ranging from .375 to .771 and a reliability of =.867. data analysis the research data was analyzed using the ibm spss statistics 20 for windows program. multiple linear regression analysis was used to analyze the data. according to muhid (2019), multiple linear regression can measure the influence of more than one independent variable on one dependent variable; in this study, marital adjustment and religiosity with marital satisfaction. results table 2 depicts the effect of marital adjustment and religiosity on marital satisfaction (f=35.889; p=.000). this result indicates marital adjustment and religiosity have a significant effect on marital satisfaction. the contribution of marital adjustment and religiosity to marital satisfaction is based on the coefficient of determination (r2=.452). this result means that marital adjustment and religiosity account for 45.2% of marital satisfaction. table 2 multiple linear regression test result table 3 shows the results of the partial effect of the marital adjustment on marital satisfaction (t=6.224; p=.000) and the partial effect of religiosity on marital satisfaction (t=2.163; p=.033). these findings suggest that increasing marital adjustment scores leads to increased marital satisfaction. moreover, the higher religiosity, the higher the marital satisfaction will be, and vice versa. table 3 shows that partially, marital adjustment and religiosity had a 36.33% and 8.84% effective contribution to marital satisfaction, respectively. table 3 the contribution of marital adjustment and religiosity on marital satisfaction table 4 shows the categorization of participants' on marital satisfaction, marital adjustment, and religiosity. most participants had a moderate level of marital satisfaction, marital adjustment, and religiosity, 65.6%, 73.3%, and 57.8%, respectively. r r square f p .672 .452 35.889 .000 variable β t p effective contribution (%) (constant) 13.933 2.489 .015 marital adjustment .352 6.224 .000 36.33 religiosity .161 2.163 .033 8.84 humanitas indonesian psychological journal 133 nadhirah & khotimah (marital satisfaction among families living with parents-in-law: …) table 4 the categorization of marital satisfaction, marital adjustment, and religiosity discussion the findings of this study show that marital adjustment and religiosity contribute significantly to marital satisfaction. the simultaneous contribution of marital adjustment and religiosity to marital satisfaction is medium. marital adjustment and religiosity contribute to 45.2% of marital satisfaction. partially, both marital adjustment and religiosity contribute positively to marital satisfaction. the contribution of marital adjustment to marital satisfaction is higher than that of religiosity. the positive effect of the marital adjustment on marital satisfaction is consistent with the previous study of wives in long-distance marriages, which identified disparities in marital satisfaction based on the wife's level of marital adjustment (rachmawati & mastuti, 2013). research participants with a high level of marital adjustment also had a high level of marital satisfaction. another study among couples on early and late marriage shows a positive correlation between marital adjustment and life satisfaction (arshad et al., 2014). the higher the marital adjustment, the higher their marital satisfaction will be. this result is consistent with the findings that marital satisfaction is linked to individual adjustment (rospita & lestari, 2016). the differences in individual abilities in marital adjustment influence perceived marital satisfaction (marni, 2018). every interaction between individuals and their partners can produce dynamics in the marriage domain, allowing couples to attain life happiness and marital satisfaction (scorsolini-comin & dos santos, 2012). couples need to adapt in their marriage to obtain marital happiness and satisfaction (hurlock, 2003). various issues that may arise during the marital adjustment process can impact marital satisfaction (marni, 2018), particularly for those who live with in-laws. couples adjust with their spouse and their spouse's families to gain positive support and establish good relationships (abbas, 2019). the son-in-law's adjustments will be more challenging because he must focus on his relationship with his in-laws as a member of his partner's family (hurlock, 2003). the problems in the early years of marriage in connection with the in-laws determine the marriage's success. parents-in-law can interfere in their children's and daughterin-law's married lives, thus can make the daughter-in-law uncomfortable and influencing marital adjustment and satisfaction. another finding in this study is that religiosity and marital satisfaction have a positive effect. this result is consistent with the findings that religiosity was positively connected with marital satisfaction and had a 33.9% effective contribution (istiqomah & mukhlis, 2015). furthermore, a study on couples from iran's education department found a relationship between religious opinions with marital satisfaction (dowlatabadi et al., 2016). a similar finding was also found among couples undergoing the ta'aruf process, in which religiosity contributes to 71% of marital satisfaction (khairiyah & aulia, 2017). in a family, religiosity helps to overcome obstacles and trials, form good relationships, prevent deviations from variable category total percentage marital satisfaction high 17 18.9 moderate 59 65.6 low 14 15.6 marital adjustment high 13 14.4 moderate 66 73.3 low 11 12.2 religiosity high 22 24.4 moderate 52 57.8 low 16 17.8 134 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) nadhirah & khotimah (marital satisfaction among families living with parents-in-law: …) established boundaries, and ensure marital satisfaction between couples (dowlatabadi et al., 2016). religiosity reinforces people to be more tolerant and live a life based on sharia (istiqomah & mukhlis, 2015). as a result, individual religiosity in married life can positively impact marital satisfaction. this finding is consistent with the findings of a previous study when marital adjustment was relatively low, and religiosity could play a role in increasing perceived marital satisfaction (marni, 2018). good religious knowledge makes individuals aware of every consequence of each behavior, making them more satisfied with their marriage (mokoginta, 2014). furthermore, religious beliefs are the source of control for couples, allowing them to continue carrying out their respective duties and roles, be patient, trust each other, and cultivate love based on allah (marni, 2018). moreover, similarities in religious and emotional tendencies lead to emotional harmony in the couples' lives (fard et al., 2013). in addition, a realm of cognition, e.g., cognitive consensus and religious beliefs, also plays a role in determining marital satisfaction (fard et al., 2013). as the muslims regard marriage as sacred worship in which the couple makes a sacred promise to god, religiously committed couples can have a better relationship in their marriage (aman et al., 2019). both male and female participants have moderate levels of marital satisfaction, marital adjustment, and religiosity. married couples living together in the parents-in-laws' house are still natural for indonesian people, particularly in pamekasan regency, with local matrilocal cultural characteristics (surya, 2013). this finding is consistent with a previous study that showed no difference in the average level of marital satisfaction between husband and wife (kurdek, 2005). regarding the length of the marriage, most participants had moderate levels of marital adjustment, religiosity, and marital satisfaction. this finding demonstrates that the first five years of marriage are the most critical time for people to make changes to build family harmony. the moderate level indicates that individuals are still in psychological maturation (muhid et al., 2019). various adjustments are required in the first years of marriage, frequently affecting perceived marital satisfaction (hurlock, 2003). however, marital satisfaction tends to decrease as the length of the marriage is longer (mokoginta, 2014). in terms of the age at marriage, all age groups of participants at marriage were in their early adulthood. in this study, no differences in marital adjustment, religiosity, or marital satisfaction across all age groups of participants at marriage. people adjust to new life patterns in their early adulthood, including when they marry (hurlock, 2003). this study has limitations. first is the adoption marital satisfaction scale from the standard enrich marital satisfaction scale. second, a measuring instrument is required primarily based on local community culture and the characteristics of the research participants, families, and living with parents-in-law. further research will get more accurate research results when using specific measuring instruments. furthermore, this study is based solely on the two factors studied for marital satisfaction. therefore, other factors need to be explored as long as they are relevant to the criteria of couples' participants. conclusion marital adjustment and religiosity significantly contribute to marital satisfaction in families living with parents-in-law. marital adjustment positively affects marital satisfaction, which means that when marital adjustment improves, so does the individual's perception of marital satisfaction. similarly, religiosity positively affects marital satisfaction; the higher religiosity, the higher marital satisfaction will be. as the contribution of marital adjustment to marital satisfaction is higher than that of religiosity, families living with parents-in-law need to enhance their marital adjustment to have higher marital satisfaction. humanitas indonesian psychological journal 135 nadhirah & khotimah (marital satisfaction among families living with parents-in-law: …) acknowledgment the authors acknowledge the rector of islamic state university sunan ampel surabaya, and the dean of the faculty of psychology and health for the support and also to the participants in the data collection stage. declarations author contribution. an conceived the presented idea, developed the theory, and analyzed the data. skk designed the framework theory. both authors discuss the results and contribute to the final manuscript. funding statement. there is no funding agency involved in this research. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references abbas, m. 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(2012). correlations between subjective wellbeing, dyadic adjustment, and marital satisfaction in brazilian married people. the spanish journal of psychology, 15(1), 166–176. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.5209/rev_sjop.2012.v15.n1.37304. srisusanti, s., & zulkaida, a. (2013). studi deskriptif mengenai faktor-faktor yang mempengaruhi kepuasan perkawinan pada istri [desctiptive study on the factors influencing marital satisfaction among wifes]. ug journal, 7(6), 8–12. stark, r., & glock, c. y. (1970). american piety: the nature of religious commitment. university of california press. surya, t. f. (2013). kepuasan perkawinan pada istri ditinjau dari tempat tinggal [marital satisfaction among wifes in terms of place of residence]. calyptra: jurnal ilmiah mahasiswa universitas surabaya, 2(1), 1–13. http://journal.ubaya.ac.id/index.php/jimus/article/view/392/258. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.5209/rev_sjop.2012.v15.n1.37304 http://journal.ubaya.ac.id/index.php/jimus/article/view/392/258 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 19 (2), august 2022, 138-147 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i2.43 perception of undergraduates on study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety in kwara, nigeria agubosi lydia akunna, falilat anike okesina, samuel kolawole ajiboye, omotayo esther monisola department of counsellor education, university of ilorin, nigeria corresponding author:agubosi.la@unilorin.edu.ng introduction the examination outcome determines success or failure in the academic endeavor. the examination is not the real taste of knowledge acquired after the instructional process. yet, it is the yardstick for measuring the effectiveness, success, or failure of educational instruction at the end of instruction. the examination can be written in essays, open-ended, objectives, and matching tests. it could also be an oral examination in the form of an oral interview. all over the world, either written or oral examination is used to access instructional outcomes in learning institutions. the examination applies to grade learners for promotion to the next class or level, placement, and admissions to higher educational institutions. an examination is periodically taken to test and measure the success of students after they have been exposed to a learning experience. one issue that makes students fail in the examination is examination anxiety. no matter the mode it takes, examination generates anxiety in the examinee. the anxiety level depends on the examinee's preparedness before the examination. anxiety is the inner unpleasant disposition and feelings usually characterized by sweating, shortness of art icle info ab st r act article history received: november 11, 2021 revised: february 24, 2022 accepted: march 15, 2022 examination anxiety has made students fail their examinations, causing many problems, including depression and suicide. the study aimed to investigate study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety as perceived by undergraduate students in kwara state, nigeria. the influence of gender, academic level, and age on strategies for handling examination anxiety were also investigated. a descriptive survey was adopted, with a sample of 250 respondents selected through a multistage sampling procedure to participate. data was collected through study habit for overcoming examination anxiety questionnaire (sheaq). the instrument was validated by four experts in measurement and has a good reliability coefficient obtained through test re-test. one research question and three hypotheses guided the study. based on data analysis with t-test and anova, hypothesis 1 was retained, while hypotheses 2 and 3 were rejected. findings showed that overcoming examination anxiety as perceived by respondents are: reviewing what was taught, having adequate time for study, and testing oneself, among other strategies. findings also showed no significant difference in the strategies for overcoming examination anxiety based on gender; significant differences were found based on academic level and age. therefore, students should be counseled on the need to develop good study habits to pass examinations. keywords anxiety; examination; strategies; undergraduates; university. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i2.31 mailto:agubosi.la@unilorin.edu.ng humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 139 agubosi et al. (perception of undergraduates on study habit strategies…) breath, shivering, uneasiness, and worry. examination anxiety is a negative effect, worry, and psychological arousal, leading to the behavioral response of failure or lack of competence in examination (matthew et al., 2006). pagaria (2020) defined test anxiety as a psychological condition that causes outrageous distress and anxiety during the period of testing. anxiety is the exaggerated state of apprehension, with feelings of uneasiness resulting in stress and fear of an imminent danger (akinade, 2001). examination anxiety is the type of anxiety people face during the examination period, which can linger to the post-examination. even though anxiety during the examination period is normal, it becomes a problem when the anxiety poses a threat to the examinee. anxiety can lead to failure in an examination; it causes examination fever, making students miss their examinations. examination anxiety could affect the academic performance of students (mohammed et al., 2017; yusefzadeh et al., 2019). some students who express anxiety during examinations might be afraid of examinations and play truancy and absenteeism. when students are persistently absent from school, failure in the examination is inevitable. chukwu (2014) noted that students are anxious during examinations. the anxiety occurs in all categories of students regardless of age (solanke, 2014), mainly students who are consistently absent in class when a teacher is teaching. curbing examination anxiety among students requires proactive strategies that could impact examination anxiety. planning and strategizing geared towards reducing examination anxiety is a task that requires teachers' efforts, school authorities, and other stakeholders in education. teachers who deliver a course of instruction and conduct examinations could curb examination anxiety through their teaching method and the questions set in the examination. a teacher who dedicated little or no time to teaching would be mounting high anxiety in the students, who would be very anxious and afraid of what kinds of questions would come out in the examination. parents could be blamed for their children's anxiety during examination because they threaten their children to do well to avoid being disgraced by society (olayinka & omoegun, 2000). ogunsanya & buraimo (2020) recommended that regular counseling services be introduced to students to train them on study habits and strategies to excel in their academic work. the school authority could contribute to examination anxiety by preparing an examination timetable, so students are not given enough time to prepare. examination dates and times are not given enough space. a reasonable examination timetable could allow students to prepare well for the examination and easily take it. on the contrary, an examination timetable that allows students to sit for three or more exams a day will generate high examination anxiety. examination anxiety does not view gender. male and female examinees struggle with examination anxiety. as reported in olatoye & afuwape (2003) research finding, gender differences do not mean significant differences in cognitive test anxiety. however, chukwu (2014) study on test anxiety among secondary school students showed that male students exhibit higher test anxiety than female students. solanke (2014) revealed that age did not matter when it comes to examination anxiety because students, irrespective of age, showed no significant difference in their perception of the factors responsible for examination anxiety. anxiety is likely to occur when students are not adequately prepared for the examination. the way to adequately prepare for the examination is to imbibe a good study habit strategy. therefore, this study aimed to investigate study habit strategies that could help students overcome examination anxiety, fill the knowledge gap, and contribute to existing knowledge on examination anxiety. the problem is that students sometimes fail examinations due to a lack of good study habits. many students did not know they needed to plan for their studies to avoid examination 140 issn 2598-6368 (online) /issn 1693-7236 (print) agubosi et al. (perception of undergraduates on study habit strategies…) anxiety that might make them fail their examinations. poor study habit leads to failure in examination. students who perform poorly in examinations are not happy doing so. examination anxiety is an emotional problem that could result in neurotic difficulties. trifoni & shahini (2011) noted that examination anxiety gives rise to physical and psychological problems, which could lead to emotional breakdown resulting in possible damage to the individual's personality. poor academic performance among students has a lot of negative consequences. students who perform poorly in the examination are not happy about doing so. some students do sleep in the class overnight to study. female students could run into the danger of rape by sleeping in the lecture halls and classrooms. cultists could also attack students at night in the classrooms. some criminal activities are going on in school resulting from failure in examinations. some students who fail examinations play truancy, go into hard drugs, drop out of school, join cult activities, become alcoholics and some attempt or commit suicide. these negative consequences call for a study that will investigate study habit strategies to help students overcome examination anxiety. therefore, the purpose of the study was to investigate the study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety as perceived by undergraduates of the university of ilorin. it also investigated the influence of gender, academic level, and age variables on the participants' perception of study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety. one research question was raised to guide the conduct of this study thus: what are the study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety among undergraduates in kwara state? three hypotheses were postulated to guide the study as follows: (1) there is no significant difference in respondents' perception of the study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety based on gender; (2) there is no significant difference in respondents' perception of the study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety based on an academic level; (3) there is no significant difference in respondents' perception of the study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety based on age method research design the research design adopted for this study is a descriptive survey. a descriptive survey enables the researcher to obtain the opinion of a representative sample of the target population to infer the perception of the entire population (daramola, 2006). a descriptive survey approach was considered appropriate for this study. the researcher is interested in collecting information from a representative sample of undergraduates of the university of ilorin, ilorin, kwara state, to find out the perceived study habit strategies for handling examination anxiety among undergraduates of the university of ilorin. participants the population for this study consisted of all undergraduates at kwara state universities. the target population comprised undergraduates of the university of ilorin. a multistage sampling procedure was used to select 250 sample students that participated in the study. at stage 1, a convenient sampling technique was used to select the university of ilorin out of five universities in kwara state. in stage 2, a simple random sampling technique was used to select students from the university of ilorin to participate. students in their 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500 levels, that is, students in their first year, second year, third year, fourth and fifth year, were selected from faculties of law, education, management sciences, social humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 141 agubosi et al. (perception of undergraduates on study habit strategies…) sciences, and agricultural sciences. the order of student selection was 100 level (54 students), 200 level (103 students), 300 level (60 students), and 400 and above level (33 students). the number selected from the various levels was based on the number of students in the various levels. stratified sampling was used to select the students according to demographic variables of gender, academic level, and age (see table 1). table 1 demographic data of respondents frequency percentage gender male 109 43.6 female 141 56.4 academic level 100 54 21.6 200 103 41.2 300 60 24.0 400 and above 33 13.2 age 16-19 years 83 33.2 20-23 years 63 25.2 24-26 years 70 28.0 27 years and above 34 13.6 instruments the researchers designed the instrument for this study, titled study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety (shsea), based on the theory of skinner (1954) on behavioral learning. the instrument is comprised of two sections (a & b). section a consisted of respondents' demographic information, such as gender, academic level, and age, while section b consisted of 20 items on study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety. the responses patterned after the four-point likert-type format with options of strongly agree (sd) = 4 points; agree (a) = 3 points; disagree (d) =2 points; strongly disagree (sd) = 1 point. four experts validated the instrument in test and measurement evaluation. the instrument's reliability was obtained through the test re-test method. the questionnaire forms were administered to forty tertiary institution students who were not part of the respondents. after three weeks, the same respondents were given the same instrument to respond. the two sets of scores were correlated using pearson product moment correlation which yielded a reliability of .78. the questionnaire forms were personally administered to the respondents and collected on the spot to avoid loss. section b in the instrument was scored by summing up the points and dividing by 4 to obtain the mean score of each item, thus: 4+3+2+1=10/4= 2.50. the cut-off mark is 2.50. any item in the questionnaire that did not score 2.50 and above was not considered study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety. data analysis data analyses were conducted using descriptive and inferential statistics. demographic data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, frequency, and percentages. data obtained from the research question was analyzed using mean and rank order, while t-test and analysis of variance (anova) were used to test the formulated hypotheses. hypotheses were tested at a .05 level of significance. 142 issn 2598-6368 (online) /issn 1693-7236 (print) agubosi et al. (perception of undergraduates on study habit strategies…) results this study has a research question: what are the study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety perceived by undergraduates of the university of ilorin? table 2 shows that all the items except 15 and 17 had 2.50 mean scores and above; therefore, all items except items 15 and 17 are perceived as study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety. table 2 mean and rank order analysis of the respondents' perception of study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety item no to avoid examination anxiety, one should engage in the following study habits: mean rank 12 review what they learned in school that day 3.33 1st 1 have adequate time for studying 3.28 2nd 3 test oneself periodically 3.25 3rd 20 check work before consider it done 3.16 4th 14 have time for study sessions and breaks 3.07 5th 7 create a pre-studying checklist 3.03 6th 9 find a good reading spot 3.03 6th 11 write during classes 2.97 8th 6 create study plan 2.95 9th 2 create adequate time for studying 2.92 10st 5 cover all course outlines before the examination starts 2.92 10th 13 get at least eight hours sleep everyday 2.88 12th 18 take a break to take care of oneself 2.86 13th 8 create a weekly schedule 2.82 14th 4 have my personal reading timetable 2.77 15th 19 study offline as much as possible 2.76 16th 16 organize lecture note 2.70 17th 10 use coffee while studying 2.58 18th 17 avoid social media 2.48 19th 15 ask question in class when lecture is not understand 2.46 20th the first hypothesis in this study: there is no significant difference in the study habit strategies for handling examination anxiety as perceived by undergraduates of the university of ilorin based on gender. table 3 shows that the calculated t-value of .64 is less than the critical t-value of 1.65 with a corresponding p-value of .524, which is greater than the .05 level of significance. the null hypothesis is accepted since the calculated p-value is greater than the significance level. this result indicates no significant difference in the study habit strategies for handling examination anxiety as perceived by undergraduates of the university of ilorin based on gender. table 3 the t-value of the respondents' view on the study habit strategies for handling examination anxiety based on gender gender n mean sd df cal. t-value crit. t-value p male 109 57.84 6.77 248 .64 1.65 .524 female 141 58.49 8.70 the second hypothesis in this study: there is no significant difference in the study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety as perceived by undergraduates of the university of ilorin based on the academic level. table 4 shows that the calculated f-ratio of 55.90 is greater than the critical f-ratio of 2.60 with a corresponding p-value of .000, which humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 143 agubosi et al. (perception of undergraduates on study habit strategies…) is less than the .05 level of significance. the null hypothesis is rejected since the calculated p-value is less than the significance level. this result indicates a significant difference in the study habit strategies for handling examination anxiety as perceived by undergraduates of the university of ilorin based on the academic level. table 4 analysis of variance (anova) of the respondents' view on the study habit strategies for handling examination anxiety based on academic level source ss df mean square cal. f-ratio crit. f-ratio p between groups 6323.732 3 2107.911 55.90* 2.60 .000 within groups 9275.452 246 37.705 total 15599.184 249 *significant, p<.05 to ascertain where the significant difference lies, scheffe post-hoc was carried out, and the output is shown in table 5. it shows that respondents at the 100 level had a 66.33 mean difference, the 200 level had a 54.23mean difference, and the 300 level had a 55.32 mean difference, while those in the 400 level and above had a 62.58 mean score. those in the 100 level had a mean difference of 66.33 implies that the mean score of respondents in the 100 level is greater than the mean difference of other groups, thus contributing to the significant difference. it means that 100 level students are the ones that had the highest perception of the strategies for overcoming examination anxiety, thereby making them differ significantly from students at other levels. table 5 scheffe's posthoc based on academic level variable group mean difference p 100 66.33 .843 academic level 200 54.23 1.000 300 400 & above 55.32 62.58 1.000 1.000 sig. p<.05 the third hypothesis in this study: there is no significant difference in the study habit strategies for handling examination anxiety as perceived by undergraduates of the university of ilorin based on age. table 6 shows that the calculated f-ratio of 57.64 is greater than the critical f-ratio of 2.60 with a corresponding p-value of .000, which is less than the .05 level of significance. the null hypothesis is rejected since the calculated p-value is less than the significance level, indicating a significant difference in the study habit strategies for handling examination anxiety as perceived by undergraduates of the university of ilorin based on age. table 6 analysis of variance (anova) of the respondents' view on the study habits strategies for handling examination anxiety based on age source ss df mean square cal. f-ratio crit. f-ratio p between groups 6439.514 3 2146.505 57.64* 2.60 .000 within groups 9159.670 246 37.234 total 15599.184 249 *significant, p<.05 144 issn 2598-6368 (online) /issn 1693-7236 (print) agubosi et al. (perception of undergraduates on study habit strategies…) to ascertain where the significant difference lies, scheffe post-hoc was carried out, and the output is shown in table 7. it shows that respondents between 16-19 years had a mean difference of 55.76, 20-23 years had a mean difference of 50.44, 24-26 years had a mean difference of 60.66, and 27 years above had a mean difference of 63.47. these results imply that the mean difference between respondents between 24-26 years of age and those between 27 years and above is greater than the mean difference of other groups, thus, contributing to the significant difference observed. it means that respondents between 24-26 years of age and those between 27 years and above had the most perception of the strategies for overcoming examination anxiety, thereby contributing to the significant difference observed. table 7 scheffe posthoc based on age variable group mean difference p age 16-19 years 55.76 .119 20-23 years 50.44 .109 24-26 years 27 and above 60.66 63.47 1.000 1.000 sig. p< .05 discussion the study showed that the respondents perceived that study habits strategies for overcoming examination anxiety are: reviewing what they learned in school that day, having adequate time for studying, testing themselves periodically, having time for a study session, creating a pre-study checklist, finding a good reading spot, creating and following study plan, among other strategies. this finding supports ipaye's (2005) study, which noted that students must have a study time schedule and know when to study. the finding also aligns with bentil et al. (2020), who asserted that not having good study habits and skills was the dominant examination anxiety among in-school adolescents. a previous study conducted by agubosi & akerele (2017) also supported the finding by noting that poor study habits could make students not perform well in the examination the study finding implies counseling practice. when appropriate study habit is imbibed, examination anxiety can be overcome. lack of adequate preparation for examination causes fear and its attendant failure in the examination. school counselors must counsel students on reading through good study habits to pass their examinations. the students can be given individual or group counseling as the case may be. one of the objectives of having school counselors is to help the students do well in academics; therefore, the school counselor should wake up to that responsibility. hypothesis one revealed no significant difference in the respondents' perception of study habit strategies for overcoming examination based on gender. this result implies that male and female respondents were not different in their perception of the study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety. the finding was probably because both genders know the importance of good study habits during the examination period. the finding supports lawrence (2014) study, which discovered no significant difference between higher secondary school boys and girls in their study habits and test anxiety. the finding also aligns with cassady & johnson (2002), who stated that gender differences do not mean significant differences in test anxiety. the finding is not consistent with pagaria (2020), who found a significant difference in test anxiety between male and female college students on test anxiety. the finding did not support a study from tsegay et al. (2019), which found that test humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 145 agubosi et al. (perception of undergraduates on study habit strategies…) anxiety is more prevalent in women than in men gender. the finding did not also support numan & hasan (2017), who found that girls experience a higher level of test anxiety than boys. still, girls exhibit better study habits and excel more academically than boys. hypothesis two showed a significant difference in the study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety as perceived by undergraduates of the university of ilorin based on the academic level. the finding might be so because students at different levels might not have the same study habit strategy. students in 100 levels (freshers) might have more examination anxiety because they are beginners who might need to know more about the study habit strategies to overcome examination anxiety. others with higher levels who have taken the examination for granted may not need to know more about overcoming examination anxiety. the finding parallels numan & hasan (2017), who found differences in the effect of study habits on test anxiety of undergraduates from different academic levels. the finding is consistent with hanfesa et al. (2020), who discovered that many first-year students had test anxiety. hypothesis three revealed a significant difference in the study habit strategies for handling examination anxiety as perceived by undergraduates of the university of ilorin based on age. this result implies that respondents' perceptions of the study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety differed based on age. the finding might probably be so because there is maturity based on age. older students should have good study habits than younger ones. the finding negates sharma's (2017) study, which found no significant difference in the effect of anxiety and study habit on the academic achievement of senior secondary school students irrespective of age. the finding of solanke (2014) further negates the finding in the research that found no significant influence of age on the perception of students on the factors responsible for examination anxiety based on the findings of this study, it is recommended that: (1) school counselors should counsel the students on the need to develop good study habits to excel in their academic performance, and (2) teachers should inculcate the habit of studying well to students before the examination to avoid unnecessary examination anxiety, (3) the school counselors should organize seminars where students would be equipped with skills on how to prepare for the examination to avoid anxiety during the examination, and (4) the school authority and the government should provide enabling environment devoid of distractions so that students will concentrate in their studies. this study's limitation is that the financial limitation has become the obstruction to increasing the number of respondents. therefore further research can be carried out in another locale with more participants. conclusion study habit strategies for overcoming examination anxiety are: reviewing what was learned in school that day, having adequate time for studying, creating a pre-study checklist, finding a good reading spot, creating a study plan, testing oneself periodically, and having time for study sessions, and breaks. findings also showed no significant difference in the respondents' perception based on gender, but significant differences existed based on academic level and age. acknowledgment the researchers acknowledge the department of counsellor education and the university of ilorin that permitted the conduct of the study. also, the undergraduates of the university of ilorin who participated in the study. the supervisors and the lecturers validated the 146 issn 2598-6368 (online) /issn 1693-7236 (print) agubosi et al. (perception of undergraduates on study habit strategies…) instrument for data collection. and the typist that typed the manuscript. the researchers are grateful for your assistance in seeing that the article is worthy of publication. declarations author contributions: laa organizes the research and collects and analyzes the data. fao contributes to data collection. ask contributes to proofreading the manuscript. oem contributes to designing the instrument and collecting the data. funding statement. the researchers themselves funded the research. conflict of interest. the authors had no conflict of interest in carrying out the research. additional information. the researchers declare that the study will be helpful to learners who take the examination because, through it, they will learn the strategies to adopt to overcome examination anxiety. references agubosi, l. a., & akerele, p. o. 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(2019). the effect of study preparation on test anxiety and performance: a quasi-experimental study. advances in medical education and practice, 10, 245–251. https://doi.org/10.2147/amep.s192053. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-019-1859-5 https://doi.org/10.2147/amep.s192053 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 20 (1), february 2023, 80-89 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humantias.v20i1.138 job crafting and innovative behavior among hospitality workers: the moderation effect of work engagement gursweet kaur, vivi gusrini rahmadani faculty of psychology, universitas sumatera utara, indonesia corresponding author: vivi@usu.ac.id introduction the hospitality sector has been impacted by the covid-19 outbreak worldwide. the covid-19 pandemic has caused the closure of 1.266 hotels in indonesia and the layoff of 150.000 employees (alika, 2020). seventy-one hotels are closed due to the pandemic in the north sumatra region alone, including 24 hotels in medan, 32 in samosir, and 15 in simalungun. hotel owners in north sumatra experience monthly losses of about 100 billion rupiahs (sianturi, 2020). the hotel management must develop a strategy to survive and overcome this condition. hotels can gain competitive advantages by delivering innovation based on effective and planned strategies. the more innovative a hotel is, the more likely it is to be survived (campo et al., 2014; de spiegelaere et al., 2014). innovation is required to deliver and make new items or complete updates by applying creative behavior to customers. implementing innovative behavior can help organizations accelerate their success in achieving their goals (shanker et al., 2017). innovative behavior is an employee’s creative way of implementing innovative ideas in the workplace, which can stimulate an organization’s improvement (de spiegelaere et al., 2014). employees’ innovative behavior is shown by always being creative at work, always conveying creative ideas, looking for new techniques at work, having plans to develop art icle info ab st r act article history received july 27, 2022 revised january 7, 2023 accepted february 8, 2023 the covid-19 pandemic impacted a decline in hotel occupancy rates in the hospitality sector worldwide, including in indonesia. therefore, hotel management and workers need innovation to attract customers by crafting their jobs and developing original and creative ideas. moreover, employees’ work engagement will also support the emergence of innovative behavior. this study aimed to explore whether work engagement moderates the relationship between job crafting and innovative work behavior among hotel employees. this research was conducted at one of the four-star hotels in medan, with 109 employees chosen with a total sampling technique to participate in this study. the innovative behavior scale, the job crafting scale, and the work engagement scale were used to collect the data, which were then processed using the moderated regression analysis method with process macro software. the results show job crafting has a significant positive effect on innovative behavior, and work engagement moderates the effect of job crafting on innovative behavior. increasing innovative behavior can be achieved by increasing job crafting and work engagement in the organization. the implication of this study may assist the hotel management in assessing its employees and then implementing training on job crafting and work engagement to improve innovative behavior. keywords innovative behavior; job crafting; work engagement. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humantias.v20i1.138 mailto:vivi@usu.ac.id humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 81 kaur & rahmadani (job crafting and innovative behavior among hospitality workers: …) new ideas, trying to innovate using resources, and developing creativity in work teams (banimelhem et al., 2022). innovative work behavior is required in hospitality through innovative thoughts for new works, methods, administrations, or items (campo et al., 2014; m.-s. kim & koo, 2017; luoh et al., 2014). innovation in the hotel area can further develop finance, efficiency, quality guidelines, authoritative worth, and execution (edghiem & mouzughi, 2018). indeed, the hotel business requires a creative way of incrementing visitor visits. visitors themselves will be drawn in by the innovations hotel management creates. accordingly, innovation affects expanding guests to remain at the hotel (rosyiana et al., 2020) and can improve hotel performance (m.-s. kim & koo, 2017). previous research indicates that hotel employees should be innovative and creative in their behavior to propel the hotel industry (mahfud et al., 2019; wu et al., 2018). consequently, it is notable that the hotel management must create and upgrade the development and innovation of its workers by nurturing higher innovative work behavior to produce an upper hand for the hotel. therefore, job crafting is needed to bring up innovative behavior among workers (rofcanin et al., 2016). job crafting is a process by which employees change the way or design of their work, physically and psychologically (wrzesniewski et al., 2013). as one of the job resources, job crafting has become an important topic in research. opposing the job resources, in this study, we illustrate the covid-19 pandemic as the key job demand which requires hotels to survive and compete. due to frequent interaction and the responsibility to serve customers, hotel employees must adapt and design their roles to meet customers' demands (h. kim et al., 2018). thus, there was a higher need for the employee to display innovative work behavior during this pandemic time. some previous empirical studies found job crafting positively affects innovative behavior (supriyanto et al., 2020; uen et al., 2021). in addition, other studies found that job crafting mediates transformational leadership and innovative behavior (afsar et al., 2019), and job crafting has a mediating servant leadership and innovative work behavior (khan et al., 2021, 2022). hotel employees have to deal with their customers' preferences, demands, and expectations. thus, to maintain high customer satisfaction, hotels must have engaged employees (turksoy & tutuncu, 2021). engaged employees can work optimally and can satisfy customers as well. in turn, customers will ultimately benefit the hotel because there are many customer references related to the hotel's services. moreover, work engagement can develop innovative behavior among employees, where highly engaged employees will put more effort into their tasks, are more innovative and take the initiative to solve a problem, and have high enthusiasm for work (sharma & nambudiri, 2020). work engagement is a positive state of mind and a sense of satisfaction with a job that can be seen in vigor, dedication, and absorption (schaufeli et al., 2002; schaufeli & bakker, 2004). work engagement can be a factor that increases innovative behavior in organizations. at the individual level, job engagement positively impacts work and duties innovation (rahmadani et al., 2020). in addition, research on individual intrinsic motivation shows that work engagement is closely related to innovative behavior (aryee et al., 2012; chang et al., 2013; tims et al., 2013), where innovative behavior among employees can increase in a work environment where work engagement increases (kyoung park et al., 2014). thus, it can be said that the higher the level of employee work engagement, the greater the originality and innovation produced by the employee (gichohi, 2014). this study developed based on the urgency of employees’ innovative behavior among hospitality workers, especially during the covid-19 pandemic. therefore, this study examined the extent to which work engagement will increase the effect of job crafting on innovative behavior in hotel employees. the first hypothesis of this study is job crafting increases innovative work behavior among hotel employees. while the second hypothesis is work engagement moderates the relationship between job crafting and innovative work behavior among hospitality workers. 82 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) kaur & rahmadani (job crafting and innovative behavior among hospitality workers: … ) method research design this study uses a quantitative method with a correlational design involving three variables, innovative behavior as the dependent variable, job crafting as the independent variable, and work engagement as the moderator variable. a survey study was conducted among hospitality workers in medan. the research was carried out online via a google form, where the google form link was shared with the participants by the manager and hrd team, and they asked them to fill out the form. the instruction and informed consent were attached accordingly in the google form link. participants the participants of this study consisted of all employees at one of the four-star hotels in medan. one hundred nine employees participated, with the majority being male (67.9 %), aged 18 – 40 years (93.58%), and worked 3 – 10 (57.80 %). most of the participants came from the housekeeping division with 38 employees (34.9%), followed by the front office division with 16 employees (14.7%), marketing with 15 employees (13.8%), f & b with 13 employees (11.9%), and engineering as many as ten employees (9.2%). meanwhile, 17 participants are from the hrd, accounting, and general manager and assistant divisions (15.50%). instruments three scales, originally in english with summated rating method, were used in this study for data collection. therefore, before being modified to the similar response’s anchors, all three scales followed the back translation procedure (brislin, 1970). the modification was conducted in a few parts deemed necessary to be replaced to adjust to the participant's context. when adapting and modifying the measuring instruments, the experts were involved. all scales use a likert format consisting of five ranges of choices for answers ranging from 1 to 5, which are: 1 (never), 2 (rarely), 3 (sometimes), 4 (often), and 5 (very often). innovative behavior was measured with the scale developed by dahiya & raghuvanshi (2022), which was modified based on the six dimensions proposed by kleysen & street (2001) and de jong & den hartog (2010). those dimensions are opportunity exploration, generation of ideas, investigation of information, championing ideas, and ideas implementation and application. 19 out of 20 items had high factor loadings between .69 and .89. the cronbach’s alpha coefficient = .95. one item from the investigation of information was dropped due to the low factor loading. job crafting is measured by modifying the job crafting scale (jcs) proposed by tims et al. (2012) with four dimensions: increasing structural job resources, decreasing hindering job demands, increasing social job resources, and increasing challenging job demands. all 16 items had high factor loadings between .57 and .86. the cronbach’s alpha coefficient = .88. work engagement is measured by modifying the utrecht work engagement scale (uwes) proposed by schaufeli & bakker (2004), which consists of 3 dimensions of work engagement: vigor, dedication, and absorption. eight out of 12 items had high factor loadings between .60 and .86. the cronbach’s alpha coefficient = .79. two items from both vigor and absorption dimensions were dropped due to low factor loading. data analysis the hypothesis was tested with moderated regression analysis with process macro by hayes (2018) using spss statistics 21 software. however, some assumptions must be tested beforehand (keith, 2014). a normality test is carried out to assess whether the data humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 83 kaur & rahmadani (job crafting and innovative behavior among hospitality workers: …) distribution is normally distributed. the linearity test determines whether the relationship between variables is linear. the homoscedasticity test determines whether the residual variance is unequal in a regression model; if the residual variance remains, the data is homoscedastic. the multicollinearity test determines the correlation between the independent variables; if two or more independent variables have a strong correlation, there is a multicollinearity between the independent variables. results table 1 shows the effects of job crafting and work engagement on innovative work. based on the results, job crafting significantly positively affects innovative behavior (p < .05); b = .5951), which means hypothesis 1 is accepted. the higher the frequency of job crafting, the employees' innovative behavior will be higher. moreover, work engagement moderates job crafting and innovative work behavior, as expected in hypothesis 2. table 1 the results of moderated regression analysis coeff se t p llci lci constant 58.1937 1.3421 43.3597 .0000 55.5325 60.8549 job crafting .5951 .1724 3.4514 .0008 .2532 .9369 work engagement .3277 .2718 1.2058 .2306 -.2112 .8666 job crafting * work engagement .0352 .0175 2.0129 .0467 .0005 .0699 r²= .1378 f(3,105)=5.5934 table 1 shows the moderating effect of work engagement on the relationship between job crafting and innovative behavior [b = .035, t(105) = 2.01, p = .04]. in sum, work engagement moderates job crafting and innovative behavior, as expected in hypothesis 2. figure 1 interaction plot 84 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) kaur & rahmadani (job crafting and innovative behavior among hospitality workers: … ) figure 1 illustrates that work engagement moderates the association between job crafting and innovative work behavior in such a way that job crafting is positively associated with innovative work behavior for low, average, and high level work engagement. this finding supports hypothesis 2, with the added value as the r-square change index due to the moderating effect (hayes, 2018). the change in the r-square value from model 1 to model 2 (plus interaction) was .0333, indicating the interaction effect accounted for an additional 3.33% variation in y (innovative behavior). based on the data categorization, employees with innovative behavior are categorized as innovative are 43.1%, and 8.3% are categorized as very innovative. therefore, in total, there are 56 people (51.4%) are innovative and very innovative. moreover, for the job crafting variable, as many as 60 employees, about 55%, are proficient in doing job crafting, and 3.7% are categorized as very proficient. in total, 64 people (58.7%) are proficient and very proficient in job crafting. this finding is also followed by the high percentage of employees in the category of high work engagement (60.6%) and 10.1% in the very high work engagement category. in total, 77 people (70.7%) are in the category of high level and very high level of work engagement. discussion this study examined whether job crafting positively affects innovative behavior and whether work engagement moderates this effect. the main finding in this study shows that job crafting has a positive effect on innovative behavior and that work engagement moderates the effect of job crafting on innovative behavior. job crafting has a significant positive effect on innovative behavior. these results indicate that the more often an employee improves his work components, the higher the innovative behavior carried out by the employee. these results are supported by previous studies that state that job crafting can increase employees’ innovative behavior (afsar et al., 2019; supriyanto et al., 2020; uen et al., 2021). the results show that job crafting is one of the factors that can encourage innovative behavior among hotel employees. 58.7% of the participants are in the category of proficient and very proficient in doing job crafting. in other words, many hotel employees are active and have a high initiative to change their work aspects. this finding aligns with previous research, which shows that by increasing job resources, in our case by applying job crafting, hotel employees will manifest their actions to achieve work goals in a work environment with high job demands (bavik et al., 2017). thus, applying job crafting in their daily work routines will empower the hotel employees to tackle the job demands in the challenging covid-19 pandemic pressure in the hospitality sector, helping the hotel company survive this situation. finally, the availability of resources and balanced job demands can encourage employee motivation and commitment to pursue innovation (demerouti et al., 2015). the hotel employees know that innovation is needed. so, it is associated with the characteristics of someone who explores opportunities (de jong & den hartog, 2010; yesil & sozbilir, 2013). furthermore, employees carry out idea generation, meaning that employees issue new concepts with the aim of improvement. the result that 51.4% of participants are innovative and very innovative indicates that the employee can see solutions at work, even in a problematic situation such as the covid-19 pandemic. after employees generate their innovative ideas, they conduct information investigations regarding their ideas, whereas formative investigation involves experimenting with new ideas and solutions before implementing them. in this case, the hotel employees try their ideas before implementing them in a broader context. next, they fight for their ideas, trying to convince their superiors and coworkers about the idea so it can be implemented. ultimately, these innovative ideas can be applied in hotels, a form of new work or routine humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 85 kaur & rahmadani (job crafting and innovative behavior among hospitality workers: …) processes usually carried out (amankwaa et al., 2022; de jong & den hartog, 2010). for example, hotel employees have updated their services to serve a takeaway system for customers who order offline and online food to keep getting income even though the hotel is empty of visitors. work engagement moderates the effect of job crafting on innovative behavior. based on the data categorization, 70.7% of employees are in the high and very high work engagement category. in other words, more than half of the participants have passion, dedication, and absorption components in doing their jobs. it can be said when hotel employees feel passionate about work, have high dedication to work, and absorb their work; it stimulates their behavior. in turn, the work engagement will strengthen the effort to make changes related to their work physically and cognitively or to craft it, leading to creative ideas and innovation to make it profitable for the hotel. a previous study found that employees sought resources (crafting their work) and challenges when they were more engaged (petrou et al., 2012). in crafting their job, the hotel employees adopt a bottom-up strategy in which they actively change their tasks for themselves. employees who work more energetically, enthusiastically, and engrossed will take an active role in their tasks (shin et al., 2018). as a result, they will perform at work, and in our study, they behave innovatively. similarly, employees with a proactive tendency as engaged employees will take the initiative and persevere until they see a substantial change in their workplace (sharma & nambudiri, 2020). more specifically, a high level of engagement and approach to job crafting leads to performance and creativity; however, burnout (the antidote to work engagement) is unrelated to approach crafting (zhang & parker, 2019). in sum, engaged employees' job crafting is associated with strong innovative work behavior. in contrast, job crafting is also associated with the least innovative work behavior for the least engaged employees or employees with low work engagement. there are a few limitations of this study. first, this study uses a work engagement scale with a modified utrecht work engagement scale (uwes) (schaufeli & bakker, 2004). the items are prepared using statements on the uwes scale translated into indonesian and adapted to the participants. after conducting an online trial, several items fell out. further researchers are advised to study further the fallen items, such as doing sentence redactions and conducting re-tests online and offline. next, this is a cross-sectional study with one company as a sample; thus, no causal inference is applied, and be careful in the generalization. conclusion job crafting affects employees' innovative behavior; the more competent individuals at job crafting will also be more innovative. moreover, work engagement increases the effect of job crafting on employees' innovative behavior. the better employees craft their job, the stronger their work engagement and the higher their chances to perform innovative behavior. thus, hotel management may implement programs to increase job crafting and work engagement to enhance innovative behavior among their employees. acknowledgment the authors thank the participants and the hotel management for granting permission to collect the data. the authors also appreciate the reviewers' and editors' constructive feedback and comments on this article. declarations author contribution. gk was responsible for outlining the research design, collecting and analyzing the data, and writing the article. vgr was responsible for approving the research design, checking the results, writing the article, and processing the article for publication. 86 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) kaur & rahmadani (job crafting and innovative behavior among hospitality workers: … ) funding statement. this study was self-funded. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references afsar, b., masood, m., & umrani, w. a. 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(2019). reorienting job crafting research: a hierarchical structure of job crafting concepts and integrative review. journal of organizational behavior, 40(2), 126–146. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2332 https://doi.org/10.1177/1059601113492421 https://doi.org/10.54055/ejtr.v29i.2439 https://doi.org/10.1108/tpm-08-2020-0068 https://doi.org/10.1108/s2046-410x(2013)0000001015 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.06.474 https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2332 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 20 (2), august 2023, 129-135 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v20i2.120 perception of corruption across gender, religion, and socioeconomic status asoke kumar saha1, atanu kumar dogra2, arunavo bairagi3, vijay pratap singh4, md. alamgir hossain1, sayma akter pata5 1department of psychology, jagannath university, bangladesh 2department of psychology, university of calcutta, india 3department of psychology, university of chittagong, bangladesh 4department of psychology, lalit narayan mithila university, india 5residential behaviour specialist (rbs), anderson centre for autism, usa corresponding author: drasoke@psychology.jnu.ac.bd introduction corruption is a multidisciplinary topic in the government and private offices, banks, transport systems, railway offices, businesses, industry, and even in the education system. a study on corruption found that in several eastern european countries, more minor incidences of corruption have been reported, but other countries had more significant corruption problems (anderson & gray, 2006). moreover, corruption is one factor hindering the success of decentralization in developing countries (baltaci & yilmaz, 2006). this condition has made several countries make a breakthrough; for example, in cameroon, some programs have been experimented with in reforming customs administration to reduce corruption (cantens et al., 2010). a study in tanzania found that corruption may continue even with high wages and good work conditions (fjeldstad, 2003). meanwhile, collective experience impacts perceived corruption more than personal experience (canache et al., 2019). perception of corruption has several impacts on individual psychological condition. a previous study finding shows individuals with a greater perception of corruption tend to be less satisfied with their life (ciziceno & travaglino, 2019; tay et al., 2014). also, the perception of official corruption significantly negatively impacts subjective well-being (ma et al., 2022). while another study found the more corruption perception, the more depression article info abst ract article history received july 12, 2022 revised may 15, 2023 accepted august 12, 2023 corruption is a critical issue for bangladesh, including corruption in higher education. the present study explored the perception of corruption based on gender, religion, and socioeconomic status with factorial survey research design. one hundred twenty participants were selected by purposive sampling technique from male and female university students aged 20-26 years. all the participants were studying in public and private universities. personal information form (pif) and perception of corruption scale (pcs) were used for this study. the pcs measured the respondents’ level of perception about corruption, consisting of 18 items. one-way analysis of variance and t-test were applied to analyze the data. the result indicates no significant difference in perception of corruption based on gender. in contrast, there is a significant difference in the perception of corruption based on religion, with the hindus having the lowest perception of corruption. moreover, there is a significant difference in perception of corruption based on socioeconomic status. therefore, university students’ perceptions of different corrupt practices need to be addressed. keywords corruption; gender; perception; religion; socioeconomic status. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v20i2.120 mailto:drasoke@psychology.jnu.ac.bd 130 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) saha et al. (perception of corruption across gender, religion, and…) will be, and vice versa (zhang, 2022). moreover, a previous systematic review found the perception that people around behave dishonestly will increase corruption behavior (julián & bonavia, 2020). especially among university students, the perception of corruption in the workplace influences their intrinsic motivation (llullaku & bërxulli, 2017). therefore, it is crucial to know how people perceive corruption based on gender, religion, and societal status. women are considered less corrupt because of their integrity and morality (goetz, 2007). ingrained power practice between women and men produces gender as a biological and social role that indicates abuse of power tendency. even though both women and men are affected by corruption, the unequal gender relations in society's perspective cause women to be more exposed to corruption and its consequences (swamy et al., 2001). women’s lower status and position in society make them vulnerable to corruption. this condition may lead to different perceptions of corruption across gender. religion may influence human behavior and activity (north et al., 2013). a study found the relationship between religion and corruption may be influenced by ecological inference, the heterogeneity between countries, and religious commitment among individuals (ko & moon, 2014). another study in 174 countries shows that islam and christianity have no significant effect on corruption (shadabi, 2013). the variety of the results from previous studies may indicate the differences in perception of corruption based on religion. socioeconomic status (ses) includes household income, occupation, and profession as well as combined income or an individual's ses, only their attributes in their family. socioeconomic status is typically broken into three levels: higher, middle, and lower. higher levels of corruption perception are found among individuals of lower economic status and uneducated than the higher class of socioeconomic status (maeda & ziegfeld, 2015). as perceptions motivate behavior, it is crucial to understand the relation of socioeconomic status to the perception of corruption (treisman, 2000). corruption is a constant phenomenon worldwide, especially in developing countries, and is one of the key issues for public policies. it negatively impacts society and creates a hamper on our social life. day to day, the rate of corruption rises. therefore, this study aimed to identify the perception of corruption based on gender, religion, and socioeconomic status, which harms our everyday life because it creates disturbance. moreover, this study helps to create awareness among the people to play a vital role in handling the problem of corruption. we can know what and how people think about corruption and how they perceive it. the main objective of the present study was to investigate the perception of corruption based on gender, religion, and socioeconomic status. based on findings of previous studies, theoretical perspective, and the above objectives, the following hypotheses were formulated: (1). significant differences will be found in the perception of corruption based on gender. (2) significant differences will be found in the perception of corruption based on religion, and (3) significant differences will be found in the perception of corruption based on socioeconomic status. method research design the study involved a factorial design consisting of two levels of gender (male and female), three levels of religion (muslim, hindu, and others), and three levels of socioeconomic status (higher class, middle class, and lower class). at the same time, the dependent variable is the perception of corruption. the perception of corruption among university students across gender, religion, and socioeconomic status was observed in this study. before collecting data from the participant, permission was first taken from the concerned authority, and necessary rapport was established with the participant. participants were informed about the purposes and necessities of the present research in the context of humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 131 saha et al. (perception of corruption across gender, religion, and…) bangladesh, both verbally and in written form. the participants were then briefed about the questionnaires and how to fill them up. participants were assured that their information would be used only for research purposes and would be confidential. after collecting data, respondents were thanked and rewarded for their cooperation. participants the students of different universities in dhaka city were selected as the target population for the study. participants were selected by purposive sampling method studying in public and private universities. the sample consisted of participants who completed each questionnaire, and its dimensions comprised 120 university students, male (64 and 53.33%) and female (56 and 46.67%). the age ranges were 20 years to 26 years, and participants were muslim (89), hindu (24), and other religions (7). the socioeconomic status participant as a higher class (28), middle class (61), and lower class (31) found this collecting data. instruments data was collected through questionnaires. the following questionnaires and assessment instruments measured each participant's perception of corruption. a personal information form (pif), a personal information questionnaire, was used to collect personal and demographic information such as age, gender, religion, and socioeconomic status. the perception of corruption scale (pcs) is a likert-type scale that measures the characteristics and behavior of individuals regarding the perception of corruption, containing 18 items calculated as totally true=5, partially true=4, neither true or false=3, partially true=2, and totally false=1 (singh, 2005). therefore, the highest score can be 90, and the lowest score can be 18 with a score close to 90 means people have a negative perception of corruption, and a score close to 18 means people have a positive perception of corruption. the bangla version scale's reliability is cronbach’s a= .68. even though scholars have a different minimum level of reliability, some accepted values of .6 .7 as an acceptable level of reliability (ursachi et al., 2015). a difference score (d score) was calculated by subtracting the score from each item for each subject separately to determine participant orientation. mean of d scores were thus obtained separately for all 120 participants. data analysis first, obtained data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. hypotheses were then tested with a one-way analysis of variance and a t-test. results the findings are shown through the perception of corruption across gender, religion, and socioeconomic status. the result from a one-way analysis of variance of the perception of corruption based on gender shows no significant difference in corruption perception among male and female university students (f = 1.191; p > .05). on the contrary, the result from a one-way analysis of variance shows a significant difference in perception of corruption based on religion (f = 5.416; p < .01). therefore t-test was conducted to determine the difference in perception of corruption across religions. table 1 indicates the mean score and standard deviation obtained for muslims (m = 65.79; sd = 15.288), hindus (m = 54.96; sd = 13.681), and other religions (m = 68.00; sd = 9.292). the table also shows that mean differences in perception of corruption between muslim and hindu respondents were significant. moreover, the mean differences in perception of corruption between others and hindu respondents were also significant. therefore, the hypothesis of the difference in perception of corruption based on religion was 132 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) saha et al. (perception of corruption across gender, religion, and…) found in this study, especially between muslims and hindus, and hindus with participants with other religions. the hindu participants have the lowest mean perception of corruption. table 1 mean sd and t-value of perception of corruption based on religion variable religion n mean sd t p pcs muslim hindu 89 24 65.79 54.96 15.288 13.681 3.145 .001*** pcs hindu others 24 7 54.96 68.00 13.681 9.292 -2.907 .011* note: *** p < .001; ** p < .01; * p < .05 the result from a one-way analysis of variance shows a significant difference in perception of corruption based on socioeconomic status (f = 4.910; p < .05). therefore, a ttest was conducted to determine the difference in perception of corruption across socioeconomic status. table 2 results from t-test on perception of corruption based on socioeconomic status group n m sd df t p higher class and middle class 28 43.29 13.018 87 -9.834 .001*** 61 65.93 8.446 higher class and lower class 28 43.29 13.018 57 -13.907 .001*** 31 77.94 4.582 middle class and lower class 61 65.93 8.446 90 -7.367 .001*** 31 77.94 4.582 note: *** p < .001; ** p < .01; * p < .05 results in table 2 indicate that there is a significant difference in perception of corruption between higher (m = 43.29) and middle (m = 65.93) class groups (t = -9.834, p < .01). the results also show that there is a significant difference in perception of corruption between higher (m = 43.29) and lower (m = 77.94) class groups (t = -13.907, p < .01). moreover, the results show that there is a significant difference in perception of corruption between middle (m = 65.93) and lower (m = 77.94) class groups (t = -7.367, p < .01). participants from the higher class have the lowest perception of corruption. in contrast, participants from the lower class have the highest perception of corruption. discussion this study's results show no differences in the perception of corruption among male and female university students. therefore, the first hypothesis of this study was rejected. this result aligns with a previous study in slovenia that found no differences in the perception of corruption based on gender (borošak & šumah, 2019). although women participated less in bribery (swamy et al., 2001), a previous study's findings found women perceive more need corruption, while men perceive more greed corruption (bauhr & charron, 2020). the impact of corruption on gender equally affected men's and women's tendency (goetz, 2007). moreover, another study found differences in the tolerance of corruption between men and women in australia but not in indonesia, india, and singapore (alatas et al., 2009). the varying results indicate that other variables than gender may play a role in the perception of corruption. the first hypothesis of this study is not supported and may be caused by several conditions. the respondents of this study are male and female university students, and education affects their perception. also, in modern times, males and females are all aware of the perception of corruption. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 133 saha et al. (perception of corruption across gender, religion, and…) the respondents of this study were classified among three groups based on their religion: the muslim, hindu, and others. the findings show a significant difference in the perception of corruption based on religion. moreover, the perception of corruption among muslim and hindu university students is significant. also, the perception of corruption significantly differs between the hindu and the others. the hypothesis of the perception of corruption concerning religion is supported in this research. these findings align with a previous study's result on religion's impact on corruption (shadabi, 2013). however, findings from a previous study show the impact of religion on corruption is mediated by cultural channels (zelekha & avnimelech, 2023). a study in china found the role of religious culture in preventing official corruption (xu et al., 2017). in this study, the respondents were classified among three groups based on their socioeconomic status score: higher class, middle class, and lower class group. the findings show a significant difference in the perception of corruption based on socioeconomic status. the perception of corruption among university students from higher classes is lower than two other groups. in comparison, university students from the lower class socioeconomic have higher than the other two groups. these results align with findings from a previous study in croatia that the corruption perception of individuals is influenced by selected socioeconomic factors (zakaria, 2016). the current study will help many organizations to increase their honesty, transparency, and integrity to reach their goal. this study's findings will also help the government and private service organizations rely on betterment against corruption. however, this study has limitations. the first limitation relates to the demographic variables that are thought to be associated with the perception of corruption. future research needs to co-operate more variables associated with the social aspect, as social identity and family background impact the perception of corruption. the second limitation is the number of participants involved in this study. further research needs to be conducted on a large sample size and collected data above the country. conclusion even though there are no differences in perception of corruption between male and female university students, in this study, the perception of corruption significantly differs based on religion and socioeconomic status. the hindus have the lowest perception of corruption. on the other hand, university students from the higher class have the lowest perception of corruption, while the lower class has the highest perception of corruption. these differences need to be addressed in any intervention in corruption, focusing on designing ethical training programs to raise awareness of the negative consequences of non-monetary activities. acknowledgment the authors acknowledge the institutions where the study has been conducted. the authors also highly acknowledge the participants who participated in the study as respondents. we are also acknowledging cordially those who collected data for the current study. declarations author contribution. aks: finalization of the research proposal and supervised the whole study. akd: coordinator of the study and contributed to data analysis. ab: contributed to introduction and discussion. vps: contributed to scale development. md.ah: data collection and report writing. sap: reviewed the paper with data analysis funding statement. the study has been conducted the present study out of personal interest. thus, there are no funding agencies as such to conduct the study. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. 134 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) saha et al. 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(2022). the relationship between corruption perception and depression: a multiple mediation model. psychology research and behavior management, 15, 1943– 1954. https://doi.org/10.2147/prbm.s370045 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0304-3878(00)00123-1 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0304-3878(00)00123-1 https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550614528544 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0047-2727(99)00092-4 https://doi.org/10.1016/s2212-5671(15)00123-9 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chieco.2016.11.005 https://doi.org/10.1080/10999922.2016.1172929 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e16882 https://doi.org/10.2147/prbm.s370045 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 20 (1), february 2023, 1-10 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humantias.v20i1.18 trust and communication as predictors of marital intimacy among individuals in dual-earner marriages reynalda fildzah dessyrianti1, jenny lukito setiawan1,2 1school of psychology, universitas ciputra surabaya, indonesia 2 center for marriages and families, universitas ciputra surabaya, indonesia corresponding author: hai.rfildzah@gmail.com introduction in indonesia, the normative family structure is the most common. men are expected to work and provide for their families, while women are supposed to care for the house. a man as a father is expected to provide moral direction, be a role model for his children, and earn a living (lamb, 2000), while a woman as a mother is expected to care for and nurture their children (weaver & coleman, 2005). the family structure may function properly if each member fulfills their responsibilities (retnowati et al., 2014). like other developing countries, indonesia has many unemployed married women. however, in recent years, the number of women participating in the workforce has risen rapidly, creating dual-earner couples. political reform in indonesia also increases women’s participation in the labor force (utomo, 2015). many women play a dual role as mothers and help meet the financial needs of their families as secondary earners. being secondary earners, these women are expected to supplement the family's income by pursuing a job that does not interfere with their primary obligations as spouses and mothers (utomo, 2012). in those cases, we should expect married women to work in less difficult positions than their husbands, to work fewer hours, gain less labor market experience, have weaker labor force commitment, and suffer slower income growth (utomo, 2012). on the one hand, a wife's participation in earning a living has various positive impacts on the family, especially in marital relationships. the wife's workplace involvement is a art icle info ab st r act article history received february 20, 2022 revised june 16, 2022 accepted november 15, 2022 every year, the labor force grows, owing to an increase in the number of women employed and dual-earner couples, including in indonesia. individuals in dual-earner marriages face several problems, such as marital intimacy. this study aimed to investigate the role of trust and communication in marital intimacy among individuals in dual-earner marriages in surabaya. participants in this study were 103 individuals in dual-earner marriages in surabaya, chosen using the convenience sampling technique. this study used three scales: trust scale, communication scale, and personal assessment of intimacy in relationship (pair) inventory. multiple linear regression analysis was used to analyze the data. the results show trust and communication contributed significantly to marital intimacy, with the total effective contribution of the two variables being 74 percent. trust contributed bigger than that of communication, 68.7 percent and 5.3 percent, respectively. this study concludes that trust and communication simultaneously and partially play a significant role in marital intimacy among individuals in dual-earner marriages in surabaya. therefore, to maintain marital intimacy, individuals in dual-earner marriages need to develop trust in their husband or wife. keywords communication; dual-earner; marital intimacy; trust. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humantias.v20i1.18 2 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) dessyrianti & setiawan (trust and communication as predictors of marital intimacy …) buffer for her stress because of her role in the household (haddock & rattenborg, 2003). moreover, working can also help wives grow and achieve themselves and provide additional income for the family (renanita & setiawan, 2018). in addition, for husbands, their wives' participation can reduce the pressure to become the sole breadwinner, which in turn can create more psychological space and time for them to actively participate in family life (haddock & rattenborg, 2003). on the other hand, while dual-earner couples may feel many positive benefits, there are also some drawbacks. working couples each tend to experience a variety of burdens and responsibilities at work and in caring for their families (santrock, 2013). dual-earner couples have lower-quality marriages due to excessive workload and family conflicts (frisco & williams, 2003). many roles and responsibilities create additional stress for dual-earners, affecting family and work life (elloy & mackie, 2002). a study found that working couples tend to divorce (silberstein, 2014). another study found that dual-earner couples generally have a lower marriage quality and a higher probability of ending their marriage due to work and family conflicts (frisco & williams, 2003). it is a widely known fact that divorce is common in most countries, including indonesia. although the number of marriages grows yearly, the divorce rate also rises (statistic indonesia, 2022). marital intimacy is essential to maintain a marriage. when a couple's marital intimacy is not fulfilled, there will be a tendency for the individual to leave the relationship (kirby et al., 2005). a lack of marital intimacy among partners contributes to marital discontent, and they may end the relationship (khalifian & barry, 2016). when a couple has low marital intimacy, their tendency to have a happy and prosperous marriage is also low. therefore, this condition may even lead to divorce. marital intimacy is a relationship between individuals in the realm of marriage in which processes and experiences result from individual self-disclosure to partners (schaefer & olson, 1981). couples with well-established marital intimacy have a higher tendency to have a happy marriage. individuals with great intimacy with their partners feel more satisfaction in relationships and life and feel that their lives are meaningful (cordova, 2009). marital intimacy also makes individuals physically healthier, happier, and more resilient (cordova, 2009). this study aimed to investigate the factors that play a role in marital intimacy, especially among individuals in dual-earner marriages in surabaya. several variables are expected to play a role in marital intimacy, including trust and communication. trust is an individual's positive feelings toward a partner, which includes a sense of confidence that the partner's behavior is predictable, can rely on the partner, and the belief that the partner can maintain the relationship commitment (rempel et al., 1985). the notion that a partner is honest and trustworthy is referred to as trust (williams et al., 2009). trust is essential to a strong marriage (harris et al., 2008). therefore, trust is expected to have a role in every dimension of marital intimacy. regarding sexual intimacy, trust plays a role in deciding sexual relations with partners. an individual's sense of trust affects decision-making and sexual commitment (goldenberg et al., 2015). in emotional intimacy, trust is a basis for vulnerability to a partner. there is a need for trust in a partner, which involves a sense of security, reliability, and predictable vulnerability (cordova et al., 2005). in recreational intimacy, trust plays a role in increasing the time spent together. when couples trust each other and can share their feelings, this will help them strengthen intimacy through holidays, fun activities, and leisure time (kardansouraki et al., 2016). furthermore, trust is needed in social intimacy as an individual believes in their partner's social life. without trust in the relationship, individuals will quickly be suspicious of the scope of their partner's friendship (asif & saim, 2018). communication is the process of conveying something to the other person to understand and be understood (olson et al., 2008). the communication that is used in this study refers to marital communication. previous studies consistently found that humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 3 dessyrianti & setiawan (trust and communication as predictors of marital intimacy …) communication is crucial to marital satisfaction (khorlina & setiawan, 2017; renanita & setiawan, 2018; rhenardo & setiawan, 2017). happy couples agree that they are satisfied with their communication with their partner (olson et al., 2008). communication is essential to maintain household integrity and harmony (dewi & sudhana, 2013). moreover, communication is like the heart of an intimate relationship and is the foundation of a relationship (olson et al., 2011). individuals in dual-earner households tend to spend most of their time balancing work and domestic life. as a result, they spend less time with their spouse. being preoccupied with each other's jobs might cause misunderstanding and conflict in marriage (dewi & sudhana, 2013). this situation is where good communication takes part, and communication helps build and maintain marital intimacy because it facilitates conflict resolution in marriage (olson et al., 2011). as a result, healthy communication is vital, and it is challenging to establish intimacy without it (martin & mahoney, 2009). it is hoped that dual-earners will be able to have a harmonious marriage with high intimacy as trust and communication develop. several studies have been undertaken on the impact of trust and communication on intimacy. trust between partners is associated with love and intimacy (larzelere & huston, 1980). communication is also a strong predictor of intimacy and relational satisfaction (emmers-sommer, 2004). although prior research has already discussed trust or communication toward intimacy, the study in a dual-earner context is still limited. research conducted by emmers-sommer (2004) examined a group of dating students, while larzelere & huston's (1980) study was conducted on a group of dating and married individuals. the dual-earner context was not addressed in either study, and the results could not represent the condition of the dual-earner. dual-earners frequently experience role conflict and overload due to excessive work and family responsibilities (williams et al., 2009). studies on marital intimacy are still not widely found in the context of eastern culture, especially in indonesia. indonesia adheres to a collectivist culture, while existing research is generally from the western society with an individualistic culture. collectivism and individualist cultures have different family norms, values, and obligations (hofstede, 2001). in the context of eastern culture, carrying out roles and responsibilities in marriage will affect the quality of marriage, in contrast to western culture, where quality is viewed through the fulfillment of hedonism in husband and wife (sorokowski et al., 2017). the differences in roles and responsibilities in marriage in western and eastern cultures may produce differences in marriage quality, particularly regarding marital intimacy and the influencing variables. this study attempted to fill the current gap in the literature about marital intimacy in dual-earners. this study aimed to determine the role of trust and communication in marital intimacy among individuals in dual-earner marriages in surabaya. this study also intended to explore which variables play a more significant role in predicting marital intimacy. findings from this study should help expectant dual-earner couples, dual-earner couples, individuals, and marriage counselors better understand the factors that influence marital intimacy. this study examined dual-earner couples because of the various conflicts in carrying out multiple tasks and responsibilities at work and in family life. the primary hypothesis of this study is that trust and communication simultaneously have a role in marital intimacy. the first minor hypothesis is that trust has a role in marital intimacy, while the second minor hypothesis is that communication has a role in marital intimacy. method research design a quantitative correlational research design was applied in this study. the correlational design represented the actual condition; therefore, the results are not determined causal 4 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) dessyrianti & setiawan (trust and communication as predictors of marital intimacy …) relationships between variables and provide definitive evidence regarding cause-effect relationships among variables (stangor, 2011). participants participants in this study were 103 individuals in dual-earner marriages (37 husbands and 66 wives) with various age ranges. participants were working-married individuals who also had a working spouse. participants lived in surabaya and were recruited through convenience sampling. participants fill out questionnaires with an online survey using google forms. the vast majority of the respondents had the experience of dating before marriage. participants were then entered into a random drawing for an e-money gift reward. table 1 shows the demographic data of participants. table 1 demographic data of participants instruments three scales were used in this study. trust scale, communication scale, and personal assessment of intimacy in relationship (pair) inventory were translated into indonesian. all participants were asked to fill in the scale using the likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, to 5 = strongly agree). dual-earners’ trust was measured using trust scale (rempel et al., 1985), comprising 26 items regarding the level of trust. the items focus on faith, predictability, and dependability (e.g., “though times may change and the future is uncertain, i know my partner will always be ready and willing to offer me strength and support”). the alpha cronbach and item-rest correlation for trust scale are presented in table 2. communication was measured using communication scale (olson & larson, 2008), which consists of 10 items regarding communication style. the items focus on communication style and satisfaction with one’s spouse (e.g., “i am very satisfied with how my partner and i talk with each other”). the alpha cronbach and item-rest correlation for communication scale are presented in table 2. marital intimacy was measured using personal assessment of intimacy in relationships (pair) inventory (schaefer & olson, 1981). this scale consists of 30 items regarding marital intimacy. the items focus on marital intimacy within five dimensions; emotional intimacy, social intimacy, sexual intimacy, intellectual intimacy, and recreational category n % marital status husband 37 36 wife 66 64 age 20 – 30 years old 49 47.6 31 – 40 years old 32 31.1 41 – 50 years old 13 12.6 >51 years old 9 8.7 length of dating before marriage no dating 13 12.6 < 1 year 28 27.2 1 – 3 years 38 36.9 4 – 6 years 11 10.7 7 – 9 years 9 8.7 > 9 years 4 3.9 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 5 dessyrianti & setiawan (trust and communication as predictors of marital intimacy …) intimacy (e.g., “we enjoy the same recreational activities”). the alpha cronbach and itemrest correlation for this scale are presented in table 2. table 2 item-rest correlation and alpha cronbach scale item-rest correlation cronbach’s α trust faith .411 – .811 .883 predictability .607 – .771 .870 dependability .350 – .692 .789 communication .468 – .751 .863 marital intimacy emotional intimacy .367 – .645 .781 social intimacy .447 – .505 .659 sexual intimacy .352 – .646 .732 intellectual intimacy .493 – .619 .760 recreational intimacy .346 – .726 .754 data analysis the stepwise regression analysis was applied to examine the role of trust and communication in predicting marital intimacy after knowing the correlation of each independent variable to the dependent variable using the jasp 9.2 version. a regression test in research helps test the relationship between variables, assuming that one or more independent variables can predict the dependent variable (clark-carter, 2009). results table 3 shows the results of multiple linear regression analysis. the results demonstrate that, simultaneously or partially, all independent variables play a significant role in marital intimacy. the results indicate both trust and communication played a significant role in marital intimacy (f(2,100) = 142.5, p<.001) with a total contribution of 74% (r² = .740). table 3 regression analysis model sum of squares df mean square f sig. regression 25.372 2 12.686 142.5 <.001 residual 8.901 100 .089 total 34.273 102 the minor hypothesis test results also show that trust and communication partially play a significant role in marital intimacy (see table 4). trust played a role in marital intimacy (t = 7.018; p <.05) and contributed significantly to marital intimacy of 68.7% (r² = .687). communication also played a role in marital intimacy (t = 4.528; p <.05) and contributed significantly to marital intimacy of 5.3% (r² = .053). it can be seen that trust has a more significant role in marital intimacy for individuals in dual-earner marriages in surabaya. table 4 minor hypothesis testing unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients t p model b std. error beta trust .467 .067 .555 7.018 <.001 communication .249 .055 .358 4.528 <.001 6 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) dessyrianti & setiawan (trust and communication as predictors of marital intimacy …) discussion this study addressed the role of trust and communication in marital intimacy in dual-earners. findings revealed that trust was the stronger predictor of marital intimacy; marital intimacy can develop when both partners exhibit a healthy and dynamic relationship. trust plays a role in strengthening relationships (ramadhini & hendriani, 2015). the findings are consistent with the results of previous studies, where trust within a couple is related to intimacy. trust is an important factor in the harmony and integrity of marriage (larzelere & huston, 1980) and essential to a successful marriage (harris et al., 2008). another study found that existing relationships cannot be closely intertwined without trust (asif & saim, 2018). one possible factor for the greater contribution of trust in this study is the involvement of self-disclosure in forming trust and how it relates to marital intimacy. self-disclosure is essential for developing intimacy since it requires openly discussing personal thoughts and ideas (olson et al., 2011). a previous study showed that if a husband and wife open to one another without having secrets, trust will eventually form between them (suryani & nurwidawati, 2016). the vast majority of the participants in this study were dominated by wives (64%). this condition might also contribute to the result. women tend to disclose themselves more than men (haselhuhn et al., 2015; olson et al., 2011), whereas men see selfdisclosure as something not masculine, discouraging them from doing so (maccoby, 1998). in line with the hypothesis, results also showed that communication plays a significant role in marital intimacy. the finding parallels a previous study finding that communication skills increased intimacy between husband and wife (farbod et al., 2014). communication is an essential factor in building intimate relationships (sprecher, 2002). when communication is good, marital intimacy will also increase. communication encourages couples to share their feelings, needs, and hopes. as a result, intimacy will more likely intensify as they understand each other. therefore, good communication between partners is needed. the conflicts faced by dual-earner couples are often not at the core of the problem. the problem lies in an unhealthy and ineffective problem-solving process (howe, 2012), including terrible communication. it is common for husbands or wives to fail to communicate their feelings, expectations, or the problems they face. this condition negatively impacts marital relationships (fatima & ajmal, 2012). with such limited quality time to spend with the other half, establishing good communication is undoubtedly challenging for dual-earners. although dual-earners can still get in touch with each other through their smartphones, previous studies revealed that technology use could disrupt relationships by decreasing time spent together, increasing conflict, and contributing to a lower level of relationship satisfaction (hertlein, 2010; hertlein & webster, 2008; mcdaniel & drouin, 2019). according to the regression analysis, trust and communication contributed 74%, implying that other factors may have played the remaining 26%. one factor that may contribute to intimacy was the length of dating before marriage, given that the vast majority of the respondents had the experience of dating before marriage (87.4%). prior research about the length of dating and marital intimacy is still limited. a previous study found that couples who dated for a more extended period before marriage experienced higher marital stress (kamp-dush et al., 2008). marriage quality in the first few years is overshadowed by the couple's relationship when dating from the perspective of a boyfriend and girlfriend rather than a husband and wife (wilson & huston, 2013). when a couple has a good relationship during the dating period, it is more likely that their early married life will also tend to be more intimate. this finding is consistent with the finding of another study that premarital relationships could develop deeper as more experiences are shared (niehuis et al., 2016). these study findings would help develop best practices for indonesian married couples by better understanding the role of trust and communication in marital intimacy, especially among individuals in dual-earners marriages. however, this study has limitations. the research participants were limited to individuals in dual-earner marriages in surabaya and humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 7 dessyrianti & setiawan (trust and communication as predictors of marital intimacy …) studied with a cross-sectional design. further studies need to be conducted using random sampling with an experimental design so the results can be generalized and causality can be tested. future studies will be better to involve both husband and wife to investigate the dynamics of the same marital relationship. conclusion trust and communication play a significant role in marital intimacy among individuals in dual-earner marriages. simultaneously and partially, both trust and communication contributed to marital intimacy, with trust playing a more significant role. the more trust between the couples, the more marital intimacy will be, and vice versa. thus, couples need to strengthen their trust and communication to enhance their marital intimacy, especially among individuals in dual-earners marriages. acknowledgment the authors would like to thank the dean of the school of psychology universitas ciputra surabaya for the support, as well as all of the participants who took part in this study. declarations author contribution. rfd, as the first author, established the research topic, collected data, analyzed data samples, produced the report, and editing. jls, as the second author, assisted with developing research ideas, examined and corrected the final manuscript, and supervised the work. funding statement. any funding mechanism does not support this study. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references asif, a., & saim, s. 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(2013). shared reality and grounded feelings during courtship: do they matter for marital success? journal of marriage and family, 75(3), 681–696. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12031 http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01199/full https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224490209552141 https://www.bps.go.id/dynamictable/2017/03/03/893/nikah-talak-dan-cerai-serta-rujuk-2012-2015 https://www.bps.go.id/dynamictable/2017/03/03/893/nikah-talak-dan-cerai-serta-rujuk-2012-2015 https://journal.unesa.ac.id/index.php/jptt/article/view/1767 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17441730.2012.646841 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01494929.2015.1113224 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0265407505054519 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12031 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 20 (1), february 2023, 29-39 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humantias.v20i1.47 the get personal application to improve personal safety skills in children yun nina ekawati, verdiantika annisa, nofrans eka saputra department of psychology, universitas jambi, indonesia corresponding author: nofransekasaputra@unja.ac.id introduction sexual crimes against children are a growing problem in almost all regions of indonesia (collin-vézina et al., 2013; mashudi & nur’aini, 2014). it is most experienced by boys and girls around 2 to 12 years old (komalasari, 2016; rohmah et al., 2015). these crimes are in the form of coercion of sexual activities in unnatural and undesirable ways, in which children are included as objects of perpetrators (probosiwi & bahransyaf, 2015) furthermore, the perpetrators are usually the closest people, such as biological or stepparents, neighbors, and relatives, showing that their environment does not provide a safe place of care (hikmah, 2017; komalasari, 2016). children’s bewilderment provokes sexual crimes about negative connotations of perpetrators’ true intentions covert in the form of propositions or other motives, which can be followed by intimidations that compel children to comply (mashudi & nur’aini, 2014). criminals use grooming as the primary tactic in 70% of cases to approach victims (protection, 2019). sexual crime includes coercing or physically forcing someone to commit a sexual act against their inclination or purposefully osculating someone else without that person's permission. furthermore, it is a form of sexual violence that comprises child sexual abuse, grouping, rape (coerced vaginal, anal, or oral penetration or a drug-facilitated sexual assault), or the torture of the person sexually (collin-vézina et al., 2013; mashudi & nur’aini, 2014). art icle info ab st r act article history received march 21, 2022 revised december 23, 2022 accepted january 5, 2023 sexual crime comprises child sexual abuse, grouping, rape, or the torture of a person in a sexual manner. recently, sexual crimes have posed a threat to children in indonesia. this study aimed to determine the effectiveness of the get personal application in enhancing children's personal safety skills against sexual crime. a pre-post control group design was utilized with a quasi-experimental approach. twenty-two elementary school pupils who participated in the study were split into experimental and control groups, with the experimental group receiving the get personal application treatment. the personal safety skills scale was utilized to obtain the pretest and posttest data. the data were analyzed by independent sample t-test and paired sample t-test. significant differences were found in the results of personal safety skills in the pretest and posttest scores in the experimental group, while the control group didn’t indicate any difference. following the paired t-test, individuals in the experimental group demonstrated a significant difference between the means of the pretest and posttest, with the posttest’s mean score being higher than the pretest’s mean score. therefore, the get personal application improves children's personal safety skills and may apply to enhance personal safety skills among children. keywords children; personal safety skills; the get personal application. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humantias.v20i1.47 mailto:nofransekasaputra@unja.ac.id 30 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ekawati et al.(the get personal application to improve…) jambi province has a high incidence of sexual crimes, which should be a cause for concern. data from the regional integrated service unit for protection and children jambi province (2019) showed many reported child sex crimes. furthermore, in 2018-2019, as many as 312 children across jambi became victims, both boys, and girls. sexual crimes against children violate morals and laws, and this act hurts physically, psychologically, and socially (sitompul, 2015; tursilarini, 2017; umar et al., 2018; w. zhang et al., 2015). even children who have been abused and trauma tend to commit the same crimes against others. it becomes a continuous cycle; therefore, each victim must recover from the trauma and break the cycle (octaviana, 2019). sexual crimes against children usually occur due to a lack of insight and other skills to protect themselves against sexual criminals, such as resisting persuasion, seduction, or threats (umar et al., 2018). efforts to avoid these crimes can be carried out by providing sexual education. after participating in sexual education programs, personal safety skills improve regardless of age (chen et al., 2012). the education programs can be carried out on a school basis (h. zhang et al., 2021; w. zhang et al., 2014). a previous study shows training programs combined with appropriate practical skills will empower children in preventive behavior (alirezaei & mirzaiinajmabadi, 2019). the personal safety skills program aims to advance knowledge and skills to avoid the threat of sexual crimes (kumalasari & kurniawati, 2018; mashudi & nur’aini, 2014; wurtele, 2008). this skill attempts to deal with child sexual abuse; therefore, they may be responsible for protecting their bodies from sexual predators (hasanah et al., 2019). studies have shown that personal safety skills have successfully stimulated an increased ability to prevent sexual crimes (juarni et al., 2020; umar et al., 2018). in addition, it has been shown that providing information about personal safety skills to school and preschool children increases knowledge and skills (handayani, 2017; mashudi & nur’aini, 2014). educational media for personal safety skills as an instrument for sexual education can be dolls, stories, videos, student workbooks, dramas, and comics (bruce, 1995). however, this study examines media for android-based personal safety skills training to provide more accessible and practical knowledge about preventing sexual crimes in children (fitria et al., 2020; hasanah et al., 2019). children receive three skill components recognize, resist, and report (bagley & king, 2003), which are packaged in the get personal application (gadget personal safety skills). this application is based on an android developed to provide knowledge about the potential for sexual crimes (recognize), able to refuse the treatment of sexual crimes (resist), and dare to provide information to parents openly about sexual crimes behavior (report). these applied activities are carried out in stages with the principle of student-centered learning that emphasizes understanding, planning, action, and reflection (twigg & jorgensen, 2000). therefore, this study aimed to investigate the effects of the get personal application on improving children's personal safety skills. this research hypothesizes that the get personal application will improve children's personal safety skills. method research design this research was designed as quasi-experimental research. this design required an experimental group and a control group to be compared. table 1 shows the research design. initially, a pretest was conducted to gauge each participant's level of personal safety skills by giving the experimental and control groups a scale to fill out. in the treatment phase, the experimental group received the treatment, whereas the control group received no treatment. the get personal treatment was implemented by facilitators who underwent a three-day humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 31 ekawati et al. (the get personal application to improve…) training program to teach kids the get personal activities for 150 minutes. in the last stage, the experimental and control groups' scores on the precise scale used for the pretest were used to provide the posttest table 1 quasi-experimental design description: eg : experiment group cg : control group o1 : pretest o2 : posttest x : the get personal treatment children were exposed to the get personal application for three days as part of the treatment given to the experimental group. the get personal application was administered daily for around 150 minutes, with the sessions shown in figure 1. figure 1 get personal sessions participants the criteria for participants in this research were elementary school students aged 6-8 years. participants aged six years old were the majority (54%). the number of female participants is more significant than that of males, 73% and 27%, respectively. 11 students were in the control group. in contrast, 11 students were in the experimental group. therefore, all participants were equally allocated to both groups. instrument the data collection used components of personal safety skills: recognition, resistance, and reporting (bagley & king, 2003). the personal safety skills scale was field tested on elementary school students in muara jambi and has components reliability between .86-.92, with 24 items. the sample of recognition items is described, such as whether the child can state sensitive body parts in the hear area (hair-neck). resist items are described as whether the child can say stop, no, stop, no, scream, or not want to be touched when sensitive body group pretest treatment posttest eg o1 x o2 cg o1 o2 32 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ekawati et al.(the get personal application to improve…) parts are touched. reporting items are shown, such as children can tell parents about sexual crimes that have taken place. the get personal application the application (apk) is software that can be launched and booted on mobile devices like android (burgers et al., 2016; liu et al., 2014). the application was further developed using the smart apps creator (sac) program as a digital interactive medium for developing multimedia material for mobile devices. it works with all types of gadgets and touch screens (smartappscreator.com). therefore, by designing this product as an app, get personal will become a simpler and more sustainable (paperless) solution. as shown in figure 2, the pictures are aligned with event scenarios that are easy for children to comprehend and child-friendly colors. these pictures are developed in the get personal application to ease children’s comprehension and make children comfortable. figure 2 design of get personal application pictures experts have verified the material of the get personal application. the validators, including psychologists, parents, teachers, women, and child protection professionals, were explicitly chosen based on their competence areas. table 2 shows the validation results. table 2 validation results subactivities objectives description of the content and form of activities validator total score s v validation level 1 2 3 4 truth & dare children recognize the body parts that can and should not be touched children are asked to open a virtual truth card containing information about the body parts that can be and should not be touched 4 4 3 4 15 11 .55 high children are asked to open a virtual dare card containing questions about the parts that can and should not be touched 4 5 4 3 16 12 .60 high humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 33 ekawati et al. (the get personal application to improve…) table 2 continued subactivities objectives description of the content and form of activities validator total score s v validation level 1 2 3 4 children recognize who can and cannot touchsensitive parts children are asked to open a virtual truth card containing information on who is allowed to touch the sensitive 12art 5 4 4 4 17 13 .65 high children are asked to open a virtual dare card containing questions about who can touch the sensitive art 3 3 5 3 14 10 .50 moderate children know the behavior of other people with the potential for sexual crimes such as touching, persuading, threatening. children are asked to open a virtual truth card containing information on forms of behavior with the potential to commit sexual 4 4 4 3 15 11 .55 moderate children are asked to open a virtual dare card containing question about forms of behavior with the potential to commit sexual crimes. 4 4 4 3 15 11 .55 moderate mode on children know how to resist actions from others who pose physical children are asked to open a virtual card containing questions that describe the actions of others who pose a physical threat 4 4 4 3 14 10 .50 moderate children know how to resist the actions of others who have the potential to harm verbally children are asked to open a virtual card containing questions that describe the actions of others by verbally refusing 4 4 3 3 14 10 .50 moderate speak up children know whom to report or tell to about the sexual crimes that they have faced children are asked to open a virtual card which stimulates their ability to speak or write down the incidents of sexual crimes they have experienced 4 4 4 4 16 12 .60 high 34 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ekawati et al.(the get personal application to improve…) results table 3 presents the statistic descriptive of the experimental and control groups' mean and standard deviation of pretest and posttest scores. it can be seen that the pretest score of the control group is slightly higher than that of the experiment group. table 3 statistic descriptive group score mean standard deviation experiment pretest 73 5.0 posttest 79 7.2 control pretest 76 9.5 posttest 74 6.1 figure 3 compares the average pretest-posttest scores of the experimental group to those of the control group. the mean score in the experimental group increased from the pretest to the posttest, but the mean score in the control group decreased from the pretest figure 3 mean difference between the experiment and control groups table 4 shows the results from the paired sample t-test and the independent sample ttest. the result of paired t-tests on the experiment group was significant (t=-2.992; p<.05), with the mean score on the posttest being higher than on the pretest. this finding indicates after receiving the get personal treatment, the experimental group showed improved personal safety skills. contrarily, there was no difference between the mean of the pretest and posttest scores among individuals in the control group (t=.600; p>.05). meanwhile, the independent sample t-test on the pretest score between the experimental and control groups was insignificant (t=-2.992; p>.05). the findings indicate that personal safety skills among the experimental and control groups did not differ before the treatment. table 4 the results of the t-test t-test score t value p paired sample t-test pretest eg – posttest eg -2.992 .014 pretest cg – posttest cg .600 .562 independent sample t-test pretest eg – pretest cg -.974 .342 posttest eg – posttest cg 1.495 .151 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 35 ekawati et al. (the get personal application to improve…) discussion this study aimed to investigate the effects of the get personal application on enhancing children's personal safety skills. the findings show a significant difference in personal safety skills in the pretest and posttest scores in the experimental group, with the average posttest value higher than the pretest. in contrast, there was no significant difference in the control group. the findings imply that the get personal application effectively improves children's personal safety skills. personal safety skill is one of the programs shown to help children avoid the risk of sexual crimes (kumalasari & kurniawati, 2018; mashudi & nur’aini, 2014; wurtele, 2008). the get personal application may apply as a school-based program to prevent sexual crime. school-based violence prevention education can be useful for increasing children's knowledge and skills regarding sexual violence prevention (h. zhang et al., 2021; w. zhang et al., 2014). training programs and their combination with appropriate practical skills enable children to adopt preventive behavior (alirezaei & mirzaiinajmabadi, 2019). this school-based program is expected to improve children's personal safety skills after participating (chen et al., 2012). the get personal application attempts to use technological elements in the program. training in android-based personal safety skills can be easier and more effective in teaching children of relevant knowledge (fitria et al., 2020). the study results show that the get personal application improves children's personal safety skills. these results are in line with previous studies results (handayani, 2017; hikmah, 2017; juarni et al., 2020; kumalasari & kurniawati, 2018; mashudi & nur’aini, 2014; umar et al., 2018) which aim to improve children's personal safety knowledge and skills to avoid the threat, as well as stimulating the increased ability to prevent sexual crimes (çeçen-eroǧul & hasirci, 2013; wurtele et al., 1986). the get personal application comprised three components: recognize, resist, and report (bagley & king, 2003; çeçen-eroǧul & hasirci, 2013; sawyerr & bagley, 2017). recognize is related to the importance of children understanding, identifying parts of the body that may and should not be touched by others, who may touch-sensitive parts of the body, and also finding out abnormal behaviors from other people related to sexual crimes. furthermore, resist is the behavior of facing or rejecting other people when committing sexual crimes or acts. meanwhile, the report is the behavior of reporting to parents, closest people, or the authorities when dealing with other people who commit sexual crimes or who make sexual discomfort the components of personal safety skills are organized into applications and board games that use multimedia elements in the form of audio tools and virtual map functions to enhance children's enthusiasm for playing. the get personal application consists of three parts games, including truth and dares, mode on, and speak up, including virtual cards and board games, which require to be organized by paying attention to the shape of the text, colored board games suitable for children's development. hence, children will be interested in using this application to play while learning. to ensure the validity of the get personal app, validators, including psychologists, parents, teachers, and child protection professionals, appraised it. the validator's assessment is also helpful as a measure of improvement to improve the reliability of the content. the results of the validator's assessment are within the valid criteria, which are included in the moderate and high categories. the truth and dares game provides image stimulation for children to recognize the body and sensitive areas and recognize the bad behavior of perpetrators of sexual crimes through virtual cards displayed. recognizing body areas is essential to provide information 36 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ekawati et al.(the get personal application to improve…) as early as possible to shape children's knowledge of personal safety skills and attitudes toward preventing sexual behavior (handayani, 2017). the mode on game provides image stimulation regarding rejection behavior and relationships with others who intend or commit sex crimes. children attending these sessions are encouraged to say no to potential sexual acts by others (handayani, 2017). at the same time, the illustration depicted in the speak-up game emphasizes events that appear in an unsafe state or receive sexual crimes treatment from others. therefore, in this game, children are required to report incidents of sexual crimes they have experienced to their parents or guardians in their environment. this combination is expected to increase their skills in telling someone about the incidence of sexual harassment, which is still considered very low (wulandari et al., 2020). this study has several limitations. the first limitation is a few references regarding interventions on personal safety skills using digital media as a demonstration. the second limitation is the potential of study participants’ mortality. the time the school gives needs to be optimized so that respondents do not drop out of the study. moreover, interventions carried out during the experiment require the school's commitment to providing facilities and infrastructure support. conclusion the get personal application, with three game sessions, improves children's personal safety skills. a significant difference between pretest and posttest scores among the experiment group, with a higher score in the posttest than in the pretest, supports implementing the get personal application for children. event illustrations arranged with pictures appropriate to the context of the game provide stimulation for children to recognize personal safety skills. participants' experience in the get personal game strengthens information about recognition by recognizing parts of the body that may and should not be touched by others, who may touch sensitive parts of the body, and abnormal behaviors from other people related to sexual crimes. the get personal application also enhances participants' resistance to facing or rejecting others when committing sexual crimes or actions. the report deals with reporting to parents, closest people, or the authorities when dealing with other people who commit sexual crimes or cause sexual discomfort among the participants was also improved with the get personal application. therefore, the get personal application is a valuable tool for improving personal safety skills, which hopefully may develop children's skills in dealing with the threat of sexual crimes around them. acknowledgment the authors would like to thank the elementary school students in the jambi area and the validators of the application implemented in this study. declarations author contribution. yne established the research topic, collected data, analyzed data samples, and wrote the report. va assisted with developing research ideas. nes supervised the work and examined and corrected the final manuscript. funding statement. this research has been carried out under the applied research scheme provided by the faculty of medicine and health science, universitas jambi. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 37 ekawati et al. 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(2015). preventing child sexual abuse early: preschool teachers’ knowledge, attitudes, and their training education in china. sage open, 5(1). 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244015571187 https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006x.54.5.688 https://doi.org/10.1177/10497315211022827 https://doi.org/10.1177/1049731513510409 https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244015571187 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 21 (2), august 2024, 134-142 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas http://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i2.278 the role of self-efficacy and work engagement on the contextual performance of special guidance teachers een rohaeni1*, aulia aulia1 1faculty of psychology, ahmad dahlan university, yogyakarta, indonesia corresponding author: een2007044030@webmail.uad.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction special guidance teachers are those who teach children with special needs in inclusive schools. according to the minister of national education republic of indonesia (2009), the formal duties (task performance) of a special guidance teacher may include: conducting assessments, administration, and curriculum and home visits as well as organising special learning services, media adaptation and program development. they also have some responsibilities in managing special aids/ visual aids/ special books/ special media and carrying out special administration. in doing those formal duties, special guidance teachers need encouragement, motivation, dedication and fostering contextual performance, so that the implementation of this inclusion program runs well. motowidlo and van scotter (1994) defined contextual performances as performances that do not directly contribute to the organisation's main technical process, but instead, they maintain the larger organizational, social, and psychological environment in which the technological core operates. it encompasses activities that improve the psychological climate and the viability of the social and organizational network, such as volunteering to complete tasks that are not formally part of the job, cooperating with others, and adhering to organizational rules, even when it is personally inconvenient. morever, according to van article info abst ract article history received december 7, 2022 revised december 15, 2023 accepted january 10, 2024 this research aims to examine the role of self-efficacy and work engagement on the contextual performance of special guidance teachers in inclusive schools. participants in this research were 101 special guidance teachers consisting of 86 women, 15 men; 22 people aged <30 years, 87 people aged 30-50 years, and 3 people aged >50 years. the data was collected through three scales, namely the self-efficacy scale, the modified uwes scale, and the contextual performance scale and was analysed using the linear regression technique on spss 25.00. the results showed that self-efficacy and work engagement together have a significant relationship to contextual performance with a magnitude of 31.2%. partially, self-efficacy has a very significant role on contextual performance, with a magnitude of 13, 2%; likewise, work engagement has a very significant role in contextual performance with a magnitude of 16,7%. these results have implications on how organisations may improve special guidance teachers' contextual performance by enhancing their self-efficacy and work engagement. keywords contextual performance inclusive schools self-efficacy work engagement mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas http://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i2.278 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 135 rohaeni et al. (the role of self-efficacy and work engagement on the contextual performance of special guidance teachers) scotter (2000) contextual performance becomes visible when employees voluntarily help colleagues who have difficulty completing their tasks, act with certain steps to establish good working relationships, or try their best to complete tasks on time. according to borman et al., (2001) contextual performances are characterized by enthusiasm, which refers to the ability to maintain enthusiasm and work extra to complete the task; voluntary, which refers to the willingness to carry out tasks that are not formally related to work/duties; cooperate, which means helping and cooperating with others; comply with the rules, which means being able to follow the rules and procedures that exist within the organization and the support and defend the goals of the organization, that refers to the willingness to support and defend the organizational’s goals. in the context of special guidance teachers, contextual performance may involve assisting each other in completing administrative tasks, providing assistance to kids with special needs, and demonstrating initiative in completing critical job tasks. cheasakul and varma (2016) revealed that teachers with high contextual performance demonstrate their commitment to the organization by willingly taking on tasks beyond their job responsibilities, exceeding the assigned tasks, and taking on additional responsibility to ensure the efficient operation of their respective departments. they eagerly take on tasks that go beyond their allocated responsibilities in the subjects they teach as well as a high enthusiasm for teaching and are more persistent in facing the challenges of teaching children with special needs (christian et al., 2011). previous research found some factors that affect teachers’ contextual performance which cover both internal factors and external factors. the internal factors include emotional intelligence, self-efficacy, work engagement, extrinsic motivation, organizational citizenship behaviour (hao & li, 2020; laili et al., 2022; salisu & awang, 2018; satriyono & vitasmoro, 2018). the external factors encompass the organizational environment, leadership, perceptions of organizational support, and organizational culture (aulia et al., 2022). one internal factor affecting contextual performance is self-efficacy. bandura (1997) defined self-efficacy as a person's belief in his ability to produce a performance that influences events and affects his life. this belief can determine how a person feels, thinks, motivates himself, and behaves. this belief creates various effects through four main processes, namely cognitive, motivational, affective and selection processes. that is, selfefficacy is the belief in one's abilities that will determine the desired results of the main tasks carried out. according to bandura (1997), self-efficacy consists of three dimensions, namely magnitude, generality, and strength. magnitude is related to the difficulty of a task. generality means that it is related to the task, and refers to how much confidence a person has in carrying out the task. strength refers to how strong or weak a person's belief in carrying out the task. past research examined self-efficacy among teachers for example, haddad and thaleb (2016) found that self-efficacy was associated with higher performance among lecturers. another research also found higher self-efficacy among vocational teachers was associated with performance and job satisfaction (bustami et al., 2022). in inclusive school settings, shade and stewart (2001) found that many teachers in inclusive schools have low selfefficacy as they are not confident in teaching children with special needs in inclusive schools which may reduce the quality of education. however, self-efficacy has not been examined in association with contextual performance, particularly among special guidance teachers. self-efficacy is very important for teachers as it fosters the quality of student learning (santrock, 2007). it is also important to enhance teachers’ confidence regarding their abilities to teach in inclusive schools. moreover, self-efficacy is an important factor that humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 136 rohaeni et al. (the role of self-efficacy and work engagement on the contextual performance of special guidance teachers) affects the ability to teach students with disabilities more effectively (sharma et al., 2015). past research found that self-efficacy has a significant and positive correlation with task performance and contextual performance (kappagoda, 2018; salisu & awang, 2018). another factor influencing contextual performance is work engagement. schaufeli and bakker (2004) defined work engagement as “a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption”. kahn (1990) conceptually explains that work engagement emphasizes the involvement of a person in carrying out tasks by expressing himself physically, cognitively, and emotionally at work. furthermore gonzález-romá et al. (2006), explained that work engagement is a positive, satisfying, work-related mindset characterized by passion, dedication, and appreciation. according to schaufeli and bakker (2004) work engagement is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption. vigor refers to high energy, a willingness to invest energy in work, and perseverance in facing difficulties. dedication refers to a strong involvement marked by enthusiasm, pride, and inspiration. those with high dedication have a sense of significance, enthusiasm, inspiration, pride and challenge. absorption is a condition in which employees feel that time is running fast and it is difficult to separate themselves from their work. work engagement is important, particularly for special guidance teachers in inclusive schools as teachers with high work engagement demonstrate positive emotions such as joy, interest and enthusiasm as well as arousal in teaching that brings a positive learning atmosphere (bakker & bal, 2010). past research found that work engagement has a strong correlation with performance among employees (yao et al., 2022). other research also found that work engagement was associated with teachers’ performance (bakker & bal, 2010). moreover, it was also associated with tasks and contextual performances among special education teachers (christian et al., 2011). research about self-efficacy and work engagement and how those were associated with contextual performance among special guidance teachers in indonesia was limited. this research is important to enhance the current knowledge regarding contextual performance, particularly among special guidance teachers as well as provide reference for institutions or counsellors in promoting employees’ contextual performance. thus, this research examined whether self-efficacy and work engagement together have an association with contextual performance among special guidance teachers in inclusive schools?; does self-efficacy have a role on contextual performance?; does work engagement have a role on contextual performance?. we expected that self-efficacy and work engagement have a role on contextual performance. method research approach this study used a quantitative approach through a survey to collect the data. participants the participants were 110 special guidance teachers in inclusive schools in bogor regency, indonesia with the criteria: special guidance teacher in inclusive school and still actively teaching until the time the research was conducted. breaking down by gender yields 86 females (55.9%) and 15 males (41.36%) representing a balanced gender distribution in this humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 137 rohaeni et al. (the role of self-efficacy and work engagement on the contextual performance of special guidance teachers) student population. breakdown by age resulted in 22 teachers aged <30 years, 87 teachers aged 30-50 years and 3 teachers aged >50 years. instruments this study used three scales that were distributed online to respondents via google forms. contextual performance was measured using the contextual performance scale that was adapted from the contextual performance scale compiled by (aulia et al., 2022). this scale consists of 10 items which were developed based on the aspects of contextual performance (borman et al., 2001) (i.e., enthusiasm, volunteering, cooperation, complying with regulations, and defending organizational goals). the scale had very good content validity indicated by aiken v coefficients ranging from 0.75 to 1.00. the cronbach alpha coefficient was 0.90 (aulia et al., 2022). in this study, the alpha was 0.83. self-efficacy was assessed using the self-efficacy scale adopted from the self-efficacy scale compiled by (aulia et al., 2019). the scale consists of 12 items that measure three aspects of self-efficacy based on bandura (1997) which include magnitude, generality, and strength. the scale had very good content validity indicated by aiken v coefficients ranging from 0.66 to 0.88. the cronbach alpha coefficient was 0.91 (aulia et al., 2022). in this study, the alpha was 0.85. we used the utrecht work engagement scale (uwes) developed by schaufeli and bakker (2004) which was modified for the indonesian context by (aulia et al., 2019). this 18-item modified utrecht work engagement scale has been validated by (aulia et al., 2019). the scale had very good content validity indicated by aiken v coefficients ranging from 0.61 to 0.88 and the alpha reliability coefficient was 0.89 (aulia et al., 2019). the current was 0.87. data analysis the data was analysed using the linear regression technique conducted through spss 25.00. results before carrying out multiple regression analysis techniques. we did several assumptions tests, the normality test, linearity test and multicollinearity test. the results of the normality test show the value of kolmogorov smirnov was p = 0.20 (p > 0.05), which means that the residual data was normally distributed. the results of the linearity test showed that the relationship between self-efficacy and contextual performance had a deviation from a linearity value of 0.25> 0.05 and a linearity significance value of 0.00 <0.05, meaning that the data was linear. likewise, the relationship between work engagement and contextual performance has a deviation from a linearity value of 0.68 > 0.05 and a linearity significance value of 0.00 < 0.05, meaning that the data was linear, so it can be concluded that the linearity prerequisites have been met. the results of the multicollinearity test showed that the two independent variables, self-efficacy and work engagement, have a tolerance value of 0.78 >0 .10, meaning that there is no multicollinearity. then based on the value of vif obtained a value of 1.28 < 10, meaning that it does not occur between one independent variable and another independent variable. based on the assumption and prerequisite tests of the normality, linearity, and multicollinearity that have previously been met, the data analysis in this study can be continued using multiple regression analysis techniques to test the hypothesis. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 138 rohaeni et al. (the role of self-efficacy and work engagement on the contextual performance of special guidance teachers) the result showed that self-efficacy and work engagement were associated with contextual performance (r=0.55), and this relationship was quite strong with an fcount of 14.63 and a significance value of 0.000. it can be seen that the value of fcount > ftable is 3.09 with a significance value of 0.000 < 1%, so it can be interpreted that self-efficacy and work engagement together have a very significant role on contextual performance. the magnitude of the effect of self-efficacy and work engagement can be seen from the value of r2=0.31, meaning that these two independent variables simultaneously contributed 31.2% to contextual performance, while 68.8% was affected by other variables. table 1 the results of the t test dependent variable: contextual performance signifikansi p value (*** p < 0.001). based on table 1, it can be seen that the self-efficacy regression coefficient value as a significance level of p=0.004 and a t-count value of 2.924. this shows that the t count > t table was 1.984 with p value 0.004 < 0.01, so it can be interpreted that self-efficacy has a very significant role on the contextual performance variable. meanwhile, the contribution value of self-efficacy was 0.132. this value is obtained from the product of the beta value of self-efficacy (0.285) and the correlation value (r = 0.464). the magnitude role of the selfefficacy variable on contextual performance variables was 13.2%. on the work engagement variable, it can be seen that the value of the work engagement regression coefficient has a significance level of p= 0.001 and a t-count value of 3.485. this shows that the t count > t table is 1.984 with a significance value of p 0.001 < 0.01, so it can be interpreted that work engagement has a very significant role on contextual performance. meanwhile, the contribution value of work engagement was 0.167. this value was obtained from the product of the beta value of the work engagement (0.333) and the correlation value (r = 0.472). the magnitude role of the work engagement variable on contextual performance variables was 16.7 %. discussion this research aimed to investigate the role of self-efficacy and work engagement on contextual performance among special guidance teachers in inclusive schools. the result showed that self-efficacy and work engagement simultaneously have a role on contextual performance. this indicates that higher self-efficacy and work engagement will affect the increase in enthusiasm, their willingness to carry out, tasks outside of their formal duties, and their ability to cooperate with colleagues, comply with regulations, and support and defend the goals of the school. the study’s findings also support the research objectives that self-efficacy and work engagement are important factors in contextual performance at work. the magnitude of the relationship of the variables self-efficacy and work engagement on contextual performance is 31.2%. the results suggest that a special guidance teacher who is confident in his abilities has a sense of enthusiasm and satisfaction, is actively engaged in fulfilling his responsibilities and has the energy to dedicate to his work. they are also involved with their work, which variable beta pearson correlation t sig self-efficacy .285 .464 2.92 0.004 significant work engagement .333 .472 3.48 0.001 significant humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 139 rohaeni et al. (the role of self-efficacy and work engagement on the contextual performance of special guidance teachers) makes them believe that time is running fast and it is difficult to stop working. the selfconfidence regarding their abilities will affect them in completing their tasks effectively so that contextual performance increases. on the other hand, those who lack confidence in their abilities would experience pessimistic, and dissatisfaction, are less able to invest in their energy for work and are less attached to their working time will cause lower contextual performance. the results also showed that self-efficacy has a role on contextual performance. this indicates that special guidance teachers who have great and strong beliefs and the ability to complete any difficult task well will have a better willingness to help others, volunteer for extra work, and follow rules and procedures. when teachers feel confident in their ability, they also feel confident in being able to collaborate with parents, other professionals and colleagues, and teachers feel confident in being able to prevent and handle disruptive student behavior in the classroom. the results supported past research by kappagoda (2018), that found that self-efficacy was associated with contextual performance among employees in banking organisations. another research also found that self-efficacy was strongly related to contextual performance (jawahar et al., 2008). the employees' confidence in their ability to organize and execute the necessary courses of action to complete the task has a significant and positive correlation with the additional role-supporting behaviours that are not directly related to their job. the results also showed that partially, work engagement has a role on contextual performance. this indicates that special guidance teacher who dedicates themselves to their work with great energy will affect their contextual performance. teachers who are highly engaged in their work are able to invest their energy and persevere in resolving any issue while accomplishing their responsibilities as educators of children with special needs. they hold a strong sense of pride and enthusiasm and are motivated to complete their work efficiently. additionally, they are willing to assist their colleagues, despite the fact that this is not part of their responsibilities. this result aligns with previous studies that showed that work engagement has a considerable relationship on contextual performance, such as research conducted by laili et al. (2022) which revealed that work engagement partially contributed 40% on contextual performances. moreover, (christian et al., 2011; putra & darmastuti, 2021) also found that work engagement has a relationship with contextual performance. this research has implications on how schools may help special guidance teachers increase their contextual performance by increasing self-efficacy and work engagement through training or enhancing the individuals’ meaning of work as well as promoting organizational support. this research also has limitations. first, the samples were relatively homogenous as those were recruited from one region, which limits the generalisation of the result. future research needs to increase the number of respondents recruited from several regions in indonesia or teachers in non-inclusive schools. future research may also advance this research by involving those with different characteristics such as from non-teacher samples. second, this research examined the direct relationships between self-efficacy, and work engagement and contextual performance which may lack an explanation regarding the underlying mechanisms explaining those relationships. future research could advance the research by using more sophisticated methods and data such as lisrel or amos to test the model to examine the underlying mechanism explaining the relationships between selfefficacy and work engagement and contextual performance or investigate other variables that may weaken or strengthen the relationships among those variables. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 140 rohaeni et al. (the role of self-efficacy and work engagement on the contextual performance of special guidance teachers) conclusion based on the results, it can be concluded that both simultaneously and partially self-efficacy and work engagement have roles on contextual performances among special guidance teachers in inclusive schools. these findings underline the importance of efficacy and work engagement for special guidance teacher in inclusive schools because increasing these two variables will also increase their contextual performance. these findings also have implications on how school management may increase teachers’ contextual performance by promoting their efficacy and the level of engagement with their work. acknowledgment the authors thank all participants willing to be involved in this data collection declarations author contribution. the first author contributed to designing the study, collecting data, and writing the draft manuscript. the second author contributed to supervising study design, consulting data analysis, reviewing manuscripts, and finalizing manuscripts. funding statement. none. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references aulia, a., prabawanti, c., & wafa, z. 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(2022). the relationship between work engagement and job performance: psychological capital as a moderating factor. frontiers in psychology, 13, 729131. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.729131 https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-3802.12071 https://doi.org/10.1016/s1053-4822(99)00040-6 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.729131 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 19 (1), february 2022, 1-12 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://dx.doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i1.7 resilience process of a victim sexual violence in women: transformation from victim to activist risma inayah, sara palila department of psychology, universitas islam negeri sunan kalijaga, indonesia corresponding author: rismainayah1@gmail.com introduction humans are faced with life's ever-increasing challenges and events that can lead to traumatic conditions, such as natural disasters, loss, and sexual violence. sexual violence is a common problem across nations. it is estimated that one out of three women in the world has ever experienced physical or sexual violence (devries et al., 2013). sexual violence is violence of human rights that affects millions of people worldwide. one in four women had experienced at least one incident of sexual violence during their lifetime (bows, 2018). empirical evidence from 21 regions and 81 countries, the study revealed that 30% of women aged 15 and over had experienced physical and or sexual violence during their lifetime (devries et al., 2013). moreover, recent data published reported that about 1 in 3 (30%) women had been subjected to physical and or sexual violence (world health organization, 2021). this fact indicated that sexual violence problems are experienced across the nation, both in developing and developed countries, including indonesia. sexual violence is excessively extreme restrictions on women's sexual and reproductive autonomy (blake et al., 2014). the world health organization (who) defines sexual art icle info ab st r act article history received may 23, 2021 revised january 13, 2022 accepted january 31, 2022 humans face numerous life challenges and phenomena that could cause traumatic feelings, such as violent cases. amid these challenges, resilience was an essential psychological ability for individuals, including victims of sexual violence. thus, this study aimed to determine the resilience process, factors that influenced and the meaning of the resilience process traversed by women victims of sexual violence. this research involved three informants who were victims of sexual violence. a qualitative method with a phenomenological approach was applied in this study. the semistructured interviews were conducted in data collection. the data were analyzed with interpretative phenomenological analysis. based on the analysis of transcribed interviews, three themes emerged: experienced various unpleasant emotions, coped and adapted with the situation, experienced several changes in herself and became resilient. participants also have their meaning of the resilience process. furthermore, the new finding is the pain victims experience, and their coping forces them to become resilient and join the organization that focuses on against sexual violence. internal and external factors affect the resilience of victims, including empathy, social concern, and goals to be achieved. the implication of this study is to enhance the current literature on resilience and as additional knowledge to understand the resilience process and factors that influence victims of sexual violence to become resilient. keywords resilience; sexual violence; trauma; women. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://dx.doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i1.7 mailto:rismainayah1@gmail.com 2 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) inayah and palila (resilience process of a victim sexual violence in women: …) violence as any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, unwanted sexual comments or advances, or acts to traffic or otherwise directed against a person’s sexuality using coercion by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting, including but not limited to home and work (world health organization, 2021). sexual violence might affect victims, both physically and psychologically. physically, the impact is genital trauma, death, unwanted pregnancy, sexual dysfunction, and sexually transmitted diseases (blake et al., 2014). psychologically, the impacts include depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd), phobias, fear of sexual intercourse, fear of pregnancy due to rape, and suicidal thoughts (devries et al., 2018; fu’ady, 2011; scott et al., 2017). women who have been sexually abused may face specific barriers to developing healthy relationships, such as an inability to trust themselves and members of the offending gender (newsom & myersbowman, 2017). sexual violence victims might also obtain social stigma, exclusion, and rejection (leon et al., 2008). previous research found that women who became victims of violence tend to develop ptsd (post-traumatic syndrome disorder) in the future (fu’ady, 2011). among the victims of sexual violence who experienced ptsd, they have not reached the appropriate level of resilience (muhid et al., 2017). however, not all victims experience the wholly negative impact of and experience ptsd. some victims can adapt, get up, and recover from the traumatic events they experienced. they can accept themselves positively (muhid et al., 2017). this ability to adapt and take positive aspects from unpleasant experiences is referred to as resilience (dewi & hendriani, 2014). resilience is one of the most critical psychological abilities for individuals (hendriani, 2013). moreover, resilience has more and more commonly been mentioned as another psychological resource (tsirigotis & łuczak, 2018). resilience is an important aspect of recovering from traumatic events (lee et al., 2013). resilience is a dynamic process that focuses on recovery and adaptation to difficult circumstances so that individuals can return to their healthy mental state (luthar & cicchetti, 2000; reich et al., 2010). moreover, resilience is an individual's ability to be strong to gain new experiences and have positive emotions when undergoing unusual conditions and traumatic events (bonanno et al., 2011). the resilience of the sexual violence victims formed gradually. people have different processes for forming resilience. there are four phases of the resilience forming process (hendriani, 2013). first is the stress phase, in which the individual is dominated by attitudes and behaviors that discover an increase in the amount of pressure experienced. the second phase, self-reconstruction, begins when the stress experienced slowly decreases due to the number of factors that strengthen psychological conditions both from within and outside. individuals perform coping strategies as the key to adaptation. third, the strengthening phase is passed by individuals with various activities that strengthen psychological conditions, observing emotions that sometimes fluctuate. the coping and adaptation strategies carried out in the previous phase continue to be carried out by individuals to face new problems. fourth resilience phase, in which the individual is in a stable psychological condition and continues to improve in managing emotions. individuals accept suffering from all its consequences as part of the whole self. although individuals experience difficulties, individuals can still discover empathy, do not dissolve in the difficulties they face, are more enthusiastic in facing life's challenges. individuals show great effort to stay productive (hendriani, 2013). two factors influence the resilience forming process, internal and external factors (choi et al., 2019). internal factors come from within the individual, which is used to deal with stressful situations and internal control, for example, self-efficacy, self-esteem, positive affect, self-worth, optimism (lee et al., 2013). in contrast, external factors are sources that come outside the individual, for example, support systems and clinical settings (domhardt et al., 2014; manomenidis et al., 2019). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 3 inayah and palila (resilience process of a victim sexual violence in women:…) the interaction between risk and protective factors might affect resilience. risk factors directly increase the likelihood of an individual having negative behavior. for example, people who have depressive symptoms and severe anxiety-related impairments had a lower level of resilience (lee et al., 2013). protective factors may facilitate an individual's adjustment and increase resilience (choi et al., 2019; dewi & hendriani, 2014). a literature review study found the main protective factors that increase resilience are family and social support, education, optimism, ability to overcome problems, the focus of control, and selfefficacy (domhardt et al., 2014). previous quantitative research on the resilience of victims of sexual harassment suggested that qualitative research is necessary for considerably deeper research data (izzaturohmah & khaerani, 2018). several studies have also discussed resilience (fajrina, 2012; naufaliasari, 2013; newsom & myers-bowman, 2017). previous research focused on adolescents who experienced pregnancy due to sexual violence (fajrina, 2012), other research focused on women who experienced sexual violence in their childhood (domhardt et al., 2014; newsom & myers-bowman, 2017), and research focused on the resilience of african american women survivors of child sexual abuse (singh et al., 2013). however, the specific topic about achieving resilience in the victims of sexual violence in indonesia has not been studied yet. thus, this study will examine how resilience was forming in the victims of sexual violence. this study focuses on young adult women who have experienced sexual violence as teenagers and become women activists. method in this study, the qualitative method with the phenomenological approach was applied. the data collection process mainly uses interviews. the observation was also be conducted as supporting data. the data used in this research is primary data that directly comes from the participants. participants purposive sampling was applied in this study. before recruiting process, information about this research was disseminated on social media. prospective participants who were willing to participate in the study and met the inclusion criteria were contacted. the authors explain the description of the data collection process that will be carried out, the possible losses experienced, and provide informed consent. the informed consent also depicted information about the use of pseudonyms in reporting the research. the authors schedule the interview when the participant has agreed to participate in the interview process. the participants in this study were three women who had experienced sexual violence, lived in yogyakarta, and then became women activists for a minimum of two years. they are active in organizations that focus on against women's violence. table 1 shows the demographic data of the participants. table 1 participant information no. name age activist* sexual violence experience 1 za 22 3 being exposed to the genital area of men (exhibitionism), get her breast squeezed without consent. 2 na 24 3 attempted rape, get her breast squeezed without consent 3 al 21 5 attempted rape, sexual harassment note: *total year of participant become an activist in women sexual violence 4 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) inayah and palila (resilience process of a victim sexual violence in women: …) data collection the author collected the data with a semi-structured interview method, one-on-one interviews at a private location selected by each participant, a total of three times for each participant. before the interview, the questions were arranged based on reivich & shatte's (2002) resilience theory. each participant was asked the same question but did not rule out other flexible questions to explore unanticipated topics that appeared during interviews. the author recorded the interview and then transcribed it verbatim. the research questions revolve around three main things. the experience of sexual violence experienced, the process of resilience, the factors that influence and the participant's meaning of her experience as a woman, and the process she has gone through. all interviews were conducted by the first author and lasted from 1 to 2 hours. data analysis the data were analyzed using the theory of interpretative phenomenological analysis (smith, 2015), which consists of four steps. first, write and read the full description. the author wrote the entire interview transcript and reread the interview results in this step. the second step is compiling or making parts of the description to find units of meaning. at this step, authors begin to understand interview transcripts, then do coding and record meaningful, important, or interesting texts in the interview process. furthermore, the authors conducted a reduction to focus on highlighting the important things conveyed by the resource persons. third, develop themes or meanings. at this step, authors develop and discover appropriate themes and record them. authors read and reread the results of the reduction and coding that have been carried out in the previous process and group them into similar themes. this process aims to find an appropriate theme to represent what the resource person conveys. the last step is connecting between themes and writing. at this step, authors reread, analyze and relate similar themes to become a broad theme. the first author then discusses the results of the theme with the second author to determine whether the theme used is representative of the entire interview. professional checking and member checking were applied as the data triangulation techniques. after the entire process of data analysis and research results is complete, the authors carry out professional checking by conveying the process that has been passed and the research results. the professional then provided input so that the authors make improvements. results the results show themes on the resilience process, the factors influencing the resilience, and the participant's meaning of their experience. each participant who experienced sexual violence went through several phases to achieve resilience and had their meaning. we used pseudonymous initials al, za, and na. the participants experienced sexual violence more than one time. the first participant, al, has experienced attempted rape by someone she knew. the second participant is za, that experienced sexual harassment when she was in a vocational school. the sexual harassment experienced by za was the perpetrator showed his genitals (exhibitionism) and squeezed her breasts when she was cycling. the last na had experienced sexual harassment and attempted rape. the resilience process experienced a variety of unpleasant emotions. after being sexually assaulted, participants felt very afraid, angry, withdrew from society for a few days, and traumatized. participants humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 5 inayah and palila (resilience process of a victim sexual violence in women:…) are also experiencing a sleeping problem. as a result, the participant experienced an inability to carry out the activities and plans that she had previously arranged. it was the first time for me to be traumatized, afraid to go to school, afraid to be alone; i was disgusted at that time (za) that is all i am traumatized; in september, i had a plan, so it was ruined because i could not do anything, i could not think anything (al) mmmm, i feel like i have not come to terms with it..a few times, i dream about it, several times because of that dream, i woke up with irregular breath (na) besides, almost all participants except na blamed herself and negatively viewed herself. both al and za thought that she was dirty because of that incident. they also felt guilty towards herself and blamed herself. i felt dirty; what the hell i am weak, why i unable to refuse at the time? if i might have to dodge, i am not going through this.. i feel so wrong at myself, it is true, because why i can not give firmness to myself (al) coped and adapted to the situation. to overcome stress and unpleasant emotions, all participants have coping strategies and adapt to the situation. the participants told their experiences to their friends and seniors in the organization. by telling their experience, participants got support and were motivated to survive. they also feel not alone. i realized at the beginning that what motivated me to survive was from outside myself, the seniors, they reminded me (al) i told my best friends about the incident, and i got support. i felt not alone (za) even though she got support from her friend, za was still traumatized and anxious. she was afraid that the experience would happen one day. za attempted to keep herself busy, to forget the bad experience. she kept herself busy with drawing and joined the organization. za also received education from the school about exhibitionism. this education made za feel better and understand her experiences and the conditions of the perpetrator herself. then, za empathized with the perpetrator and encouraged her to forgive the offender. forgiving the offender for her was an attempt to heal herself so that the burden that she felt was lessened. apart from empathy etc., the most influential thing is to forgive the perpetrator, forgive her for me, to heal myself (za) the incident encouraged na to find out more about her experience. then, na joined the organization and read many books related to gender and feminism. na's thinking concept about her experiences changed drastically, so she did not have harmful stereotypes against her, such as feeling guilty and seeing herself as unclean. in this organization, na first talked about her experiences and felt accepted. many of her friends have experienced the same thing not to feel alone. continuing from here, na joined an ngo working on anti-violence issues against women. na was in progress and continues to reflect. na hopefully understands her state and the causes and effects of the experience. na had also learned to come to terms with herself and her experiences of abuse. yeah, as a justification, as part of the recovery process, i was in an ngo, i learned so much about myself, reflected on myself and my experience (na) 6 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) inayah and palila (resilience process of a victim sexual violence in women: …) while at the organization, na also told about her experience of harassment to one of her organizational friends. the acceptance without judgment that she got from her friends made na feel better and not feel alone. she realized that many others shared her experience. experienced several changes in herself and became resilient. after some coping strategies, all participants have several influences and changes. for example, in participant al, she had started to accept the incident compared to 2-3 weeks after the incident. the progress she has made so far is that she has been able to talk more openly about her experiences without feeling overly sad. in fact, at this time, al can be grateful for her better condition. al was more cautious about trusting others. she became more socially distant and worried about new people she met. she feels this is important to avoid a bad experience. one of the admirable things is that the experience of sexual harassment she experienced often makes all the participants involved in the movement and women's issues. for the al participant, her experience prompted her to join several organizations advocating violence against women. al did this because she had felt how to be a victim; she did not want other people to feel it. she then felt the need to become a stronger person. al has often spoken about taboo issues, including the sexual harassment she had experienced. al wants other women to have the courage to speak up. okay, i cannot keep being weak, i cannot be like this, i try to be normal, this is a supporter for me being more enthusiastic about voicing and campaigning for taboo things not to become taboo (al) za also has progressed. although she cannot fully accept it, za feels that she is now better and braver than initially. although she said she had accepted the incident, za felt that she could not fully accept it in her deepest heart. in the deepest heart, it is not necessarily able to accept, which i really accept that when i have been through it long enough until i can talk to my friends that i am okay (za) na also has progressed after doing some coped. na was grateful for this experience because she could discover gender issues, join organizations, read many books, and become a volunteer to help women in violence. na saw the experience of sexual violence as a fire that encouraged her to obtain involved and continue the process until today. for na, the process she is currently undergoing will continue to obtain a natural recovery. na is still afraid if she has to go alone or gather with friends in an organization who are all male. the valuable experience that na experienced made her could empathize with people who experienced the same thing. na also understood the cause and effect of these experiences. in addition, na was also able to manage emotions better. external factors that influence resilience support from friends and parents. one factor that affects a person's resilience is the social support system. all participants got support from friends. er has friends who provide support after being sexually harassed. al had the support of a female activist friend. na feels that her boyfriend and her seniors in the organization can understand her situation and fully support her. na also often discusses and tells stories with her boyfriend and senior, so this is special healing for na. feeling understood and supported helps na obtain through it. in my boyfriend now i tell my situation, i tell the situation, i don't bear the burden alone (na) join the women's movement organization or community. the participants joined several organizations working on the issue of violence against women. in this organization, humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 7 inayah and palila (resilience process of a victim sexual violence in women:…) participants feel that they have a supportive environment and understand several things related to victims of sexual violence. by following the organization, participants realize that many other people have also experienced their experiences, and many cases are much more significant. they are increasingly aware that other women experience so many similar cases that they are not even aware they have been harassed. mm, i joined organization x. i became a person who moved to support survivors, and i joined anti-sexual violence movements (za) education from schools and organizations. za received education from school about how to respond when seeing people with exhibitionism. this activity made za realize that her sexual harassment experience was carried out by someone asking for help and getting sick. in the end, the activity made me see what i was going through, educating myself and from school; at that time, i realized that there are so many people like this, and the victim is not just me; it means i feel like i have friends (za). participant na also receives education from their organizations. na becomes acquainted with gender issues by joining an organization and does not feel alone. na also read many books related to gender and feminism to influence her mindset on women's issues, including the abuse she has experienced. after that incident, i went to jogja and continued to get an education. i started to dare to tell stories about myself, and they listened well and didn't judge me like that; they also told me about their experiences that were the same as mine (na). internal factors that influence resilience have goals to achieve. one thing that makes participants resilient is their goals to achieve. za doesn't like to see her pitiful self, even though she has goals to pursue and make come true. the goals encourage za to be more excited and feel better. na also has many targets that she must achieve. therefore, the experience of sexual harassment could not be an obstacle to achieving the target she had set. the target that has been set is the driving force for the na to continue to rise and become strong so that what she has done so far is not in vain. because i have academic, social, organizational, and career targets that affect me, yes, my wish list, i'll use it to motivate myself to rise (na). empathy and social concern. one thing that affects the al's resilience process is its high empathy and social concern. when feeling down, al felt that she should not be broken and stopped because of one person's behavior. al feels that many people are experiencing difficulties and must be helped to remain strong and survive through various problems in her life. why because of this one disgusting thing i keep breaking, and when i'm broken, i'll lose it all, out there i remember this father, this mother, this mother whom i helped at that time, this is one of the things that has made me strong to this day (al) the meaning of resilience process three participants have similar interpretations of the process that has been passed. al participant interprets the process she goes through as a learning process full of challenges, encouraging her to become more mature. this process is challenging because it collides with complete self-acceptance, making it more mature. al felt that she had to make it through 8 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) inayah and palila (resilience process of a victim sexual violence in women: …) this. al feels that there will be more severe challenges in the future than this; therefore, al is trying to overcome this challenge. another meaning of the resilience process that al goes through is that she is grateful for her experience. al felt grateful for being given more strength by god to go through this painful experience. al believes that allah will not give trials beyond her limits. she believes that she is strong and capable of getting through this. al believed in the power of god and felt that she could not be weak. grateful for being given more strength, you cannot be weak; you have to believe in the power of god (al) za also interpreted that the experience of sexual harassment has led her to become more sensitive to women's issues. za also realizes that what she has experienced is only a small part of cases of sexual violence that are still very rampant. za, at this time, was finished with the experience she had. i see this case as a case that happens a lot. if i have never been a survivor. i might do antiviolence movements because i have never experienced violence (za) also, za saw herself as someone lucky to be through the process with a positive and obtain support from their surroundings. she feels lucky because many other people are not as lucky as she is; they still have a prolonged trauma. after all, they are unable to manage the trauma they have. na also viewed the experience of harassment as an experience that prompted her to be active in women's organizations. at this time, na has been grateful for this valuable experience because the experience led her to know and be active in women's organizations. in addition, she can empathize more with fellow victims and process with herself. the point is that i am grateful that i went through those events; i am fortunate that i had that experience, with this experience it is valuable for me (na) na also assumed that achieving resilience is a learning process that will continue and will not stop here. na feels that she still has to continue the process and learn many things to fully recover from everything related to her experience. discussion in line with the research objectives, the results of this study provide data on the resilience process of the participants, factors that influenced them, and their meaning of the resilience process. after experiencing sexual violence, all participants went through was feeling various unpleasant emotions. participants felt angry, shocked, guilty, afraid to travel alone, had nightmares, withdrew from society, self-harming, and worried if the violence might happen again. these results indicated that the experience provides heavy pressure on the participants. previous research shows that sexual violence has a psychological impact on feelings of fear (blake et al., 2014; tsirigotis & łuczak, 2018), anxiety, low self-esteem, distrust, hatred of the opposite sex, and nightmares (lee et al., 2013). the unpleasant feelings indicate participants were experiencing the first stage of the resilience theory, which is a stress phase. in a stress phase, individuals usually show sadness, anxiety, difficulty accepting reality, and other responses that indicate emotional instability (hendriani, 2013). the participants also questioned their experiences, ashamed and blaming themselves for what has happened, and developed negative views. these findings align with previous research that sexual violence victims have negative self-images, shame, guilt, helplessness, and anxiety (anggreiny & sulistyaningsih, 2013; lee et al., 2013). feelings of shock, anger, guilt and other feelings lead participants to self-harm. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 9 inayah and palila (resilience process of a victim sexual violence in women:…) all participants attempted to cope and adapt to their unpleasant emotions, indicating they were in the second phase of resilience, that is, self-reconstruction (hendriani, 2013). participant tried to cope with the unpleasant emotions by taking up her hobbies and keeping herself busy. besides, telling the violence to the closest friend is also a way to cope with their unpleasant emotions. previous research found that telling stories is an effort to recover (illenia & handadari, 2011). moreover, social support from local friends and having friends who experience the same thing helps in the victims' recovery process (muhid et al., 2017). social support is a predicted factor in becoming resilient (williams & nelson-gardell, 2012). sharing what participants have experienced and letting people learn from it made them feel joy. participants felt it was as the burden in their shoulder had lifted, their expressed. internal strength supports the resilience process in victims (newsom & myersbowman, 2017). in this study, participants attempted to understand the perpetrator. participants attempted to give empathy and forgiveness to the perpetrator. the knowledge participants had learned before made them understand the perpetrator's background. this understanding encourages participants to empathize and attempt to forgive the perpetrator for the sake of her mental health. participants initiated their coping strategies to feel better and learn to accept themselves. sometimes participants still feel anxious or have other unpleasant emotions, especially when triggers remind them of the experience. resilience is a dynamic process of responding to new vulnerabilities and adapting to changing circumstances (pulvirenti & mason, 2018). all participants kept doing all the coping and attempted to heal themselves. studies showed traumatic experiences require time in the healing process (dewi & hendriani, 2014). these study findings show that being a victim of violence encourages participants to obtain more information about sexual harassment and sexual violence; consequently, participants are curious to understand why they experienced sexual violence. previous research found that information and reinforcement from the surrounding environment would help victims of sexual violence to accept themselves more (muhid et al., 2017). therefore, participants understood that other people are also experiencing violence. by joining an organization, the participants were more aware of their experiences. being in an organization enables participants to get a support group that plays a role in the resilience forming process. as mentioned before, support groups are essential for violence victims (domhardt et al., 2014; muhid et al., 2017; pulvirenti & mason, 2018; williams & nelson-gardell, 2012). in turn, the participants became more empathetic and supported the other sexual violence victims. at the end of their resilience process, participants were more grateful and became more resilient. all of the participants felt grateful because that experienced brought them to know more about women's issues and have social support. gratitude has an essential role in increasing resilience (zuanny et al., 2013). participants also became more solid, motivated, and spoke up for the other victims of sexual violence, as they believe sharing stories is a healing process. the study also found that solid motivation from within makes victims of violence survive (cecchet & thoburn, 2014). after all coping strategies, all participants experienced several changes and became resilient. in this study, participants shared similarities in personal meanings of the sexual violence experience that might occur anywhere and anytime. they believe that sexual violence or sexual harassment is a crime that long-term impacts the victim. therefore, all participants also take that sexual violence experience led them to be involved in organizations or ngos on women's issues. in achieving resilience, participants were also influenced by external and internal factors. internal factors include participants' goals and targets to be achieved, empathy, and high social awareness. while in the previous research, no study has found empathy and deep social concern affect the resilience process. on the other hand, external factors consist of getting social support and education from the environment, 10 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) inayah and palila (resilience process of a victim sexual violence in women: …) encouraging the informant to understand her experience and respond in the future. these external factors support achieving resilience among the victims of sexual violence. luck, more mature, and a learning process are the interpretation of resilience process among this study participants. furthermore, the pain that victims experience and their coping forces them to become resilient and join the organization that focuses on sexual violence is a particular finding of this study. however, this study has a limitation. in this study, the forms of sexual violence experienced by victims were not the same. therefore, further study needs to provide clear boundaries regarding the forms of sexual violence experienced by victims and perpetrators of violence. so, it can be explored whether there are differences in the degree of trauma to victims. conclusion women with sexual violence experience withdrawing from society, various unpleasant emotions, blaming themselves and having a negative view of themselves, and self-harming in the first stage of resilience. then they try to cope and adapt to the situation, experience several changes in themselves, and become resilient. participants interpreted the resilience forming process as a learning process that would continue forever. they learn to become more empathic, mature, and understand more about themselves. empathy, high social awareness, and having dreams and targets to be achieved are internal 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(2013). daya lenting (resilience) pada perempuan korban perkosaan (resiliece among women rape victim). psikologika, 18(2), 163–174. https://doi.org/10.20885/psikologika.vol18.iss2.art6 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10538712.2017.1360425 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10345329.2011.12035908 https://ijmhs.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13033-017-0171-1 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0011000012469413 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11126-017-9529-4 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11126-017-9529-4 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/s0145213411003024?via%3dihub https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women https://journal.uii.ac.id/index.php/psikologika/article/view/7674 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 19 (2), august 2022, 109-121 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i2.31 burnout among working mothers: the role of work-life balance and perceived organizational support bagus riyono, gebrina rezki faculty of psychology, universitas gadjah mada, indonesia corresponding author: bagus@ugm.ac.id introduction the covid-19 pandemic has spread globally since 2020 and has changed the community's social and economic life. this condition has caused stress among workers because, despite it, every employee must struggle to remain professional in their work (mckinsey & company, 2020). in particular, this condition has forced many companies to adopt a work from home (wfh) policy to reduce the spread of covid-19 in the workplace. the wfh policy triggers a potential conflict between the work environment and family where employees must manage childcare issues and the continuity of their work professionally (gądecki et al., 2018). the demands between the two roles are increasingly blurring work and family roles. in addition, another phenomenon caused by wfh is a conflict in the balance of family life due to a conflict of interest between the work demand and family matters (gądecki et al., 2018). this phenomenon cannot be separated from the dual role that employees took part in during the covid-19 pandemic. women who are married, have children, and work have higher role demands than married men (mcconnon et al., 2022; raymo & ono, 2007). during wfh, women assume most of the household and childcare responsibilities though women's participation also contributes to work in the public sector (lyonette & crompton, 2015). commonly, societies expect women to perform the role concerning household responsibilities. it also pressures career women to negotiate and balance commitments between housework and work in the office (craig & sawrikar, 2009). thus, burnout due to art icle info ab st r act article history received november 25, 2021 revised july 12, 2022 accepted july 18, 2022 the pandemic of covid-19 has influenced business in general. in response to the covid-19 pandemic, most companies or organizations have been implementing work from home (wfh). for working mothers who have children, this wfh policy creates a more stressful situation since they simultaneously have to deal with work and family in the same place. this study investigated the role of worklife balance and perceived organizational support in the level of burnout tendency among working mothers. two hundred thirty-seven working mothers who work from home participated in this study. questionnaires were distributed to the working mothers to measure work-life balance, perceived organizational support, and burnout tendency. multiple linear regression was used to test the hypothesis. the results show work-life balance and perceived organizational support simultaneously predict burnout tendency. however, perceived organization support, especially a concern for employee welfare, contributes more to reducing burnout. therefore, human resource management may develop a policy to reduce burnout among women employees by concerning employee welfare in terms of compensation and benefit and creating a conducive working environment. keywords burnout; perceived organizational support; work from home; work-life balance; working mother. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i2.31 mailto:bagus@ugm.ac.id 110 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) riyono & rezki (burnout among working mothers: the role of …) women's role pressures at work and home becomes a real problem (mckinsey & company, 2020). for women, the house is a source of additional unpaid work (dobbs, 2007; wheatley, 2013). this domestic perspective parallels the work context, where many studies emphasize that women are more exposed to work-related pressures and stress than men (doyle & hind, 1998). women are also experiencing a lack of promotion, organizational support (knights & richards, 2003), and even gender role stereotypes and discrimination in the workplace (cooper et al., 2021). these stressors in the workplace can put tremendous stress on women and contribute to burnout (garossa et al., 2008). although stress and burnout are a group of variables with almost the same discussion, they have different causes and consequences. tanner (2011) explained that burnout is a chronic stress reaction due to pressure from work interactions with employees. pines and keinan (2005) explained that burnout correlates with negative symptoms, including physical, emotional, and performance symptoms at work, compared to stress. thus, burnout is the level of reaction to stressors that have the potential for more severe problems. therefore, this study focuses on the burnout variable. theoretically, burnout symptoms occur in three stages (szigethy, 2014). in the first stage, the symptoms are mild; employees will feel mentally tired when carrying out their work, frustrated, tense, suffer from unexplained body aches or pains, feel left behind in work, and have anxiety the next day. employees will feel insecure, apathetic, and bored in the second stage, which runs continuously. in the third stage, when burnout is not taken seriously, it will become persistent and develop into depression, insomnia, anxiety, and even medical diseases such as heart disease. previous research has widely studied the causes of burnout (brummelhuis et al., 2011; cordes & dougherty, 1993). time pressure, role ambiguity, role conflict, and conflict in cooperation can cause burnout (cordes & dougherty, 1993). ignoring burnout symptoms can negatively affect work roles (de beer, pienaar, & rothmann, 2014). if the pressures are not handled effectively, it will cause psychological symptoms that result in loss of creative ability, lack of commitment, emotional disturbances, and emerging behaviors that can interfere with adjustment in daily life. it was further explained that due to unresolved stress or tension situations, adjustments could not be made optimally, resulting in fatigue and decreased capacity and cynicism towards work resulting in a loss of professional efficiency (hätinen et al., 2009). demographic characteristics are also important in examining the factors that cause burnout, such as gender, education level, economic problems, and marital status (güriş, akyurt, & astar, 2017). women are more likely to experience burnout than men in service jobs. in addition, the level of education is also a contributing factor. female employees with a higher education level can parse burnout symptoms more quickly than those with low levels of education. education is realized into an essential potential that can develop better mental and emotional skills in the face of pressure. on the other hand, married employees with economic problems are also more likely to experience burnout. while age is not the principal cause of burnout, employees who work longer, at least seven years and over, have better coping skills to avoid burnout (divinakumar et al., 2014). it is essential to determine appropriate intervention steps to prevent burnout in organizations and individuals (bakker & de vries, 2021). nevertheless, individual intervention is the primary intervention that must be carried out first (bakker & van woerkom, 2017), based on conceptualizing cognitive-behavioral interventions to improve coping skills, social support, and relaxation (maricutoiu & crasovan, 2016). it was further explained that formulating interventions related to the role and support of the organization would significantly reduce burnout (dreison et al., 2018). burnout cannot be reduced merely by individual interventions; it needs more extended interventions. pijpker et al. (2020) suggest that the appropriate intervention to overcome burnout is to build self and work resources to overcome the causes of prolonged stress. at this stage, the effectiveness of reducing burnout can be confirmed through the ability of humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 111 riyono & rezki (burnout among working mothers: the role of…) individuals and organizations to provide resources that can reduce pressure on women at work. in line with the above explanation, szigethy (2014) explains the areas of prevention strategies for burnout, consisting of two main areas. these areas are life balancing as the primary source of internal factors and perceived organizational support as an external factor from individual work. both are assumed to be effective interventions to reduce burnout in workers. as the primary source, work-life balance is an individual's ability to balance life roles between work and family demands (haar et al., 2014; özbilgin et al., 2010). work-life balance is how individuals can engage and feel satisfaction between roles in family and personal life (poulose & sudarsan, 2014). employees who can balance the demands of their roles at work and home will be satisfied with their work (maslichah & hidayat, 2017). burnout mediated positive work-life balance and job satisfaction (iswardhani et al., 2019). the individual's ability to integrate work with family life can benefit employees and the organization. these benefits can protect employees' health and will increase productivity at work. work-life balance can affect the decrease in burnout through the emergence of work motivation to work better (parris et al., 2008; tuğsal & ülgen, 2017). the escalation of work demands will create an unstable situation. a working woman who is married and has children faces a dual role in her daily life with two types of work, i.e., paid and unpaid work (dobbs, 2007; wheatley, 2013). this condition requires every woman always to balance her two roles (bloom, 2016). the primary source to carry out work-life balance is the workers themselves. companies cannot provide all facilities and services to build a good work environment. each individual has to manage themselves. hence they can adapt according to the demands of their role (dumas & sanchez-burks, 2015). organizational support is present as an external factor that cannot be separated from its efforts to provide a balance between the roles of female employees. therefore, the second important factor that cannot be separated from private efforts is perceived organizational support (szigethy, 2014). a better work-life balance is accompanied by high perceived organizational support, vice versa, and the better the individual can resolve the pressures raised by their work (puspitasari & ratnaningsih, 2019; sheikh, 2022). individual behavior depends on the work environment because individual behavior towards the work environment is an inseparable entity (artha & hidayat, 2018). interactions that occur result in the development of the expected behavior. employees who perceive the work environment positively will tend to show positive behavior. moreover, employees who feel they fit into the organization can show low burnout. the benefits of work-life balance in reducing burnout cannot be separated from the role of perceived organizational support (gayathri & sajeethkumar, 2019). perceived organizational support is a buffer associated with burnout (house, 1981; parasuraman et al., 1992). if employees cannot deal with stress effectively, they may face failure to balance their roles and thus create a price they become threatened (xu & yang, 2018). confidence in support of the organization can reduce the tendency to overestimate pressure and increase perceptions of available resources to reduce burnout. organizational support in the form of attention and appreciation can be an external encouragement to strengthen the self in the face of pressure from outside the individual. perceived organizational support is essential to improving employee welfare (leather et al., 1998). perceived organizational support is a determinant of improving mood and satisfaction for employees to increase productivity at work (jain et al., 2013). in other words, the higher the work-life balance and perceived organizational support, the higher the burnout. work-life balance and perceived organizational support reflect person-environment fit in connection with the dual role of women working and organizational involvement (terborg, 1981). the suitability of individuals with both roles in work and the family will increase the effect of the target variable, namely a decrease in burnout (edwards & billsberry, 2010). while in another 112 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) riyono & rezki (burnout among working mothers: the role of …) study, perceived organizational support negatively correlated with burnout (zeng et al., 2020). this research hypothesizes work-life balance and perceived organizational support contribute to burnout in working mothers. thus, this study aimed to examine the role of worklife balance and perceived organizational support on burnout in working mothers. this study is a replicative of the previous study that aimed to strengthen the evidence of the correlation between pos, work-life balance, and burnout. however, this study is needed to understand burnout among working mothers during the covid-19 pandemic. method this study uses a quantitative research approach by distributing questionnaires to measure three variables (work-life balance, perceived organizational support, and burnout) in the research sample. the questionnaire was distributed online to all participants who met the criteria from july 6th to 21st, 2021. questionnaires were distributed by broadcast messages or email to several parties meeting the research criteria. participants criteria of participants in this study were working women, had children at age 0 to 6 years, had a minimum education of diploma 3, worked for more than six months, and their organization or company implemented work from home during the covid-19 pandemic. this study's participants were 237 mothers who worked from home during the covid-19 pandemic. the data that has been collected is then carried out with descriptive analysis to determine the description of the characteristics of the research participants, as shown in table 1. most respondents work from six months to three years, with the highest percentage being six months to one year. table 1 demographic data category description n % category description n % working period 6 months – 1 year 71 30.0 field of work human resources 62 26.0 1 – 2 years 57 24.0 law 54 23.0 2 – 3 years 62 26.0 education 40 17.0 3 – 4 years 38 16.0 telecommunications 24 10.0 more than four years 9 4.0 government 19 8.0 types of company services 76 32.0 banking sector 14 6.0 industry 50 21.0 mass media 14 6.0 trade 50 21.0 energy and mining 5 2.0 state owned enterprises 33 14.0 information and technology 5 2.0 age 21-25 years 73 30.8 number of children one 147 62.0 26-30 years 86 36.3 two 81 34.0 31 – 35 years 65 27.4 three 9 4.0 36 – 40 years 6 2.5 age of children 0 – 2 years 178 75.0 41 – 45 years 6 2.5 2 – 4 years 47 20.0 45 – 50 years 1 .5 5 – 6 years 12 5.0 length of marriage less than one year 1 .4 1-2 years 106 44.7 3-5 years 72 30.4 more than five years 58 24.5 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 113 riyono & rezki (burnout among working mothers: the role of…) instruments maslach's burnout inventory (mb i), developed by maslach et al. (1996), has been adapted into the indonesian version (andika, 2020). this adapted version of mbi was used to measure burnout in this study. the mbi consists of three aspects, i.e., emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment with 22 items with five answer choices, 1 (strongly disagree), 2 (not appropriate), 3 (neutral), 4 (appropriate), and 5 (very appropriate). “emotional exhaustion” is illustrated in these items: "i feel exhausted when i get home from work" and "i feel pressured while working with people all day." item examples in the “depersonalization” aspect are "i feel like i am inside a circle that has no end" and "i feel i treat others as if they were not human." examples of the “reduced personal accomplishment” aspect are "i have accomplished many valuable things in this work" and "i feel myself having a positive influence on the lives of others/other coworkers." the work-life balance variable in this study is measured with an instrument by fisher et al. (2009) with 24 items. it is composed of three aspects, including wipl (work interference with personal life), pliw (personal life interference with work), and wepl (work enhancement of personal life). wardhani (2019) has also adapted the scale into an indonesian version. the wlb scale has five answer choices, namely 1 (never), 2 (rarely), 3 (sometimes), 4 (often), and 5 (always). examples of the wipl aspect are "my personal life drains the energy i need to work" and "my job is neglected because of everything in my personal life." for the pliw aspect, examples are "i cannot relax at home because i am still busy with work" and "i have to postpone my interests because of work." the examples for the wepl aspect are "i have a better mood at work because my personal life is fun'' and "my personal life gives me the energy to work." the scale to measure perceived organizational support in this study was developed by eisenberger et al. (1986). this instrument has been tested by nugroho (2019) in the indonesian context. the scale consists of 16 items and comprises two aspects: attention to employee welfare and respect for employee contributions. the pos scale has five answer options, namely 1 (strongly disagree), 2 (not appropriate), 3 (neutral), 4 (appropriate), and 5 (very appropriate). for the "attention to employee welfare" aspect, the examples are "the policies where i work are made by taking into account the values that are shared by employees, including me" and "i feel unnoticed by my place of work even though i have done a good job." examples of the items of "respect for employee contributions" aspect are "the place where i work appreciates the work i get" and "the way where i work respects employee contributions is in line with what i expected." twenty-eight experts tested the instrument's validity by judging the items. the experts have a minimum master's degree in psychology. aiken's of the items on the mbi scale range from .65 to .73. the validity value of pos and wlb scales ranges from .71 to .74 and .70 to .74, respectively. all the items are valid as they meet the cut-off value for the content validity using aiken's v, which is more than or equal to .65 (aiken, 1985). subsequently, the reliability test using cronbach’s alpha found that the reliability coefficient for the mbi scale is .924, with the item-rest correlation value ranging from .332 to .853. the wlb scale has a reliability value of .945, with the item-rest correlation value ranging from .335 to .890. the pos scale has a reliability value of .931, with the item-rest correlation value ranging from .350 to .874. thus, all instruments in this study had a good reliability value. data analysis multiple linear regression was applied to analyze the data analysis of this study. the results of multiple regression analysis can provide information about the contribution of each independent variable to the dependent variable (wampold & freund, 1987). 114 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) riyono & rezki (burnout among working mothers: the role of …) results the data can provide information about the research sample by examining the number of samples, mean, minimum score, maximum score, and standard deviation of empirical and hypothetical data. results showed that burnout (bo), perceived organizational support (pos), and work-life balance (wlb) have a higher empirical mean than the hypothetical mean. these results show that those variables are higher than the assumed score (see table 2). table 2 description of research data variable hypothetical score empirical score n xmin xmax mean sd xmin xmax mean sd bo 22 22 110 66 14.67 69 107 88.51055 6.33 pos 16 16 80 48 10.67 34 72 53.20675 6.33 wlb 24 24 120 72 16 52 99 79.64557 7.83 note: xmax = maximum score; xmin = minimum score; mean = average; sd = standard deviation; n = number of item. hypothesis testing in this study used multiple linear regression to examine the relationship between work-life balance, perceived organizational support, and burnout, which is seen based on the predictive value between variables. the analysis results show that the r2 value between wlb and pos in predicting burnout is .072 with an f value = 9.088 (p < .001). table 3 shows how wlb has no significant effect on burnout (β = .230, p > .05) and how pos predicts burnout (β = -.472, p < .05). these results showed that pos has a more substantial predictive value than work-life balance toward burnout. the higher the pos, the lower the burnout level, and vice versa. table 3 regression analysis predictor beta se β t wlb .144 .113 .230 1.271 pos -.445* .170 -.472* -2.609* note: *p < .05 an additional analysis using multiple linear regression analysis with the stepwise method was conducted to explore each aspect of perceived organizational support in predicting burnout in working mothers. results show that only concern for the employee welfare aspect from pos has a negative impact on burnout (r2 = .078; f = 19.773; p < .001; β = -.492; p < .001). on the other hand, the award for employee contributions did not predict burnout. concern for the employee means companies have indifferent attitudes towards women's opinions and complaints. it shows an open attitude and provides opportunities for two-way communication. thus, the higher the company's concern for employee contributions, the lower the burnout, and vice versa. discussion the current study aimed to examine the roles of work-life balance (wlb) and perceived organizational support (pos) on burnout among working women, especially those with humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 115 riyono & rezki (burnout among working mothers: the role of…) children. results showed that work-life balance and perceived organizational support simultaneously help working mothers face burnout. it supports previous studies about worklife balance as an internal variable and perceived organizational support as an external variable that can reduce burnout (bakker & de vries, 2021; dreison et al., 2018). unfortunately, the predictive power of work-life balance and perceived organizational support on burnout in this study showed a small percentage, i.e., 7.2%. the nature of two variables in dealing with the current covid-19 pandemic has a crucial role in influencing its role against burnout. before the covid-19 pandemic, one solution that could contribute to the high worklife balance was implementing work from home (krasulja et al., 2015). it has even become a family-friendly policy (lockwood, 2003), such as in south korea (lee & hong, 2011). on the contrary, martin et al. (2022) found that during the covid-19 pandemic, time spent working among workers and stress increased. work and family are the main domains in an employee's life, especially for women who work and have children (gayathri & sajeethkumar, 2019). the interactions carried out cannot be separated from aspects of employees' perceptions of the system and human resource management policies in their place of work. organizational support is present as an external factor that cannot be separated from its efforts to provide a balance between the two lives of female employees working women must struggle to balance work and family, especially when both simultaneously demand greater attention and effort (rajadhyaksha et al., 2015). during the implementation of work from home, the situation at home is very different from before work from home was carried out. it was unprecedented; most working women had to focus on professional demands, and together they had to meet the needs of their personal lives. ideally, wfh is a condition for creating a work-life balance (ashforth et al., 2000; clark, 2000; greer & payne, 2014). furthermore, ashfaq et al. (2013) consider that the demands of work and family where there is a conflict between the two roles can note that the conflict between the two is multi-directional and multi-dimensional. working women feel mentally drained by work and less able to boast that they have achieved many valuable things in their work (oludayo et al., 2015). the level of organizational support is one of the positive efforts in helping employees coordinate their work and obligations at home to not interfere with each other (voydanoff, 2004). specific resources such as organizational support can reduce adverse psychological conditions, especially burnout (kossek et al., 2011). therefore, organizational support can significantly reduce the demands imposed by the two most dominant roles: work and family this study result also shows pos negatively affects burnout. it relates to employee perceptions of organizational commitment regarding the extent to which organizations value contributions and care about employee welfare through the benefits of perceived organizational support in predicting burnout (gayathri & sajeethkumar, 2019). it refers to the social support theory proposed by house (1981). social support is considered a "buffering" effect associated with burnout (parasuraman et al., 1992). organizational support is present to help women who work to represent organizations by attributing characteristics to positive social exchanges (eisenberger et al., 2001). women who work believe that if the company gives respect, and cares about the welfare of its employees, then employees will provide resources to help manage requests and accepted roles. xu and yang (2018) explain that if individuals cannot cope with stress effectively, they can face failure in balancing their roles so that their self-esteem is threatened. however, suppose individuals feel that they are cared for by their organization. in that case, individuals believe that the organization can provide information about the causes of stress and tell them how to deal with stress functionally. this belief in perceived organizational support can buffer 116 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) riyono & rezki (burnout among working mothers: the role of …) the effects of perceived burnout, reduce the tendency to overestimate stressors, and increase perceptions of available resources to reduce burnout. the support received can be manifested as an external encouragement to strengthen self-strength in the face of pressure outside the individual. in this case, perceived organizational support is an essential determinant of improving employee welfare (leather et al., 1998). in turn, perceived organizational support is a determinant of improving employees' mood and satisfaction, increasing affective commitment, and reducing unproductive organizational behavior (jain et al., 2013). this study result shows that among two aspects of pos, only concern for employee welfare contributes significantly to burnout. the more concern for employee welfare, the less burnout will be, and vice versa. it means that the company's attention to providing an attitude of disregard for women's opinions and complaints shown by an open attitude and providing opportunities for two-way communication can reduce burnout compared to giving awards for employee contributions (kossek et al., 2001). this research is inseparable from the limitations. the data collected in this study used an online survey distributed and filled out online by participants from any city. in addition, the researcher does not have a description of the condition of each company which is one of the measuring objects in understanding the phenomenon of burnout in working women. thus, this study does not explain the differences in company characteristics in their effect on burnout. the information about companies can be used as the measuring object in understanding the phenomenon of burnout in working mothers. conclusion work-life balance and perceived positive organizational support simultaneously reduce burnout in working and married women. therefore, reducing burnout in working women in the context of working from home can be facilitated by involving the organization in providing support and the role of these women in balancing the two roles. to minimize burnout, pos is significantly needed in an organizational setting. the practical implication of this study involves the human resource management policy concerning employee welfare in compensation and benefit and a conducive working environment. acknowledgment this article is supported by the funding (rta) from the faculty of psychology universitas gadjah mada. declarations author contribution. br as the corresponding author wrote the english version of the article and edited the article from the editing process until the final format. gr collected the research data and wrote the research report in indonesian. funding statement. this article was funded by the faculty of psychology 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(2020). the influence of perceived organizational support on police job burnout: a moderated mediation model. frontiers in psychology, 11(948), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00948 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2004.00028.x http://etd.repository.ugm.ac.id/penelitian/detail/170127 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gwao.12005 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-018-9941-4 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00948/full humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 19 (2), august 2022, 87-100 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id https://doi.org/10.26555/humantias.v19i2.45 work engagement among millennial employees: the role of psychological capital and perceived organizational support nabila ayu gumilang, indrayanti faculty of psychology, universitas gadjah mada, indonesia corresponding author: indrapsi@ugm.ac.id introduction millennial employees never stop being talked about, given their vital role in today's workforce. today's majority of working-age organizations are filled with millennials with all their distinctive characteristics, such as they have to deal with the superiority of the previous generation, global challenges, rapid technological advances, and digitalization in the workplace. previously, robbins and judge (2019) conveyed that all of those changes would lead to situations of uncertainty, complexity, and even ambiguity. according to central statistics agency (bps), in 2018, the millennial generation was 88 million people or equivalent to 33.75%, followed by generation z at 29.3%, generation x at 25.74%, and the combined generation of baby boomers and veterans at 11.27%. this number shows the high contribution of the millennial generation in shaping the structure of the current productive age population, of which 67.02% are productive age population and 50.36% are a millennial generation (susanti, 2020). this condition is then called the demographic bonus. mulyati et al. (2019) added that by 2020 the millennial generation would begin to dominate 75% of the workforce in indonesia. millennials undoubtedly can be an opportunity, but they can also be a challenge for organizations in indonesia. research conducted by nielson indonesia and the idn research institute in 2019 stated that the millennial generation would be male and female between 21 art icle info ab st r act article history received november 25, 2021 revised july 2, 2022 accepted july 5, 2022 millennials, who have several values, perspectives, and habits different from previous generations, have dominated the profile of workers in indonesia. challenges and changes in the company require millennials to be engaged in their work. this study aimed to determine the work engagement of millennial employees through the role of psychological capital and perceived organizational support. the research participants were 225 millennial employees with a minimum working period of six months. the work engagement scale (uwes-17), psychological capital questionnaire (pcq), and perceived organizational support scale were used to collect the data. this research was conducted using quantitative methods and analyzed by multiple regression analysis. the results show that psychological capital and perceived organizational support simultaneously contribute to work engagement among millennial employees. independently, psychological capital and perceived organizational support significantly predict work engagement. these findings indicate both personal factors and situational factors are needed to achieve work engagement. thus, the finding represents the existence of positive psychological movement on work engagement through the lens of the psychological process mechanism at work. keywords millennial; perceived organization support; psychological capital; work engagement. https://doi.org/10.26555/humantias.v19i2.45 mailto:indrapsi@ugm.ac.id 88 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) gumilang & indrayanti (work engagement among millennial employees: the role of…) to 36 years old in 2020, divided into two categories: junior millennial (1992-1999) and senior millennial (1984-1991). the millennial generation are employees with positive personalities (ramli & soelton, 2019), high self-efficacy in their work abilities (andrea et al., 2016; howe & strauss, 2007; smith & nichols, 2015), and high optimism (howe & strauss, 2007; kowske et al., 2010) make them have good resilience (akhir & hamid, 2017). the millennial generation has nine main behaviors: internet addiction, cashless, intelligent and fast work, likes traveling, multitasking, indifference to politics, likes to share, low ownership of goods, and low loyalty (utomo et al., 2019). the current challenges in industries are complex and varied, from the availability of talent, technological advances, and diversity to the generation gap (robbins & judge, 2018). however, today’s challenge is not only to retain talented employees but also to make employees engaged with their work. the behavior of individuals in organizations who feel engaged and fully involved in their work activities is called work engagement. work engagement is a positive mental state of employees toward their work, characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption (bakker, 2011; bakker & demorouti, 2014; schaufeli, 2012). kinicki and fugate (2018) argued that positive employee behavior would significantly relate to individual and organizational consequences, such as job performance. work engagement is considered one of the highest concepts related to employee performance. employees who are engaged in their work have some positive behavior, such as being more productive, generating new ideas and initiative, being more diligent, and not wasting much time on useless things to support the achievement of organizational goals (holbeche & matthews, 2012). the contribution that employees make to the organization is crucial. organizations have no choice but to engage employees, not only in their bodies but also in their souls, to produce suitable output (storey et al., 2019). nikhil and arthi (2018) stated that organizational success is determined by employees' contributions who have a high level of work engagement, the primary key to positive organizational behavior (robbins & judge, 2018). employees with high work engagement will use their resources within themselves, such as optimism, self-efficacy, and active coping style, to help them manage and influence their work environment more successfully (bakker & demerouti, 2008). specifically, the millennial generation's low loyalty makes them tend to move around like fleas (gallup, 2016). a survey conducted by dale carnegie indonesia in 2016 found that only 25% of the millennial workforce in indonesia is in the fully engaged category. moreover, rigoni and nelson (2016) conducted gallup research and found that less than a third of millennial generation employees fully engage with their work. robbins and judge (2018) add that low employee engagement has become a concern for most world organizations, where only 17%-29% of employees have a high engagement in their work. employees with low work engagement will exhibit behaviors such as; withdrawing from the work environment, skipping work, providing minimal effort, quickly experiencing fatigue, harming organizational productivity, and high employee turnover rates (holbeche & matthews, 2012; nikhil & arthi, 2018). previous research shows that personal resource is one of the driving factors of employee engagement (constantini et al., 2017). a personal resource is a positive self-evaluation that relates to resilience and refers to an individual's ability to control themself and impact their environment (hobfoll et al., 2003). the personal resource includes self-efficacy, optimism, and emotional stability (schaufeli, 2012). later, some personal resources of millennials would foster the achievement of organizational goals (akhir & hamid, 2017; andrea et al., 2016; howe & strauss, 2007; kowske et al., 2010; ramli & soelton, 2019; smith & nichols, 2015). some personal resources are self-efficacy, optimism, and resilience, which relate to understanding psychological capital (luthans et al., 2007). therefore, psychological capital is often categorized as a personal resource because it has a similar concept (luthans et al., 2007; nikhil & arthi, 2018) that would increase positive work-related outcomes such as engagement and well-being (constantini et al., 2017). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 89 gumilang & indrayanti (work engagement among millennial employees: the role of…) psychological capital is a relatively new concept in organizational behavior and is part of the positive psychology movement (kinicki & fugate, 2018). sweetman and luthans (2010) argued that psychological capital could encourage employees' intrinsic motivation and, therefore, can trigger a crucial component in developing employee work engagement. luthans et al. (2007) defined psychological capital as a positive self-condition with hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism characteristics. the psychological capital dimension has a high stability level over a long time. however, the dimension of psychological capital has the capability and flexibility to develop, so it can be said that psychological capital is not like a psychological construct that tends to be relatively stable and difficult to change (constantini et al., 2017). furthermore, luthans et al. (2007) prove that the components of the psychological capital dimension will be more accurately measured together than when each component stands alone. the dimensions of psychological capital indicate a conceptual relationship with work engagement (sweetman & luthans, 2010). employees who believe in their ability to master tasks and can understand well their work context (efficacy) are optimistic about what will happen to them (optimism), have high hopes (hope), and are resilient when faced with challenges (resilience) would internalize themselves to achieve organizational goals without experiencing distraction (absorption), investing their efforts to achieve goals (vigor), and have a high identification of what they do (dedication) (sweetman & luthans, 2010). high psychological capital values in employees can increase the potential values of employees. by then, employees will be more flexible and easier to adapt to dealing with various things when meeting their work demands, so psychological capital has a role in stimulating employee work engagement (avey et al., 2010; constantini et al., 2017; joo et al., 2016; simons & buitendach, 2013). the role of psychological capital is considered a significant predictor of various links to employee performance outcomes. each dimension can optimize employee potential to help organizational performance (paek et al., 2015). however, psychological capital that has a positive relationship to work engagement is not alone in generating employee work engagement (ilvonda & faraz, 2020; indrianti & hadi, 2012; rara, 2019; wardani & anwar, 2019). according to schaufeli and bakker (2004), in their jd-r model theory, work engagement is not only influenced by personal resources, in this case, psychological capital, but also job resources. further, schaufeli (2012) conveyed that job resources are defined as some functional aspects of the job to achieve work goals, reduce job demands, or stimulate personal growth and development (e.g., job control, performance feedback, and social support from colleagues). later on, kinicki and fugate (2018) identified key drivers of work engagement that consist of two factors, personal factors (personality, positive psychological capital, human and social capital) and situational factors (job characteristics, leadership, organizational climate, and environment stressor). due to the context of millennials, they need a supportive and trusting relationship with the manager and a positive climate at work to feel engaged (christian et al., 2011). thus, in this study, perceived organizational support is assumed to represent an individual’s perception of the existence of social support at work. perceived organizational support is a form of job resource (tan et al., 2020). perceived organizational support is an employee's perception of how the organization provides support to employees and the extent to which the organization is prepared to assist when employees need it (rhoades & eisenberger, 2002). matoori (2017) research found a positive and significant relationship between psychological capital and perceived organizational support and work engagement. 90 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) gumilang & indrayanti (work engagement among millennial employees: the role of…) perceived organizational support is an external factor influencing employee motivation at work (kolodinsky et al., 2018). when employees receive support from the organization, employees will have a sense of obligation to reciprocate the support; not only that, but employees will also feel part of the organization, so there is an incentive to play a more active role in the organization (rhoades & eisenberger, 2002). the basic concept of perceived organizational support is a reciprocal relationship between the giver and the recipient (rhoades & eisenberger, 2002). perceived organizational support can increase employee work engagement (bano et al., 2015; dai & qin, 2016; mufarrikhah et al., 2020; mujiasih, 2015; tan et al., 2020). when organizations provide support to their employees, indirectly, the organization has met the socio-emotional needs of employees (rhoades & eisenberger, 2002). employees who feel support from the organization will feel that the organization values their contributions and cares about their welfare (robbins & judge, 2018), especially millennials who are hungry for feedback and like interpersonal relationships with their coworkers (smith & nichols, 2015). thus, it seems clear that referring to personal resources and job resource factors that affect work engagement, psychological capital, and perceived organizational support are considered to affect employee work engagement jointly. therefore, this study examines how psychological capital and perceived organizational support will jointly affect work engagement in millennial employees. psychological capital and perceived organizational support represent personal and situational factors that should be examined simultaneously. this study would like to figure out the contribution of four components of psychological capital and two aspects of perceived organizational support to provide a profound portrayal of indonesian millennial employees. even though luthans et al. (2007) conveyed that all components should be measured together than each component standing alone. finally, the context of study in millennials also becomes added value since this specificity is essential considering that indonesian employees' demographic posture is currently being flooded with millennial employees with all their characteristics and uniqueness. furthermore, the organization can use the study result as a consideration in human resource policy-making regarding work engagement in millennial employees, particularly in indonesia. method research design the research was conducted using a quantitative approach. a survey method that uses attitude tendencies or opinions from a particular population sample (creswell, 2014) was applied in this study. participants the population of this study is indonesian millennial employees who work permanently in many institutions in indonesia. the study used the convenience sampling technique and proposed the characteristic of the respondents as follows. firstly, permanent employees born in 1980 – 2000 are millennials (howe & strauss, 2000). secondly, those who have worked for at least six months assumed new employees are experiencing a stage of exploration in their career and likely have practiced psychological experience during their working life (super, 1980). table 1 shows the demographic data of 225 millennial employees in indonesia with an age range of 22 – 37 years (mean = 28; sd = 3.75). most of the research participants were female, with 154 employees (68.4%), and most of the participants had worked for more than three years, as many as 125 employees (55.6%). a total of 183 employees (81.3%) have humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 91 gumilang & indrayanti (work engagement among millennial employees: the role of…) completed their last education at the bachelor's level, and most work in the private sector, as many as 146 employees (64.9%). table 1 demographic data category description frequency percentages gender female 154 68.4% male 71 31.6% tenure 6 month – 1 year 13 5.8% 1 – 2 years 74 32.9% 2 – 3 years 13 5.8%  3 years 125 55.6% educational background diploma 1 1 0.4% diploma 3 11 4.9% diploma 4 5 2.3% bachelor 183 81.3% master 25 11.1% work sector private 146 64.9% state owned enterprises 39 17.3% civil servant 30 13.3% professional 10 4.4% instruments data was collected online through google forms, shared via linkedin private messages and whatsapp group forwarding messages. data were collected by using a likert scale with five alternative answers. this research involves three variables: work engagement as a dependent variable, psychological capital, and perceived organizational support as the independent variables. work engagement is a positive state that employees feel when working, indicated by vigor, dedication and absorption. the indonesian version of the utrecht work engagement scale (uwes-17) as the scale compiled by schaufeli et al. (2006), which consists of 17 items, was used to measure work engagement. the uwes is on a likert scale with five answer choices, ranging from 1 = very dissatisfied to 5 = very appropriate. the indonesian version of uwes-17 has an item discrimination power between .557-.843 and a cronbach's alpha value of .950. the higher the score obtained by the individual indicates that the individual has a high level of work engagement, and vice versa. psychological capital is a positive psychological condition characterized by efficacy, optimism, hope, and resilience. psychological capital was measured using the psychological capital questionnaire (pcq) adapted from the psychological capital questionnaire (pcq) scale previously developed by luthans et al. (2007) and consists of 16 items (fithria, 2018). the pcq scale is on a likert scale with five answer choices, ranging from 1 = very dissatisfied to 5 = very appropriate. the pcq scale has an item discrimination power of .427-.880 and a cronbach's alpha value of .930. the higher the score obtained by the individual indicates a high level of psychological capital and vice versa. perceived organizational support is an employee's view of the organization regarding the extent to which the organization values employee contributions (appreciation for employee contribution) and provides support and care for welfare, including rewards, training, promotions, and wages (the organization's concern for the welfare of employee). perceived organizational support is measured using a scale developed by purwaningrum et al. (2020), based on eisenberger et al. (1986), which consists of 16 items. the perceived organizational support scale is a likert scale with five answer options, ranging from 1 = very 92 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) gumilang & indrayanti (work engagement among millennial employees: the role of…) dissatisfied to 5 = very appropriate. the perceived organizational support scale has an item discrimination power between .497-.862 and a cronbach's alpha value of .904. the higher the score obtained by the individual indicates a high perceived organizational level and vice versa. data analysis multiple regression analysis with spss software was applied to data analysis. regression analysis was used to see whether the predictor variables could predict the criterion variables. regression analysis will produce an r2 value which indicates the proportion of variance of the criterion variables that the predictor as a whole can explain, and a β value indicating the role of each predictor. results the result of the regression analysis shows that psychological capital and perceived organizational support were both able to explain 47.9% of the variation in work engagement (r2=.479; f(2, 222)=109.907; p<.001) (see table 2). psychological capital significantly predicts work engagement (β=.507; p<.001), and perceived organizational support also predicts work engagement (β =.292; p<.001). partially, each variable contributes as much as 32.5% for psychological capital and 15.4% for perceived organizational support to work engagement. table 2 result of multiple regression variables unstandardized coefficient standardized coefficients beta f t b standard error constant .964 4.349 101.907 .222 psychological capital .694 .075 .507 9.303 perceived organizational support .295 .055 .292 5.349 note: all variables have p<.01 with r=.692 and 𝑅2=.479 furthermore, each aspect of psychological capital and perceived organizational support was elaborated to see its contribution to work engagement. table 3 shows the results of multiple regression analysis on the psychological capital variable and shows that only the aspect of optimism contributes significantly to work engagement. table 3 result of multiple regression of aspect of psychological capital toward work engagement variables unstandardized coefficient standardized coefficients beta t p b standard error constant 1.575 4.407 .357 .721 hope .846 .454 .169 1.861 .064 efficacy -.075 .359 -.016 -.208 .835 resilience .503 .358 .111 1.404 .162 optimism 2.418 .338 .492 7.157 <.001** note: **for p<.001 r=.688; 𝑅2=.473; f(4,220)=49.429; p<.001 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 93 gumilang & indrayanti (work engagement among millennial employees: the role of…) meanwhile, the perceived organizational support variable shows that only the aspect of the organization's concern for employees' welfare contributes significantly to work engagement table 4 shows the results of multiple regression of each aspect of perceived organizational support on work engagement. table 4 result of multiple regression of aspect of perceived organizational support toward work engagement variables unstandardized coefficient standardized coefficients beta t p b standard error constant 32.351 3.239 9.989 <.001** appreciation .166 .171 .097 .972 .332 organization’s concern 1.012 .221 .457 4.571 <.001** note: **for p<.001 r=.540; 𝑅2=.292; f(2,222)=45.684; p<.001 additional analysis using a t-test was performed to enrich the study's results. the results showed that there was a significant difference in work engagement between males and females (t[223] = 2.52; p < .05) (see table 5). male (m=64.20; sd=10.23) had higher work engagement than female (m=60.53; sd=10.11). in more detail, which aspects of work engagement have the most role in male and female, it was found that only aspects of vigor (t[223] = 2.78; p < .01) and dedication (t[223] = 2.52; p < .05) different, while absorption was not different (t[223] = 1.53; p>.05). male (m=22.47; sd=4.18) had higher vigor than female (m=20.88; sd=3.89), and male (m=19.90; sd=3.57) had higher dedication than female (m= 18.62; sd=3.54) table 5 result of t-test analysis of work engagement on gender variable/aspect group n mean sd t df p work engagement 2.52 223 .01* male 71 64.20 10.23 female 154 60.53 10.11 vigor 2.78 223 .01* male 71 22.46 4.18 female 154 20.88 3.89 dedication 2.52 223 .01* male 71 19.90 3.57 female 154 18.62 3.54 absorption 1.53 223 .13 male 71 21.83 3.68 female 154 21.04 3.58 note: *for p<.05 discussion the results show a significant simultaneous effect between psychological capital and perceived organizational support on work engagement in millennial employees. the research 94 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) gumilang & indrayanti (work engagement among millennial employees: the role of…) findings show that psychological capital and perceived organizational support can simultaneously predict 47.9% of work engagement in millennial employees. this result is in line with research conducted by alessandri et al. (2018) on 420 employees, whereby the more psychological capital, the higher work engagement, which can predict employee performance. also, lorente et al. (2014) found that psychological capital as personal resources, according to the jd-r model concept, can increase employee intrinsic motivation and produce work engagement. work engagement is closely related to intrinsic motivation, including feelings of enthusiasm and a high level of activity, as it has benefits and meaning for him (nerstad et al., 2013). it confirms the statement of sweetman and luthans (2010) that conceptually psychological capital characteristics correlate with work engagement. in this study, psychological capital acts as a personal resource that can increase employees' intrinsic motivation at work, triggering engagement in millennial employees. moreover, the presence of psychological capital contributes to the high work engagement of millennial employees (sutrisno & parahyanti, 2018). luthans et al. (2007) stated that the components of psychological capital could theoretically actualize individual potential, especially in the workplace. furthermore, the dimensions of psychological capital will build each other into resources and capital for each individual that can lead to work engagement and broaden employees' perspectives on their work environment (sweetman & luthans, 2010). perceived organizational support is a situational factor that can be felt by the presence of organizational concern and appreciation for employee contributions. the central concept in perceived organizational support is reciprocity or a reciprocal relationship. employees who have a good perception of the organization will have a feeling of having to reciprocate the treatment of the organization; furthermore, employees will feel part of the organization, and therefore there is an incentive to play an active role in the organization (eisenberger et al., 1986). employees with a good perception of organizational support feel that the organization provides support, fairness, and care for the welfare of employees and appreciates their contribution to the organization, as well as fulfilling employee socio-emotional needs such as self-esteem. these feelings foster a sense of belonging to the organization and encourage a high contribution to the organization (rhoades & eisenberger, 2002). in line with the above argument, workplace interactions that result in work engagement behavior are reciprocal relationships between employees and organizations, as stated in the concept of social exchange theory (yin, 2018). the findings of this research further emphasize that the psychological capital possessed by millennial employees needs to be juxtaposed with the organization's treatment of them in the form of concern and appreciation for their performance. both of these things need to be addressed positively by the organization to foster enthusiasm and work dedication for millennial employees to positively enjoy every activity at work. many peculiarities of millennials need to be facilitated in the workplace so that their potential is more optimal, such as high social needs where they like interpersonal relationships in their work environment. in addition, millennials also like openness in communication. they are happy with the appreciation and consistent feedback outside of the official assessments given by the organization periodically (stanimir, 2015). furthermore, millennials also need challenges at work and desire to develop skills (smith & nichols, 2015). if employees perceive the organization as being able to provide these facilities, millennials will display more and their best abilities in helping to achieve organizational goals (de hauw & de vos, 2010). the existence of employees' perceptions of good organizational support will make them bond with their work activities, where they will devote their most extraordinary energy but still feel happy about their work. this finding also supports the empirical study of mufarrikhah et al. (2020) on 300 permanent and nonpermanent employees in indonesia, resulting in perceived organizational support positively humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 95 gumilang & indrayanti (work engagement among millennial employees: the role of…) affecting employee work engagement in organizations. the higher the employee's attachment to work, the higher the effectiveness of employees in the organization. therefore, organizations need to provide support to employees who also have psychological capital to achieve work engagement. luthans et al. (2007) state that bringing all components of psychological capital at once rather than individually should need more attention. this study found that only the optimism component of psychological capital contributes to work engagement. optimism is the component that needs to be considered by management since it could be ups and downs according to a particular situation. the more millennial employees become optimistic, the higher work engagement. thus, the organization should provide a work environment that makes employees feel optimistic. following the research finding, the organization's concern for employee welfare might be the choice to contribute to work engagement. the more organizations provide welfare, the higher the work engagement of millennial employees. as it turns, engagement from millennial employees tends to arise from organizational support in the shape of the support and care for welfare, including rewards, training, promotions, and wages, rather than appreciation for employee contribution. in short, it could be concluded that appreciation for employee contribution could not directly affect work engagement among millennial employees. however, an organization should still consider it as the default practice that should be implemented at work by considering that appreciation is one of the needs of millennials in the workplace. as a management implication, organizations need to support employees, especially millennials, through hr practice programs that provide awareness to them to implement their psychological capital in responding to work situations consistently. in addition, the organization must accompany the emergence of this psychological capital and support from the organization in the form of concern and appreciation for the millennials' performance. organizations must be sensitive that millennial employees who need feedback must be ensured to get feedback on their work. millennial employees also need flexibility in their work, so organizations need to be level-headed, discussing flexibility opportunities openly with millennial employees. with the presence of this support, the hope that springs up, the self-confidence that grows strong, the resilience that is built firmly, and optimism for the future will genuinely manifest into a millennial employee who is full of enthusiasm at work, full of dedication, and always enjoys his work. ultimately, work engagement would arise due to the simultaneous relationship between psychological capital and organizational support. the results of this study indicate differences in work engagement by gender, where males have a higher level of work engagement than females. it is in line with the results of previous research by banihani et al. (2013), which stated that gender affected work engagement where males had a higher level of work engagement than females. a similar study conducted by mache et al. (2014) also shows that men have a significantly higher work engagement than females. however, this finding is inconsistent with the results of research by gulzar and teli (2018) on 123 respondents, which showed that females had higher engagement levels than men. these differences in findings indicate a study that leads to a cultural context. the significantly higher work engagement of males in indonesia is due to culture and customs in indonesia, in which males play an important role as the family head and in family income so that their level of work engagement will tend to be higher if compared to with female (wardani et al., 2020). in particular, each aspect of work engagement was reelaborated and yielded information that, in the context of this research, the difference between males and females lies in the aspect of vigor and dedication. in contrast, there is no difference between the two in the absorption aspect. male are more enthusiastic and show dedication in 96 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) gumilang & indrayanti (work engagement among millennial employees: the role of…) their work compared to females. therefore, the assumption of gender roles in indonesian culture above makes sense in the context of this research. the limitations of this study are the unproven aspects of psychological capital as a driver of engagement, in contrast with the results of previous studies that the four aspects of psychological capital consisting of hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism are critical in generating engaged behavior (constantini et al., 2017; grover et al., 2018; joo et al., 2016; simons & buitendach, 2013). it may be caused by the variety of participants from organizations such as public servants, private companies, state-owned enterprises, and professionals. moreover, online data collection means that the researcher does not have complete control over the understanding of the subject, even though instructions for processing have been included. future research needs to address the limitation of this study to genuinely portray the role of psychological capital and perceived organizational support on the emergence of engaged behavior, including notions to examine only one organizational context or several organizations with similar hr practices and the work environment. further investigation is also needed regarding the limitation of this study. it is essential to explore whether the limitation is related to indonesian culture or whether optimism is individually the keyword for other psychological aspects. conclusion this study further confirms the role of psychological capital and perceived organizational support on work engagement in millennial employees. specifically, in the context of millennial employees, this study framework can confirm that hope, self-efficacy, resilience, and optimism for the future need to be accompanied by support from the organization to enable them to carry out their work with vigor, dedication, and absorption. however, during elaborating on aspects of psychological capital, where if done individually, only the optimism aspect contributes significantly to work engagement, although the contribution value is smaller than when it involves all aspects in the model. in addition, the aspect of optimism seems to dominate the model, even on aspects of perceived organizational support. therefore, hr practitioners need to be more concerned with optimism in the contribution of personal and situational factors to work engagement among millennials. acknowledgment the authors acknowledge the faculty of psychology, universitas gadjah mada, for the research grant for this study. declarations author contribution. nag and ii design the study, collect, analyze the data and discuss the result before submitting it; afterward, the revision is under ii’s responsibility as a corresponding author. funding statement. rta grant funded this study from the faculty of psychology, universitas gadjah mada (no.5388/un1/fpsi/up4/pt.02/2021) conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references akhir, r. m., & hamid, n. r. 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1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i2.46 the well-being of indonesian university students during the pandemic: smartphone use and sleep quality bianca marella, grace eugenia sameve faculty of psychology, universitas tarumanagara, indonesia corresponding author: biancam@fpsi.untar.ac.id introduction the covid-19 control endeavors have required unexpected and broadly ordered physical separation, eliminating possible sources of social interaction from people's life. the impacts of physical and social separation may be especially substantial for young people (10–24 years old) who went through a phase of social interaction sensitivity (orben et al., 2020). the prevention measures have had an unanticipated and unprecedented impact on higher education, not only on university administration and classes or exam delivery but also on the interactions between students and professors (capone et al., 2020). these adaptations have exerted new pressure on students in the form of increased exam-related anxiety due to the unprecedented exam procedures and new and unexpected academic workloads, all of which have been cited as major sources of stress for students (bedewy & gabriel, 2015). during the covid-19 pandemic, several studies found university students' mental health and well-being problems. students have been reported with increased depressive and anxiety symptoms (cao et al., 2020; li et al., 2020; odriozola-gonzález et al., 2020; savage et al., 2020); increased suicidal thoughts, and poor sleep quality (kaparounaki et al., 2020); as well as increased perceived stress and time spent on sedentary lifestyle (savage et al., 2020). nonetheless, another study has reported a relatively normal score of mental well-being and academic stress among italian students (capone et al., 2020), while studies from indonesia have similarly reported only mild levels of depression and anxiety (soetisna et al., 2021; sujarwoto et al., 2021). changes in education policy have demanded certain art icle info ab st r act article history received december 26, 2021 revised july 21, 2022 accepted july 31, 2022 online learning and the lack of social interactions during lockdown pushed numerous college students to live employing the internet and social media. this study investigates students' well-being and its associated factors in relation to smartphone use and sleep quality among indonesian university students during the pandemic. a sample of 327 undergraduate students (68 males and 259 females) anonymously completed the smartphone addiction scale – short version (sas-sv), who-five wellbeing index (who-5), and pittsburgh sleep quality index (psqi), along with several sociodemographic data via an online survey. the data was then analyzed with hierarchical linear regression. the results indicate that gender, perceived physical health, smartphone use, and sleep quality were associated with well-being in university students. the final model predicted 23.4 percent of the who-5 scores with a significant increase in predictive value by adding perceived physical health and sleep quality. therefore to enhance well-being among indonesian university students, suitable physical activities, good sleeping habits, and controlled smartphone use is needed. keywords mental health; sleep quality; smartphone addiction; university student; well-being. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i2.31 mailto:biancam@fpsi.untar.ac.id 162 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) marella & sameve (the well-being of indonesian university students during the pandemic: smartphone …) adaptations on the part of university students that presumably placed mental health burdens on students. yet, findings regarding the mental health status are still unclear. failure to identify and manage mental health issues in young people is a major public health issue in low and middle income countries, with important implications for meeting primary development goals (kieling et al., 2011). however, most covid-19 mental health research has been conducted with the adult population as the focus of attention. however, there is a growing body of evidence of the potential adverse impact of the pandemic on youth's mental health (chen et al., 2020; zhou et al., 2020). therefore, effective strategies must be identified to promote mental health and well-being to protect adolescents against the negative effects of covid-19. the other adjustment regarding educational demand and social restrictions that should be made in the covid-19 pandemic is the rigorous use of the internet and social media among college students. with the limitations in outdoor activities, there is an increase in smartphone use at home to accommodate work, study, leisure, and social contact (king et al., 2020; király et al., 2020; mckay et al., 2020). the widespread use of smartphones raises concerns about their inherent risks. the overuse of smartphones has a negative effect on psychological well-being (adams & kisler, 2013; elhai et al., 2017). according to the studies, adolescents with a high prevalence of social media use may utilize it as an unhealthy outlet for negative emotions and daily difficulties (lerma et al., 2021; sujarwoto et al., 2021). such coping mechanisms could progress into excessive use and increase the risk of smartphone addiction if left unattended (islam et al., 2021). excessive internet use and screen time, particularly in children, adolescents, and young people, can have a negative impact on cognition and development (neophytou et al., 2021). studies have also linked smartphone use and sleep difficulties among young people. according to a cross-national study of undergraduate students, 10.4% of them had significant nocturnal sleep issues in the previous month, with indonesia (32.9%) having the highest percentage and thailand (3.0%) having the lowest (peltzer & pengpid, 2015). sleep problems have been linked to smartphone addiction and numerous indicators of problematic smartphone usage among university students and teenagers, including prolonged smartphone use, late-night smartphone use, using a smartphone right before bedtime, and severe smartphone use (demirci et al., 2015; huang et al., 2020; liu et al., 2019; sahin et al., 2013; shoval et al., 2020). indonesians spend more than 8 hours online daily, with around 3 hours and 26 minutes on social platforms mainly accessed through smartphones (wong, 2019). despite smartphones' high consumption and ownership, research about problematic smartphone use in indonesia is still limited. previous research reported an association between problematic smartphone use and temperament profile in indonesian medical students (hanafi et al., 2019). another study reported an indonesian adaptation of the smartphone addiction scale for indonesian junior high school students (arthy et al., 2019). these studies are yet to provide a prevalence and a description of problematic smartphone use among university students. similar research conducted in other asian countries has reported the high prevalence of problematic smartphone use, such as taiwan (wang et al., 2019), china (huang et al., 2020), the philippines (buctot et al., 2020), and south korea (kim et al., 2018). this study aimed to assess the mental well-being of indonesian college students a few months well after the school closure. this study explores the role of smartphone use and sleep quality on indonesian college students' well-being during the ongoing covid-19 pandemic. a further aim was to conduct exploratory analyses to investigate whether socio-demographic characteristics would be associated with well-being, smartphone usage, and sleep quality. it is critical to establish a clear picture of the severity of smartphone use and its associated factors in the adolescent population, given the time they spend on smartphones. furthermore, there has been no study on the prevalence of problematic smartphone use in young people during the pandemic covid-19 on indonesia's population. knowing the risks may provide humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 163 marella & sameve (the well-being of indonesian university students during the pandemic: smartphone…) ways to introduce wise smartphone usage with minimum health risks, especially related to sleep quality, to maintain well-being. method this study used an online cross-sectional research approach among university students in jakarta. three hundred forty-five university students were selected through convenience sampling. eighteen students were excluded due to their incomplete scales. thus, 327 students (68 males and 259 females; mean age = 19.2 ± 1.65) were included in the study. all participants owned and used smartphones regularly. participants consented to participate in the study and were allowed to withdraw at any time. data collection took place between august and september 2020. the study was reviewed and approved by the universitas tarumanagara's ethics committee (ppz20202077). the confidentiality of participant responses was protected. therefore, the university received the study's overall conclusions but not the participants' personal information. instruments all participants completed an online questionnaire generated by google form that consisted of two sections. the first part of this data included primary socio-demographic data of individual and family characteristics. questions for individual characteristics include age, birth year, gender, place of origin, smoking exposure, and perceived health (feeling physically healthy in the past week). the second part of the questionnaire assessed the psychological attributes of the participants. the smartphone addiction scale – short version (sas-sv), developed by kwon et al. (2013), measures smartphone use in university students. the sas-sv contains ten items. participants were asked to respond to statements like “constantly checking my smartphone so as not to miss conversations between other people on whatsapp, facebook, or wechat” and “the people around me tell me that i use my smartphone too much.” each item scored on a likert scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree). the questionnaire gives an overall sas-sv score from 10 to 60, with higher scores representing problematic use. sas-sv is not intended to provide a pathological diagnosis of smartphone addiction but rather to assess the level of smartphone addiction risk and to identify the high-risk group kwon et al. (2013). arthy et al. (2019) translated and adapted the indonesian version of sassv. the cronbach's alpha of the sas-sv in this study is .864. the pittsburgh sleep quality index (buysse et al., 1989) was used to assess sleep problems. this index measures subjective sleep quality over one month. the pittsburgh sleep quality index, abbreviated psqi, is a set of 19 self-reported questions that are scored on the following components: sleep latency, subjective sleep quality, sleep duration, sleep efficiency, sleep disruptions, usage of sleep medicine, and daytime dysfunction. these component values were combined to provide a global psqi score ranging from 0 to 21, with greater scores indicating lower sleep quality. the indonesian version of the psqi was previously validated and had a reliability of .79, content validity of .89, and a specificity of 81% (alim & elvira, 2015). the cronbach's alpha of the psqi in this study is .68. subjective psychological well-being was assessed using the five-item world health organization well being index (who-5). the who-5 has been translated into more than 30 languages and is used in research projects worldwide (topp et al., 2015). it consists of five items with positive connotations that reflect the presence or absence of well-being. on a 6point scale ranging from always (5 points) to never (0 points), participants are asked to indicate the presence of these happy sensations in the preceding two weeks. higher scores indicate better-perceived well-being or quality of life. the indonesian version for who-5 164 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) marella & sameve (the well-being of indonesian university students during the pandemic: smartphone …) was used in previous research with good reliability of .83 (sasmito & lopez, 2020; soewondo et al., 2010), while the cronbach's alpha of the who-5 in this study is .827. data analysis all data were subjected to descriptive analysis, and major socio-demographic variables were tested for correlation to well-being using linear regression. all variables were examined in several steps using hierarchical linear regression analysis. the following procedures were taken to generate the multiple regression model: the first step was to enter the participants' age and gender (demographic characteristics); the second step was to enter health-related variables, specifically perceived physical health and exposure to smoking behavior; the third step was to enter the severity of smartphone use, and the fourth and final step was to enter sleep quality. each phase included reporting all standardized coefficients for each variable and the collinearity for the final mode. chi-square and pearson correlations were used to identify the correlation between socio-demographic characteristics and smartphone use severity. data analysis was performed using version 15 of stata for windows at a significant of .05 (statacorp, 2017). results table 1 shows a hierarchical multiple linear regression analysis investigating the association between predictors and the who-5 score. demographic variables explained 1.8% of the variance in the who-5, while health-related variables added 13.5% to the estimate. the smartphone use severity predicted an additional 2.5% of the variance, and the final model incorporating sleep quality predicted 23.4% of the who-5 variance. each model has a significant level of less than .05. being male students with healthy perceived physical health predicted increased well-being scores. in contrast, smartphone usage and poor sleep quality increase predict lower well-being scores in indonesian university students. table 1 hierarchical regression analysis predicting student’s well-being predictor step 1 β step 2 β step 3 β step 4 β ba sea tolerancea demographic gender (male) 5.730* 4.630* 3.410 4.450* .111 2.200 .77 age -.905 -.846 -.787 -.718 -.073 .484 .96 health-related perceived health (healthy) 11.910*** 10.980*** 8.360*** .244 1.750 .88 smoking exposure -.819 .888 .712 .015 2.480 .79 smartphone use -.267** -.191* -.121 .081 .89 sleep quality (poor) -10.110*** -.291 1.780 .88 adjusted r2 .018* .135*** .160*** .234*** δr2 .117 .025 .074 *p<.05, il**p<.01, il***p<.001; ila measure iof ilthe illast imodel unadjusted and adjusted regression analyses stratified by participants’ perceived health with sleep quality and smartphone use as the main exposure variables were conducted. in table 2, the models showed a significant effect of perceived physical health on the association between sleep quality, smartphone use, and the well-being of university students. model 2 was adjusted for gender and age. both sleep quality and smartphone use were significantly negatively associated with mental well-being among university students with good humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 165 marella & sameve (the well-being of indonesian university students during the pandemic: smartphone…) perceptions of their physical health (β = -8.92 and β = .303, respectively). sleep quality affects students’ well-being, regardless of their health perceptions, while smartphone use did not influence students with poor perceived physical health (β =.051, p>.05). table 2 associations between main predictors and student’s well-being table 3 presented the general characteristics of the study participants stratified by their smartphone usage. smartphone use severity was categorized into low and high problematic use, using a cutting score of 32 for males and 34 for females from the previous indonesian study (arthy et al., 2019). most of the participants in this study were female students (79.2%) with a mean age of 19.2 years (sd = 1.65). the participants primarily used their smartphones for social networking applications (48.6%) and playing games (38.5%). most students in this study had not been exposed to smoking behavior (85.3%), felt lonely for at least one or two days in a week (79.2%), and had a healthy perception of their physical health (66.1%). the average well-being score in this study is 60.6 (sd=16.2), with higher scores in participants in the low smartphone usage group (69.63, sd=15.19), whereas the average sleep quality score in this study is 7.03 (sd=2.85). there was a significant difference in smartphone use and sleep quality. among 222 participants with poor sleep quality, the high smartphone usage group had a higher percentage than the low group (75% and 62.3%, respectively). on the other hand, most participants with good sleep had low smartphone use. there was no significant difference in the distribution of gender and age between the two groups of smartphone use severity. however, female participants have higher problematic smartphone use than their male counterparts. table 3 the characteristics of the participants by smartphone usage variables model 1 model 2 perceived health perceived health poor good poor good sleep quality -13.360** -8.570*** -14.290*** -8.920*** smartphone use score .014 -.327** .051 -.303** *p<.05, il**p<.01, il***p<.001. il n = 327 smartphone usage effect size cohen's d p low (n=183, 55%) high (n=144, 44%) gender male 68 (20.8) 42 (22.9) 26 (18.1) .279 female 259 (79.2) 141 (77.1) 118 (81.9) smoking exposure yes 48 (14.7) 20 (10.9) 28 (19.4) .031 no 279 (85.3) 163 (89.1) 116 (80.6) perceived health healthy 216 (66.1) 134 (73.2) 62 (43.1) .002 unhealthy 111 (33.9) 49 (26.78) 82 (56.9) sleep quality good 105 (32.1) 69 (37.7) 36 (25) .015 poor 222 (67.9) 114 (62.3) 108 (75) well-being index 60.6 ± 16.20 69.63 ± 15.19 56.34 ± 14.90 .883 < .001 age 19.20 ± 1.65 19.10 ± 1.49 19.25 ± 1.72 .091 .451 166 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) marella & sameve (the well-being of indonesian university students during the pandemic: smartphone …) discussion this study investigated factors associated with the well-being of indonesian university students, mainly in jabodetabek (jakarta, bogor, depok, tangerang, bekasi) areas, a few months after the school closure due to the covid-19 pandemic. based on the cutoff score presented in previous studies, approximately 25% of the total participants had a low wellbeing score, with a mean score lower than 50 (dodd et al., 2021; topp et al., 2015). this finding strengthened previous findings from indonesian studies that revealed modest levels of depression and anxiety among university students in indonesia during the pandemic (soetisna et al., 2021; sujarwoto et al., 2021). the results from the hierarchical regression show a positive correlation between sleep quality and well-being in indonesian college students. this study's average global sleep quality score was higher than the suggested score in prior literature (buysse et al., 1989; herawati & gayatri, 2019; wang et al., 2019). poor sleep quality was found in more than half of the students in this study. similarly, a previous study found that inadequate sleep was more widespread and severely impacted mental health during the pandemic lockdown (franceschini et al., 2020). poor sleep quality affects well-being in both psychosocial and physical aspects. insufficient sleep among adolescents has been associated with mood disturbances (moore et al., 2011), somatic and psychosocial health, school performance, and risk-taking behavior (shochat et al., 2014). this study established a 44% prevalence of suspected severe smartphone use, meaning those with a high risk of smartphone addiction, among indonesian college students during the covid-19 outbreak. smartphone use was also a predictor of university students' well-being, with the well-being score significantly lower in the high smartphone use group than in their counterparts. this association is related to adolescents' social media use since past evidence showed that adolescents mostly use their smartphones to access the internet and social networking sites (buctot et al., 2020; pratama & scarlatos, 2020). previous evidence has established the linkage between social media and internet addiction to mental health status in adolescents. adolescents who spend more time online and on social media platforms are more likely to suffer from anxiety and despair (banjanin et al., 2015; sujarwoto et al., 2021). prolonged social media and internet use may cause adolescents to lose sleep as they linger on their smartphones. on the other hand, sleeping problems may result from their extensive internet use. additionally, other research suggests that sleep disorders may occur due to emotional and behavioral concerns and may contribute directly to the development of internet addiction during adolescence (siste et al., 2021). additionally, a systematic study discovered that individuals who engage in problematic smartphone use face considerably higher risks of poor sleep quality, anxiety, and depression (yang et al., 2020), and limited social media use might cause a small improvement in well-being (graham et al., 2021). age and gender were not significantly related to smartphone use in this study. several studies reported no significant gender difference in smartphone usage (chen et al., 2017; long et al., 2016). others showed significant differences with female adolescents as more vulnerable to problematic smartphone use (emirtekin et al., 2019; randler et al., 2016). nevertheless, it is important to note that female students in this study had higher proportions of severe smartphone use than male students. this result is consistent with similar previous research in indonesia (dewi et al., 2018; dhamayanti et al., 2019). female adolescents often see smartphones as a means of social contact in which messaging and social network apps play prominent roles (arthy et al., 2019; de-sola et al., 2016). voice calls, text messages, and social networks were reported as the most complex applications (roberts et al., 2014). this condition might explain the higher score of severe smartphone use in female students. nevertheless, studies still need to explore the inconsistent prevalence of gender differences in smartphone use severity among studies. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 167 marella & sameve (the well-being of indonesian university students during the pandemic: smartphone…) additionally, the finding shows students with specific characteristics, including poor sleep quality, being exposed to smoking behavior, and having an unhealthy perception of their physical health, are significantly associated with severe smartphone usage. on the other hand, students with good sleep quality who have never been exposed to smoking behavior and had good health perception are associated with low smartphone use. previous research on college students revealed that sleep quality is related to health-related behaviors, including smartphone dependence and nutritional intake, and thus affects physical and mental health (wang et al., 2019). it is worth noting that a few past research found associations between increased smoking risk and vaping behavior with social media exposure through smartphones in college students (massey et al., 2021; shadel et al., 2013). the covid-19 pandemic did cause significant disruptions in higher education. this study's findings have identified several factors to maintain a good level of well-being for university students: how they perceive their physical health, smartphone use, and sleep quality. this finding is expected because the relationship between health and well-being is interchangeable. poor physical health or illness can influence one’s well-being, just as it can influence them (diener et al., 2018). a study of italian adolescents reported a significant increase in average daily smartphone use during the pandemic (serra et al., 2021). people's behavior, particularly that of children and teenagers, may be altered by the covid-19 pandemic to mitigate some of the impacts of the crisis (dong et al., 2020). during social isolation, adolescents may have depended more on smartphones as a source of communication, information, and entertainment than they would have under normal conditions (serra et al., 2021). nevertheless, university students should manage the use of smartphones, regulate and manage their sleep, and improve or maintain physical health (faulkner et al., 2021; serra et al., 2021). students need to pay attention to the length of their screen time and learn to do activities apart from their smartphones or other electronic gadgets. this study invites university officials and lecturers to team up and think up alternative ways of teaching with a suitable balance of proportions between digital and physical aspects of learning. such methods could be even more relevant under the notion of a hybrid learning program as a new way of learning in these ongoing new-normal circumstances. it is important to acknowledge the limitations of the present study that can be used to guide future research. first, this study involved a single demographic, university students; additional research is needed to corroborate our findings in other populations to develop a more comprehensive understanding of youth well-being. this study was conducted during a specific situation, the covid-19 pandemic; therefore should be considered when interpreting the study results. second, it is essential to acknowledge that our sample size was modest, resulting in weaker conclusions. future studies should employ a bigger sample size to increase statistical power. third, it is important to stress that our data were correlational; therefore, no causal implications can be made. fourth, our research did not investigate social network addiction or maladaptive use, which could be a helpful indicator of the possibility that excessive social network use results in problematic behavior. as a result, comparative research in the future should incorporate scales to assess social media addiction or maladaptive use. despite these limitations, this study’s results can be used to formulate a recommendation on how to improve the well-being of young people despite the inescapable use of technology. regulated and controlled technology use is necessary to maintain prolonged usage, especially in young people. knowing the risks of smartphone use and low sleep quality to psychological well-being may raise awareness of wise smartphone usage with minimum health adversity. 168 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) marella & sameve (the well-being of indonesian university students during the pandemic: smartphone …) conclusion this study found the risk factors for indonesian students' well-being during the covid-19 pandemic consist of gender, poor physical health perceptions, sleep problems, and excessive smartphone use. these findings confirmed that physical and mental aspects are essential in youth well-being. suitable physical activities, good sleeping habits, and controlled smartphone use are needed to nurture mental health during home confinement. acknowledgment authors would like to thank lembaga penelitian dan pengembangan kepada masyarakat (lppm) universitas tarumangara for supporting this research. the authors also want to express gratitude to tuan hung ngo (academia sinica) for his willingness to lend his knowledge during the research. most importantly, the authors would like to thank the participants who have agreed to participate in this study and provided generous insight that made this study possible. declarations author contribution. bm designed the study, collected the data, performed the statistical analysis, and wrote the article. ges designed the study and wrote the article. the authors read and approved the final manuscript. funding statement. the funding for this research received from lembaga penelitian dan pengembangan kepada masyarakat (lppm) universitas tarumangara [grant number: 922int-klppm/untar/vi/2021] conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and publication of this article. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references adams, s. k., & kisler, t. s. 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(2020). prevalence and socio-demographic correlates of psychological health problems in chinese adolescents during the outbreak of covid19. european child & adolescent psychiatry, 29(6), 749–758. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-020-01541-4 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11469-021-00582-3 https://www.karger.com/article/fulltext/376585 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0214769 https://www.thejakartapost.com/academia/2019/03/18/how-indonesians-embrace-the-digital-world.html https://www.thejakartapost.com/academia/2019/03/18/how-indonesians-embrace-the-digital-world.html https://www.clinicalkey.com/#!/content/playcontent/1-s2.0-s0165178119317408?returnurl=https:%2f%2flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2fretrieve%2fpii%2fs0165178119317408%3fshowall%3dtrue&referrer= https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00787-020-01541-4 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 20 (1), february 2023, 53-68 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humantias.v20i1.32 adolescents’ mental health during the covid-19 pandemic: do loneliness, family, and online friends matter? ni komang yastri anasuyari, melly latifah, lilik noor yuliati department of family and consumer sciences, ipb university, indonesia corresponding author: yastrianasuyari@apps.ipb.ac.id introduction covid-19 officially became a global pandemic in march 2020 and, a year later, infected millions of people around the world. school and economic shutdowns, until recreation and tourism activities are restricted, have impacted the psychosocial environment of countries worldwide. the lockdown policy to prevent the spread of covid-19 was implemented. although it is only recommended to maintain physical distance, it cannot be denied that every person is at risk of social distance due to the drastic reduction of face-to-face meetings. the current crisis significantly affects every individual's daily life (kowal et al., 2020). a similar condition occurs in indonesia. since the government reported the first case of covid-19 in indonesia in march 2020, every sector of society has changed drastically. along with a physical distancing policy, the ministry of education and culture in indonesia requires that learning activities be carried out online or remotely from home, affecting adolescents' social aspects due to the limited social activities and direct friendships. this condition contrasts with the adolescent instinct to constantly relate and socialize with others (b. b. brown et al., 1986). all the conditions might bring significant change and challenges in adolescents' lives (fong & iarocci, 2021). as the coronavirus attacks the human respiratory system, physical health is the most affected by the covid-19 pandemic (yuki art icle info ab st r act article history received march 5, 2022 revised january 8, 2023 accepted february 22, 2023 the covid-19 pandemic has impacted every element of adolescent life worldwide, including indonesia. this study intended to examine how adolescents' loneliness and mental health during the covid-19 pandemic are affected by their family relationships and online friendships. this study collects data using an online questionnaire. the mental health continuum-short form, the ucla loneliness scale version 3, the brief family relationship scale, and the online friendship scale were used to collect the data. two hundred ninetytwo students aged 12-18 participated in data gathering in jakarta, indonesia, between march and april 2021. descriptive, correlation and structural equation modeling (sem) analyses were conducted using spss 25.0 and lisrel 8.80. this research revealed that family relationships and online friendships had a negative effect on loneliness. family relationships favorably impact adolescent mental health, but loneliness negatively impacts it. furthermore, family relationships and online friendships indirectly affect adolescents' mental health through loneliness. these findings may implement in developing interventions to assist adolescent mental health during the covid-19 pandemic in indonesia. keywords adolescents; family relationship; loneliness; mental health; online friendship. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humantias.v20i1.32 mailto:yastrianasuyari@apps.ipb.ac.id 54 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) anasuyari et al.(adolescents’ mental health during the covid-19 pandemic: do…) et al., 2020). however, this pandemic has also greatly affected mental health apart from physical health (mental health foundation, 2020). accordingly, close attention to adolescents' loneliness and mental health is also needed. adolescents are the most vulnerable age group to receive the negative impact of the covid-19 pandemic related to loneliness and mental health, compared to children or adults age, considering the main tasks of adolescent development are achieved through social interaction with other people (cooper et al., 2021). previous studies reveal that the covid19 pandemic is challenging for adolescents’ loneliness (f. chen et al., 2020; ellis et al., 2020; wang et al., 2020) and mental health (rossi et al., 2020; wang et al., 2020). a pandemic is more than just a medical phenomenon; it affects every aspect of society and causes anxiety, stress, and disorder in every individual (javed et al., 2020). adolescents staying at home, away from their school and peers, can experience social isolation and lack of social contacts, leading to loneliness (loades et al., 2020) that can have short or long‐term consequences on mental health (javed et al., 2020). loneliness is a perception of being alone and isolated; this definition indicates that loneliness is not just a physical separation from other people (tiwari, 2013). loneliness is a painful experience associated with a mismatch between the existing social relationships and the desired one, often described as a state without friends (myers, 2010). a survey of 1,043 respondents found that loneliness among respondents increased by 181% (almost three times) during the pandemic with the existence of physical distancing and self-quarantine policies (huff, 2020). not much different, another survey results stated that since the lockdown period, adolescents are almost three times more likely to experience loneliness, which makes them the most vulnerable age group to experience loneliness (mental health foundation, 2020). while 87% of 2,036 teens and youth ages 13 to 25 experienced loneliness and felt isolated, even though they could still communicate with their friends (youngminds, 2020). when people reach their full potential, work efficiently, manage everyday challenges, and contribute to their communities, they are in good mental health (world health organization, 2004). mental health affects how people think, feel, and behave and includes social, emotional, and psychological well-being (keyes, 2002). happiness and satisfaction are states of emotional well-being; social acceptance and support from the community are examples of social well-being, and positive attitudes toward individual differences and becoming independent are examples of psychological well-being (keyes, 2006). in a recent study conducted in india that children and teenagers aged nine to 18 had felt powerless (66.11%), worried (68.59%), and afraid (61.98%) during this pandemic (saurabh & ranjan, 2020). moreover, in indonesia during the covid-19 pandemic, of the 113 adolescents examined, 38.1% were at risk for peer interaction issues, 28.3% for pro-social behavior issues, and 10.6% for emotional issues (wiguna et al., 2020). most studies concentrate on risk factors, but protective factors are also needed and may be more effective as prevention efforts. feelings of separation from social relationships cause loneliness (de jong-gierveld, 1987; shiovitz-ezra & leitsch, 2010). however, teenagers' perceptions of social support from others may operate as a protective factor for their mental health (fuligni, 2019). therefore, developing quality social ties might be the best way to achieve good mental health and avoid loneliness. therefore, adolescents' loneliness and mental health will be impacted by the quality of their family's relationships, both positive and negative. positive family relationships provide warmth and support from family members, which significantly lowers the risk of loneliness in people of all ages (hombrados-mendieta et al., 2013; stocker et al., 2020) and impact better mental health in adolescents (p. chen & harris, 2019; m. d. johnson & galambos, 2014). the development of adolescence is also dominantly influenced by adolescent interactions with peers. even in a pandemic, adolescents can still build friendships without meeting face to face by utilizing internet technology through online friendship (antheunis humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 55 anasuyari et al. (adolescents’ mental health during the covid-19 pandemic: do…) et al., 2012). online friendship is a type of friendship that occurs in online situations, with the use of online media, including social networks and internet applications. online friendships can occur in two types of pairs of friends (helmi et al., 2017). first, friendships between strangers who meet on social media, then become online friends. second, friendships between friends or relatives who are known or have actually met (offline) and then interact online. adolescents are the biggest social media users to connect with friends (cauberghe et al., 2021). by establishing communication with online friends, adolescents can build desirable interpersonal relationships, reduce the loneliness they experience, and increase their social capital (best et al., 2014; triwidodo & dewi, 2012). adolescence is a crucial period in the life cycle of every individual. therefore, experiencing loneliness and poor mental health, which can adversely affect their personality and behavior in the future, is not expected among adolescents. specifically, this study intends to analyze how family relationships and online friendships affect adolescents’ loneliness and mental health during the covid-19 pandemic, as shown in figure 1. a correlation analysis was also conducted to determine the relationship between demographic characteristics with family relationships, online friendships, loneliness, and mental health in adolescents. figure 1 hypothesized model method research design this study uses an explanatory research design, with survey research, to explain the relationship and influence between variables through hypothesis testing (edmonds & kennedy, 2016). the research was conducted in march-april 2021 in jakarta, indonesia. during the data collection, jakarta began as the province with the highest confirmed cases of covid-19 in indonesia and implemented the public activity restriction policy so that all students were required to stay at home. participants were recruited through school and were contacted via messages to explain the study’s purpose and link to an online questionnaire. the procedures and informed consent were provided on the first page of the questionnaire. this study was ethically approved by the institute of research and community service ethics committee at ipb university number 350/it3.kepmsm-ipb/sk/2021. participants research participants were selected by the cluster random sampling method, starting with selecting two junior high schools and two senior high schools based on data from the dki 56 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) anasuyari et al.(adolescents’ mental health during the covid-19 pandemic: do…) jakarta province education unit. then, the total class was determined from each school, and randomization was performed again to select three classes from each school. all students in the selected class became participants in this study. two hundred ninety-two adolescents aged between 12 and 18 gave consent to participate in this study. table 1 shows among these participants, 73.6% were females, and 26.4% were males. they were middle and high school students from four different schools in jakarta, indonesia. most participants had intact families, while 14% came from non-intact families. table 1 demographic characteristics characteristics n % gender male 77 26.4 female 215 73.6 paternal level of education elementary education 15 5.1 secondary education 123 42.2 tertiary education 139 47.6 maternal level of education elementary education 21 7.2 secondary education 143 49.0 tertiary education 121 41.4 paternal working status employed 260 89.1 unemployed 17 5.8 maternal working status employed 114 39.0 unemployed 171 58.6 family status intact family 252 86.0 non-intact family 40 14.0 family size small family (≤ 4 persons) 147 50.3 medium family (5-7 persons) 142 48.6 big family (≥8 persons) 3 1.0 per capita income (idr)a < idr 683,339.00 84 28.8 ≥ idr 683,339.00 208 71.2 aidr (indonesian rupiah) instruments the data was collected using four instruments; all were administered in indonesian. family relationship was estimated using the modified brief family relationship scale (bfrs) (fok et al., 2014). it consists of 16 items with three subscales: cohesion, expressiveness, and conflict. each item is rated on a 4-point scale from very unsuitable (1) to very suitable (4). the item discrimination index ranged from .322 to .785, with reliability α=.915. online friendship was estimated using the modified online friendship scale (helmi et al., 2017). it consists of 19 items in four subscales: mutual support, voluntariness, companionship, and sharing. online friends might be strangers that people have made on social media or offline pals who also communicate online. participants rate each item on a 6-point scale from never (1) to always (6). the item-total correlation index is between .512 .750, with cronbach’s alpha of .902. loneliness was estimated using the modified ucla loneliness scale version 3 (russell, 1996). it consists of 20 items in three subscales referring to (austin, 1983): humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 57 anasuyari et al. (adolescents’ mental health during the covid-19 pandemic: do…) belonging and affiliation, intimate others, and social others. the items are rated on a 6-point scale from never (1) to always (6). internal consistency was .927 showing strong reliability, while the item discrimination index varied from .457 to .810. mental health was estimated using the modified mental health continuum-short form (mhc-sf) (keyes, 2002). it consists of 14 items in three subscales: emotional or subjective, social, and psychological well-being. each item is rated on a 6-point scale from never (1) to always (6). the item discrimination index ranged from .558 to .779, with cronbach’s alpha value of .870. data analysis processing and data analysis were conducted with ibm spss 25.0 and lisrel 8.80, using 2-tailed tests with a significance level < .05. the scores for family relationships, loneliness, and mental health were indexed and grouped into three categories based on bloom's cut-off point, namely low (<60), moderate (60-80), and high (>80). the statistical analysis used is descriptive, correlation test, and structural equation modeling (sem). descriptive analysis is used to identify each variable's mean and standard deviation. correlation tests were performed to analyze the relationship between demographic characteristics with family relationships, online friendships, loneliness, and mental health. sem is carried out with a confirmatory approach to conduct model estimation and analyze the association between the constructs. in this research model, the subscale acts as an indicator of the latent construct. results the average index of adolescents’ family relationships, online friendships, and mental health is moderate. meanwhile, the average index of adolescent loneliness is in a low category (see table 2). table 2 mean, standard deviation, and percentage of each variable variable category (%) mean sd low (<60) moderate (60-80) high (>80) family relationship 30.5 58.9 10.6 76.9 11.2 cohesion 4.5 45.5 50.0 80.2 11.2 expressiveness 27.1 45.2 27.7 70.9 17.7 conflict 84.2 14.0 1.7 48.9 13.1 online friendship voluntariness 22.9 49.7 27.4 71.8 14.5 mutual support 44.9 40.4 14.7 62.1 17.2 companionship 63.7 33.2 3.1 56.8 14.7 sharing 30.5 55.5 14.0 67.1 14.1 loneliness 62.0 31.8 6.2 58.8 17.8 intimate others 55.1 32.5 12.3 53.6 14.9 social others 71.9 24.0 4.1 54.3 14.5 belonging and affiliation 71.9 24.0 4.1 56.4 14.6 mental health 24.3 60.3 15.4 68.1 12.4 emotional well-being 19.8 58.6 21.6 70.3 13.7 social well-being 31.8 53.1 15.1 67.4 13.4 psychological well-being 26.7 51.0 22.3 67.6 14.2 table 3 presents correlation results between participants' demographic characteristics and all variables studied. adolescent age and gender, maternal working status, and family status were significantly related to family relationships. male adolescents were found to have better family relationships. the older the adolescent, the higher the quality of family 58 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) anasuyari et al.(adolescents’ mental health during the covid-19 pandemic: do…) relationships. teenagers from intact families with unemployed mothers have better family relationships. table 3 correlation analysis participant characteristics correlation coefficient family relationship online friendship loneliness mental health adolescents’ age -.197** .078 .201** -.132* adolescents’ gender (0=male; 1=female) -.122* .130* .241** -.119* fathers’ age .102 .052 -.112 .166** fathers’ education .054 -.004 -.053 .104 fathers’ working status (0=unemployed; 1=employed) .114 -.048 .159** .032 mothers’ age .030 -.070 .014 .053 mothers’ education .027 .012 -.008 .012 mother’s working status (0=unemployed; 1=employed) -.129* .069 .032 .032 family status (0=intact; 1=non-intact) .156** .030 -.159** .146* family size .016 -.028 -.044 .054 income per capita -.050 .003 -.074 .024 *significant at the .05 level; **significant at .01 level (2-tailed) loneliness is impacted by age, gender, father's work status, and family status. female adolescents are more likely to have higher rates of loneliness than males, and it has been found that the older the adolescent, the higher the level of loneliness. teenagers with working fathers and from non-intact families are lonelier. while adolescent mental health is influenced by age, gender, paternal age, and family status. female adolescents have lower mental health than males; the older adolescents are, the worse their mental health becomes. adolescents from intact families have better mental health. figure 2 structural equation model predicting loneliness and mental health the sem analysis results show the model's fit indices were χ2 = 169.14, df = 59, p > .05, rmsea = .08, cfi = .97, and gfi= .91, indicating a good fit to the data. significant path coefficients (95% ci) between the variables are illustrated in figure 2. to simplify the presentation, the model does not show latent variable indicators and error terms. loneliness was the mediator of the relationships between family relationships and online friendships humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 59 anasuyari et al. (adolescents’ mental health during the covid-19 pandemic: do…) with mental health. as predicted, family relationships and online friendships were linked with loneliness, predicting adolescent mental health. the indirect effects of the variables were examined and summarized in table 4. loneliness as an intermediate factor significantly mediated family relationships and online friendships with adolescents' mental health. nonetheless, the direct effect of online friendship on mental health was not statistically significant. however, if comparing the total effect on each path, the direct influence of the lonely variable on mental health is the largest, with a path coefficient value of .71. this finding shows that loneliness is the most dominant variable in influencing mental health compared to family relationships and online friendships. table 4 effects decomposition of factors affecting adolescents' loneliness and mental health variable direct effect indirect effect total effect loneliness 1. family relationship .54* .54* 2. online friendship .39* .39* mental health 1. family relationship .19* .38* .57* 2. online friendship .02 .27* .25* 3. loneliness .71* .71* * significant at the .05 level discussion adolescence is a turbulent period that must be passed, known as a time of stress and storm (casey et al., 2010). since early adolescence, chemical and physical changes in the brain result in a neural mismatch characterized by increased emotions in response to natural and perceived stressors (bailen et al., 2019). but, adolescents face many challenges and opportunities, including building and fostering social relationships and maintaining mental health (p. k. smith, 2016). adolescents are clearly at higher risk for experiencing psychological problems during the pandemic due to adolescent developmental characteristics and the fact that adolescents study online, spend most of their time at home, and are physically separated from their friends (magson et al., 2021). family relationships and online friendships have a significant negative effect on loneliness. loneliness in teenagers can be predicted by less harmonious family connections, characterized by low levels of support, commitment, and openness of expression as well as excessive conflict within the family. adolescents with good family relationships are less affected by physical distancing policies than those with low-quality family relationships, who are more likely to feel lonely during the covid-19 pandemic (orben et al., 2020). quality online friendships are characterized by high mutual support, a sense of community, and sharing activities that reduce adolescent loneliness. through submitted status updates, images, and comments, teenagers can indirectly access their friends through online friendships (skues et al., 2012). adolescents often use social media to express their feelings and frustration to online friends (niederkrotenthaler et al., 2019). this situation makes them feel more connected to others and reduces their feeling of isolation (skues et al., 2012). during this pandemic, it would be good if adolescents had a strong support system, such as family and online friends. on the other hand, it would be different if adolescents' family relationships and online friendships were not supportive; they would easily experience loneliness. long-term feelings of loneliness can predict mental health problems in the long term (pamela qualter et al., 2010). loneliness causes the feeling of being unloved, helpless, worthless, and abandoned (k. smith, 2019). it may be more difficult for 60 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) anasuyari et al.(adolescents’ mental health during the covid-19 pandemic: do…) people who feel lonely to encounter their interpersonal problems; therefore, loneliness might negatively affect self-esteem (yılmaz et al., 2013) and be connected to personal well-being (lyyra et al., 2021). loneliness mediates family relationships and online friendships, and mental health among adolescents. loneliness partially mediated family relationships and mental health and fully mediated online friendship and mental health. it shows that adolescents with poorquality family relationships and online friendships are more likely to feel lonely, causing low mental health. in contrast, adolescents with good family relationships and online friendships tend to feel less lonely and have better mental health. loneliness is a mediator between family functioning (adaptation and cohesion) and the mental health of vocational high school students during the covid-19 pandemic (pan et al., 2021). longitudinal loneliness has also been reported to mediate adolescent mental health and well-being (jose & lim, 2014; pan et al., 2021; pamela qualter et al., 2010). the covid-19 pandemic can positively and negatively affect family relationships and adolescent mental health. teenagers experience anxiety and worry because they fear contracting covid-19, restricted access to facilities like schools and hospitals, and limited social interaction with friends and relatives (fegert et al., 2020). this situation is also very likely to occur in every family member, which can risk causing conflict and worsening family relationships (s. m. brown et al., 2020; fegert et al., 2020; magson et al., 2021). deteriorating the quality of family relationships causes feelings of loneliness in teenagers (pan et al., 2021), leading to low mental health (isumi et al., 2020; pan et al., 2021). furthermore, the pandemic may also positively affect adolescents' mental health. family members who spend more time together may develop stronger cohesion and bonds (fegert et al., 2020). this family relationship can help adolescents reduce fear and stress due to the pandemic, ultimately reducing loneliness (cooper et al., 2021) and positively impacting mental health (s. m. brown et al., 2020; isumi et al., 2020). family systems theory identifies the relationship between family members as an element that plays an essential role in the lives of adolescents (andolfi, 2013; minuchin, 2018). the results showed that the average adolescent family relationship index was moderate. these findings indicate that most adolescents perceive that their family relationships are of sufficient quality, characterized by commitment, support, openness, and low levels of conflict among family members (fok et al., 2014). family relationship is influenced by age, maternal employment status, and family status. the older the teenager, the lower the quality of family relationships. along with increasing age, adolescents become more independent, and communication with parents decreases (parra et al., 2013). families with working mothers were found to have a lower quality of family relationships. working mothers have dual roles: domestic and public. in this condition, mothers often lack time to establish close interactions with family members, especially children (nezhad, 2013). intact families have a better quality of family relationships; however, non-intact families (parents divorced or one of them has died) have a lower quality of family relationships. incomplete or non-intact families (post-divorce) present more communication difficulties, parental conflict, and lower family cohesion than intact families (afifi et al., 2015; h. d. johnson et al., 2001; mcmanus & nussbaum, 2011). nowadays, online friendship is an inseparable part of adolescents' daily life (davis, 2012). especially in the covid-19 pandemic, online friendships can be a solution to sharing or exchanging information, building networks with new people, and maintaining relationships with old friends from the real world without meeting face-to-face (helmi et al., 2017). text messaging and chatting via social media allow adolescents to maintain a sense of connection with one another regardless of their time or physical location (davis, 2012). most adolescents have online friendships in the moderate and high categories, indicating that most adolescents have built quality online friendships through social media. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 61 anasuyari et al. (adolescents’ mental health during the covid-19 pandemic: do…) loneliness is a feeling of discomfort, loss, and dissatisfaction resulting from the incompatibility of desired social relationships with actual social relationships (fry & debats, 2002; perlman & peplau, 1982). four out of ten adolescents experience loneliness in the moderate and high categories, indicating that some adolescents are unsatisfied with their social relationships or cannot achieve the desired ones. several related studies have also reported increased adolescent loneliness during the covid-19 pandemic (f. chen et al., 2020; ellis et al., 2020; wang et al., 2020). female adolescents experience higher levels of loneliness, similar to the result of previous research (bayat et al., 2021; goosby et al., 2013; lee & goldstein, 2016). girls spend more time building social relationships and are more sensitive to a lack of support from friends and family (lee & goldstein, 2016). loneliness is impacted by age, the father's work status, and family status. adolescents feel more lonely as they get older. a study on loneliness in adolescents and adults found loneliness increases from early adolescence (age 13 years) to the mid-20s (von soest et al., 2020). adolescents to young adults are vulnerable to loneliness because of the instability of their social network; this can be related to physical changes and self-identity exploration that can make adolescents vulnerable to exclusion (p. qualter et al., 2013; pamela qualter et al., 2015). adolescents with working fathers had higher rates of loneliness. working fathers are less able to be optimally involved in children's activities because they have low control over work schedules (mcmunn et al., 2017; shows & gerstel, 2009). adolescents from non-intact families experienced higher loneliness. in the case of families with divorced parents, adolescent loneliness results from parental conflict and low family cohesion (h. d. johnson et al., 2001). divorce causes changes in the family structure, increasing the risk of emotional tension between parents and adolescents (kalmijn, 2013; wallerstein et al., 2013). most participants' mental health is in the moderate category. it indicates that some adolescents are already sufficiently well-off emotionally, socially, and psychologically, thus enabling them to cope with life's stresses, realize their potential, and contribute to their community (world health organization, 2004). adolescent mental health is characterized by age, gender, paternal age, and family status. adolescent girls have lower mental health. during a pandemic, women suffer a more significant psychological impact and higher levels of stress and anxiety (wang et al., 2020), thus consistently being associated with a higher risk of low mental health (p. chen & harris, 2019; liu et al., 2020; rossi et al., 2020). the older the teenager and the older the father, the better the adolescents’ mental health. in line with these findings, younger individuals have a bigger chance of developing mental health problems (rossi et al., 2020). during a pandemic, adolescents face stress and anxiety (wang et al., 2020). uncertainty and fear of declining academic achievement also negatively affect the mental health of adolescents who are also students (wang et al., 2020). the older the father's age, the better adolescents' mental health. adolescents with intact parents have better mental health than adolescents with divorced or deceased parents. families with both biological parents provide better developmental outcomes for adolescents with the assumption that parents carry out their functions as a source of emotional support, practical assistance, guidance, and supervision (amato & keith, 1991). the implications of this study's findings may be implemented for developing programs and policies regarding adolescent well-being in indonesia. adolescents still had high levels of loneliness (6.2%) and low mental health (24.3%). therefore, directly educating adolescents on maintaining mental health stability during the covid-19 pandemic is needed. educational activities can involve youth directly as ambassadors or volunteers to educate their fellow youths. during the pandemic, educational activities can be packaged in various methods and approached online, such as holding webinars and competitions or sharing audio-visual information through social media. adolescents must have an adequate support system to reduce loneliness and improve adolescent mental health. good quality family relationships have been shown to reduce loneliness and better predict mental health in adolescents. families can strengthen emotional 62 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) anasuyari et al.(adolescents’ mental health during the covid-19 pandemic: do…) bonds, commitment, and support between family members. families can create an atmosphere that supports open expression, warm interactions, and assertive communication to make adolescents feel accepted and understood by other family members. parents can empathize with adolescents. parents need to maintain a positive family atmosphere by responding patiently to each adolescent’s complaints and understanding his feelings. therefore, coaching and guidance to adolescents' families are also needed. so parents can gain better knowledge and skills to provide appropriate care for adolescents, leading to harmonious family relationships. based on the result, quality online friendships can reduce loneliness in adolescents. even if adolescents cannot meet face-to-face with their peers, they can use existing technology to stay connected. however, it must be ensured that the online friendships built positively impact adolescents. parents can provide encouragement and guidance so adolescents can choose online friends or be involved in good online communities. adolescents can promote positive activities with their peers, such as studying together or participating in extracurricular or talent interest clubs at or outside of school online. this research still has some limitations that can be considered for further improvement. first, the absence of observations of all research variables before the covid-19 pandemic made this study unable to comprehensively identify the particular effects of the covid-19 pandemic on all variables. second, the sample used in this research is relatively small and demographically constrained. therefore, caution is needed in generalizing the study results, given the differences in covid-19 cases and the different policies for restricting community activities from the government in each region. future research can be carried out in a broader demographic area, covering rural and urban areas. conclusion loneliness emerged as a mediator between family relationships and online friendships in adolescents` mental health. adolescents with unqualified family relationships and online friendships are more likely to experience loneliness, resulting in poor mental health. on the other hand, adolescents with good family relationships and online friendships tend to feel less lonely, which translates into better mental health. these findings should be considered when developing interventions to support adolescent mental health during the pandemic in indonesia. so there will be more indonesian youth who realize their potential, work productively, and contribute to their communities. acknowledgment the authors wish to thank the principals of all the schools who have given permission to conduct the research. we also thank the respondents who participated in this research and all of the lecturers and staff of the department of family and consumer sciences, faculty of human ecology, ipb university. declarations author contribution. nkya conceived the presented idea, performed the computations, and wrote the draft. ml verified the theory and supervised the findings. lny verified the analytical methods and supervised the findings of this work. nkya, ml, and lny discussed the results and contributed to the final manuscript. funding statement. the authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and publication of this article. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 63 anasuyari et al. 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(2020). covid-19 pathophysiology: a review. clinical immunology, 215, 108427. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clim.2020.108427 https://youngminds.org.uk/media/3708/coronavirus-report_march2020.pdf https://youngminds.org.uk/media/3708/coronavirus-report_march2020.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clim.2020.108427 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 19 (1), february 2022, 51-66 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://dx.doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i1.6 the consequence of workplace incivility among it employees: workplace stress or organizational citizenship behavior? narayanan annalakshmi, philip roshni, sanjay abhirami, pant udita department of psychology, bharathiar university, india corresponding author: narayanan.annalakshmi@buc.edu.in introduction workplace incivility refers to the exchange of what appears to be insignificant insensitive words and actions that typically go against the traditional norms of how individuals should conduct them in the workplace (c. pearson & porath, 2009). it is understood as a global problem that affects employees across multiple professions (schilpzand et al., 2016). those who observe incivility tend to have a negative reaction towards instigators, but their reactions towards the targets remain unchanged (reich & .hershcovis, 2015). various international studies (cortina et al., 2001; c. pearson & porath, 2009; torkelson et al., 2016) and asian studies (d’cruz & rayner, 2012; lim & lee, 2011; yeung & griffin, 2008; zhang et al., 2018) have reported that most of the employees experience a shade of incivility at their workplace. the present study will provide insight into how psychological factors and workplace incivility can affect workplace stress and ocb, all of which have implications for the employee as well as the organization. incivility may arise from different sources, including supervisors, coworkers, and even clients or customers. supervisor incivility is the low-intensity aberrant behavior by supervisors to harm the subordinate with unclear intention to violate the standards for mutual respect prescribed in the workplace (andersson & pearson, 1999). coworker incivility denotes the uncivil behaviors instigated by individual coworkers, such as hurtful remarks, rude emails, shunning, and gossip (reio, t. g. & sanders-reio, 2011). customer incivility art icle info ab st r act article history received september 11, 2021 revised february 14, 2022 accepted february 17, 2022 the impact of the work environment on employees has been well researched, with little focus on the pathways of such relationships. this study aimed to examine whether workplace incivility and personality predict workplace stress and organizational citizenship behavior (ocb). the role of john henryism (jh), probabilistic orientation (po), work self-efficacy, and resilience on workplace stress and ocb was also explored. the data were collected through a survey using self-report measures of perception of fair interpersonal treatment in the workplace, workplace incivility, work self-efficacy, jh, po, workplace stress, and ocb from 206 (m=120, f=86) employees from the it industry, aged 22 to 42 (m=30.47, sd=5.60). multiple regression analyses revealed that workplace incivility (from supervisor and client) positively predicted workplace stress. at the same time, coworker incivility did not predict workplace stress. on the contrary, workplace incivility (supervisor, coworker, and clients) did not predict ocb significantly. jh and work self-efficacy positively predicted ocb, while po negatively predicted ocb. this research provides new directions for future research that workplace stress is predicted by supervisor and client incivility, and ocb is not predicted by workplace incivility. keywords organization citizenship behavior; probabilistic orientation; workplace incivility; workplace stress. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://dx.doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i1.6 mailto:narayanan.annalakshmi@buc.edu.in 52 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) annalakshmi et al. (the consequence of workplace incivility among it employees: …) indicates deviant behaviors of low-intensity performed by someone who is a client or customer that reflects unclear intent to hurt an employee and violates social norms of courtesy and mutual respect (sliter et al., 2010). incivility develops a toxic workplace which causes problems among the employees like depression (lim & lee, 2011), stress (adams & webster, 2013; beattie & griffin, 2014), poor memory recall (porath & erez, 2007), low affective trust (cameron & webster, 2011), intense aggressive behaviors (blau & andersson, 2005; c. m. pearson et al., 2000), depletion in job performance (blau & andersson, 2005; porath & erez, 2007; rhee et al., 2017; schilpzand et al., 2016), and low job satisfaction (cortina et al., 2001; lim et al., 2008; lim & cortina, 2005; wilson & holmvall, 2013). thus, incivility affects the overall well-being of the employees and the organization. a previous study found that workplace incivility contributes to job stress (shabir et al., 2014). john henryism, for instance, refers to expending high effort in the context of prolonged exposure to stress as a form of coping (james et al., 1983). john henryism (jh) refers to a strong behavioral predisposition to actively cope with psychosocial and environmental stressors (angner et al., 2011; james, 1994; james et al., 1983). researchers have found that african americans may use jh to face psychosocial stressors (james, 1994; james et al., 1983). jh is related to various lifestyle risk factors for cancer (van loon et al., 2001). moreover, men employed in lower rank professions who were high on jh had significantly higher risks of acute myocardial infarction, even when adjusted for age (mujahid et al., 2017). also, jh served as a protective factor against ptsd in intimate partner violence experienced by white women (kramer et al., 2015). jh can influence how one perceives and responds to workplace stress. organizational citizenship behaviors (ocb) refer to behaviors voluntarily performed by employees that contribute to an organization as a system to satisfy its functions systematically (organ, 1988, 1990). workplace incivility can result in employees perceiving that the social exchange relationship they shared with their organization is damaged, resulting in poor ocb (taylor et al., 2011). research on workplace aggression and abusive supervision also has found that higher workplace mistreatment results in less ocb in employees (greitemeyer & rudolph, 2003; zellars et al., 2002). merely attending to or observing workplace incivility events can result in employees engaging in less ocb (porath & erez, 2009). incivility also negatively speculates individuals’ ocb (mao et al., 2019). in a work context, self-efficacy is an essential antecedent of motivation. studies show that individuals high on self-efficacy are more optimistic and determined about their ability to reach goals by applying their knowledge to specific tasks (bandura, 1997; chen et al., 2004). self-efficacy and stress are two concepts that are connected. individuals differ in how they perceive external demand or pressure, with some perceiving them as a threat while others perceiving them as a challenge. it is found that those who have high self-efficacy beliefs tend to perceive such external demands as a challenge instead of seeing them as threats (chemers et al., 2001; pintrich & de groot, 1990). there is a significant negative correlation between job stress and self-efficacy among psychiatric nurses' (el-azzab et al., 2019; zaki, 2016). self-efficacy controls the stress-strain association (grau et al., 2000). those with high job self-efficacy and increased accountability have an increased incidence of ocb (royle et al., 2005), and general self-efficacy positively predicted citizenship behaviors in men (beauregard, 2012). resilience refers to the dynamic capacity of the system to successfully adapt to conditions challenging its development, viability, and sustenance (masten, 2013). it is indicated by positive outcomes despite being exposed to factors that increase one’s vulnerability (carlton et al., 2006; tiềt & huizinga, 2002). nowadays, there is an increasing interest in how employees in the business world manage the challenges they face in their workplace (badran & kafafy, 2008; caverley, 2005). few studies have reported a positive relationship between employee resilience and ocb (paul et al., 2016; sari & wahyuni, 2019). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 53 annalakshmi et al. (the consequence of workplace incivility among it employees…) resilience is a phenomenon that indicates positive adaptation in the face of challenges or adversity. however, it may also be possible that a resilient individual, in the context of workplace incivility, may respond to it by positive behavior like organizational citizenship behavior (ocb). probabilistic orientation (po) represents a personality orientation indicating a neutral locus of control (annalakshmi, 2021; narayanan, 1977). several studies have shown that po is associated with mental health, wellbeing, and resilience (annalakshmi, 2004; priya, 1997; usha, 2005). also, the relationship between po and perceived self-efficacy is mediated by ego-resiliency (annalakshmi, 2020). personality factors like jh, self-efficacy, resilience, and po can affect workplace stress and ocb. the rationale for the present study is that since individual factors and one’s experience in the workplace can influence individual and organizational outcomes, it may be worthwhile to examine how certain personality factors and workplace incivility experiences influence outcomes like workplace stress and ocb. civility at the workplace helps create a favorable working environment for the employees and thus aids in forming a stable and productive organization. workplace incivility grows up as a harmful habitat for employees to work, developing various physical and mental health problems. hence, studying the factors associated with workplace incivility, workplace stress, and ocb deserves urgent attention, owing to its potential consequences on individual employees and the organization. the present research examines the relationship between workplace incivility and certain personality factors on the one hand and certain outcome variables like workplace stress and ocb on the other end. specifically, the study examines the effect of personality factors (john henryism, work self-efficacy, po, and resilience) and workplace incivility on two outcome variables, namely, workplace stress and ocb. specific to the current study, we operationalized work incivility in two ways: (a) the level of interpersonal fairness perceived by employees in their organization and (b) employee perception of unfair behavior or treatment by supervisors, coworkers, and customers. it is hypothesized that personality factors included in the study will positively predict ocb and negatively predict workplace stress. further, it is also hypothesized that workplace incivility will positively predict workplace stress and negatively predict ocb. these hypotheses are tested in the study. method research design a quantitative research design was adopted for the study, and the data was collected from it employees across india via an online survey. the researchers sought permission from the company officials to collect the data and obtained informed consent from the participants before giving the survey. participation in this study was entirely voluntary, and the data was collected in an anonymized manner. participants the study was conducted on 206 it professionals (120 men and 86 women) aged 22-42 years (m=30.47, sd=5.60). the mean number of years of work experience was 7.50 years (sd=4.24), and the mean number of years worked in the organization there were serving during this study was 5.13 years (sd=3.36). the participants were recruited from kochi, bangalore, coimbatore, chennai, kolkata, and delhi it-based industries. out of this, 74.3% of participants worked for multi-national companies (mnc), and 25.7% were from private organizations. a brief description of the sample is presented in table 1. 54 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) annalakshmi et al. (the consequence of workplace incivility among it employees: …) table 1 description of participants no variable percentage 1 marital status single 49.0% married 41.2% divorced 6.4% engaged 3.4% 2 religion hindu 78.3% christian 16.7% muslim 2.0% did not identify with any religion 3.0% 3 community fc/oc 61.2% bc 28.6% mbc .5% sc 2.4% did not disclose 7.3% 4 place where most parts of their life were spent city 39.9% metro cities 33.8% small towns 20.2% rural area 6.1% 5 education professional degree 39.8% bachelor’s degree 38.8% master’s degree 21.4% 6 position manager 18.9% senior analyst 36.9% analyst 28.2% data operator 4.4% web developers 5.3% consultants 6.3% note: fc, bc, mbc, and sc are categories currently recognized by the government of india as categories based on a historical hierarchy of caste in india to promote representation of the various equity groups in education and employment. instruments perceptions of fair interpersonal treatment scale (donovan et al., 1998). this 18-items scale purports to measure employees' perceptions of the fairness of interpersonal treatment in their work environment. specifically, the scale assesses an employee's perceptions of how their supervisors and coworkers in their organization treat them. the scale is composed of two subscales, supervisor and coworker treatment. the respondents are asked to rate each experience related to their workplace using a five-point rating scale, ranging from 0 (never) to 4 (many times). a sample item from the scale is "employees are treated with respect.” the cronbach's alpha for the scale on the present sample is.75. workplace incivility scale (cortina et al., 2001). this scale measures uncivil behaviors from supervisors, coworkers, and customers. the scale consists of 3 subscales: supervisor incivility (7 items), coworkers incivility (7 items), and customer incivility (5 items). the respondents are asked to rate each experience related to their workplace using a five-point rating scale, ranging from 0 (never) to 4 (many times). a sample item from the supervisor incivility subscale is "your supervisor made demeaning or derogatory remarks about you.” a sample item from coworker incivility is “your coworker addressed you in unprofessional terms, either publicly or privately.” a sample item from customer incivility is “your humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 55 annalakshmi et al. (the consequence of workplace incivility among it employees…) customers/clients doubted your judgment on a matter over which you have responsibility.” the cronbach’s alpha for the scale on the present sample for the supervisor incivility, coworker incivility, and customer incivility are .85, .90, and .86, respectively. the cronbach’s alpha for the overall scale is .93. john henryism active coping scale (james, 1994). this scale is a 12-item scale that measures active coping. the scale intends to capture predisposition toward active, high-effort coping with psychosocial and environmental stressors. the respondents are asked to rate each experience related to their workplace using five response options, ranging from 0 (completely false) to four (completely true). a sample item from the scale is “when things don't go the way i want them to, that makes me work even harder.” the cronbach's alpha for the scale on the present sample is .84. probabilistic orientation questionnaire (poq) (narayanan, 1977). the poq consists of 30 items that purport to measure the phenomenological personality orientation of the respondent. a short form of poq consisting of 14 items from the original scale was used in this study. the respondents are required to indicate their agreement with the items using a 'yes' or 'no' response. a sample item from this scale is “event by themselves are just neutral ones; we only label them ‘‘good luck’’ or ‘‘odd-luck.” the cronbach's alpha for the scale on the present sample is .68. workplace stress survey (american institute of stress, 1998). the scale consists of 10 items that assess the workplace stress of the subject. the respondents are asked to rate each item using a 5-point rating scale, ranging from 0 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree). a sample item from this scale is “most of the time, i feel i have very little control over my life at work". the cronbach's alpha for the scale on the present sample is .76. work self-efficacy scale (wsec) (avallone et al., 2007). the original scale consists of 10 items that assess perceptions regarding specific work domains. however, only the first nine items were selected for this project. since item 6 and item 10 were pertaining to working with others and were overlapping, only item number 6 was included. the respondents are asked to rate each item using a 5-point rating scale, ranging from 0 (not at all) to 4 (very well). a sample item from this scale is “thinking of future work, how well can you finish assigned work.” the cronbach's alpha for the scale on the present sample is .86. organizational citizenship behavior checklist (ocb-c) (fox et al., 2011). the scale aims to measure the frequency of citizenship behaviors at the workplace. only ten items from the 20 items of the checklist that were most relevant to the culture and context of the sample in the present study were selected for use in this study. the respondents are asked to rate each item using a 5-point rating scale, ranging from 0 (never) to 4 (always). a sample item from the scale is “how often have you done this in your present job volunteered for extra work assignments." the cronbach’s alpha for the scale on the present sample is.87. bharathiar university resilience scale (burs) (annalakshmi, 2009). the 30-items scale purports to measure the resilience of an individual. only ten items from the original 30 items scale were selected for this study. the respondents are asked to rate each item using a 5-point rating scale, ranging from 0 (strongly disagree) to 4 (very well). a sample item from this scale includes “i always seek people and opportunity to overcome my difficulties and grow up". the cronbach’s alpha for the scale on the present sample is .75. procedure a link to the online survey was shared via google forms to potential participants working in it companies, requesting them to share it with their contacts in the field. the researchers have also circulated a few questionnaires by visiting various it companies. data analysis ibm spss statistics version 21 was used to do the data analysis. a one-way anova, correlations, and hierarchical multiple regressions were used to analyze the data. 56 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) annalakshmi et al. (the consequence of workplace incivility among it employees: …) results a one-way anova was carried out to examine the gender differences with regard to study variables. it was found that males and females differed on interpersonal fair treatment [f (1,204) = 5.97, p < .05], supervisor incivility [f (1,204) = 5.30, p< .05], coworker incivility [f (1,204) = 12.56, p< .05] and overall incivility [f (1,204) = 8.50, p< .05] respectively. males [m = 26.23, sd = 8.46] were found to have higher scores on interpersonal fair treatment than females [m = 28.95, sd = 6.98]. females [m = 7.95, sd = 5.22] were found to have higher scores on supervisor incivility than males [m = 6.14, sd = 5.81]. also, females [m = 7.58, sd = 5.64] were found to have higher scores on coworker incivility than males [m = 4.79, sd = 5.52]. in addition to that, females [m = 19.51, sd = 12.51] have higher level of overall incivility than males [m = 14.06, sd = 13.74]. in sum, males reported higher levels of interpersonal fair treatment than females. females reported higher levels of supervisor incivility and coworker incivility than males. in addition to that, females have higher level of overall incivility than males. no significant gender difference was found on clients incivility [f (1,204) = 2.01, p > .05], john henryism [f (1,204) = .06, p > .05], probabilistic orientation [f (1,204) = .01, p> .05], workplace stress [f (1,204) = .13, p> .05], work self-efficacy [f (1,204) = .14, p> .05], organizational citizenship behavior [f (1,204) = .00, p> .05] and resilience [f (1,204) = 1.55, p> .05] respectively. it is interesting to note that males and females did not differ on any of the personality factors or outcome variables included in this study. they also did not differ with regard to clients’ incivility. two hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine the unique contribution of independent variables on the dependent variables, viz., workplace stress and organizational citizenship behavior, respectively. variables are entered as follows: gender, interpersonal fair treatment, supervisor incivility, coworker incivility, client incivility, john henryism, probabilistic orientation, work self-efficacy, and resilience. the results are presented in table 2 and table 3. table 2 hierarchical multiple regression analysis to predict workplace stress variables model 1 model 2 model 3 b β b β b β constant 19.21*** 14.12*** 17.4*** gender -.33 -.030 -1.32 .10 -1.03 -.08 interpersonal fair treatment .09 .11 .07 .08 supervisor incivility .28** .25 .23* .20 coworker incivility -.02 -.02 .03 .03 clients incivility .34** .22 .28* .19 john henryism -.03 -.04 probabilistic orientation -.14 -.06 work self-efficacy -.15 -.13 resilience .17 .14 r2 .001 .21 .24 f .130 10.86*** 6.83*** ∆r2 .000 .21*** .03 ∆f .130 13.53*** 1.63 *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 57 annalakshmi et al. (the consequence of workplace incivility among it employees…) table 3 hierarchical multiple regression analysis to predict organizational citizenship behavior variables model 1 model 2 model 3 b β b β b β constant 25.41*** 30.2*** 10.88* gender .02 .000 .62 .04 .53 .03 interpersonal fair treatment -.18* -.19 -.05 -.06 supervisor incivility .06 .05 .11 .08 coworker incivility -.08 -.06 -.25 -.19 clients incivility -.01 -.01 .17 .10 john henryism .19* .19 probabilistic orientation -.50** -.17 work self-efficacy .38** .26 resilience .16 .09 r2 .001 .04 .25 f .001 1.65 7.41*** ∆r2 .001 .04 .21*** ∆f .001 2.07 14.06*** *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001 hierarchical multiple regression was run to determine if the addition of interpersonal fair treatment, supervisor incivility, coworker incivility, clients incivility, john henryism, probabilistic orientation, work self-efficacy, and resilience improved the prediction of workplace stress over and above gender. a total of 24% variance in workplace stress was accounted for the predictor variables [δr2= .03, f (9,196) = 6.83, p < .001]. model 2 variables (interpersonal fair treatment, supervisor incivility, coworker incivility, clients incivility) contribute an additional 21% of the variance in workplace stress [r2= .21, f (5,200) = 10.86, p < .001]. model 3 variables (gender, interpersonal fair treatment, supervisor incivility, coworker incivility, clients incivility, john henryism, probabilistic orientation, work selfefficacy, and resilience) accounted additionally 3% of the variance on workplace stress [δr2= .03, f (9,196) = 6.83, p < .001]. hierarchical multiple regression was run to determine if the addition of interpersonal fair treatment, supervisor incivility, coworker incivility, clients incivility, john henryism, probabilistic orientation, work self-efficacy, and resilience improved the prediction of organizational citizenship behavior over and above gender. a total of 25% variance in organizational citizenship behavior was accounted for the predictor variables [δr2 = .21, f (9,196) = 7.41, p<.001]. model 2 variables (interpersonal fair treatment, supervisor incivility, coworker incivility, clients incivility) contribute an additional 4% of the variance in organizational citizenship behavior [r2 = .04, f (5,200) = 1.65, p< .001]. model 3 variables (gender, interpersonal fair treatment, supervisor incivility, coworker incivility, clients incivility, john henryism, probabilistic orientation, work self-efficacy, resilience) accounted additionally 21% of the variance on organizational citizenship behavior [δr2 = .21, f (9,196) = 7.41, p< .001]. discussion recent years have seen a surge in the number of employees in the it industry. with a growing ratio of male and female employees, the preliminary analysis in the present study examined the gender differences in workplace incivility, workplace stress, and ocb. the results of the present study show that males perceived significantly higher interpersonal fair treatment but lower supervisor incivility, coworker incivility, and overall incivility than females. the results go in line with the findings of previous studies. female employees report more 58 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) annalakshmi et al. (the consequence of workplace incivility among it employees: …) workplace incivility than males (andersson & pearson, 1999; cortina et al., 2001, 2013; gabriel et al., 2018; smith et al., 2021; young et al., 2021), especially supervisors (clay, 2013; hu & liu, 2017; hurst et al., 2017) and coworker incivility. whether this may be due to women being perceived as less threatful who may not retaliate and soft targets needs to be examined in further studies. it is also found that supervisor incivility and client incivility positively predicted workplace stress. supervisor incivility will trigger workplace stress in employees. likewise, substandard behavior of clients (sliter et al., 2010), unnecessary work overload, negligence of supervisors also can be a source of work-related stress (lim et al., 2008). further, supervisor incivility has a significant negative effect on the value congruence of the employees besides its influence on employees’ stress and recovery (jiménez et al., 2015). workplace incivility is more pervasive than abusive behavior in high-context cultures (liu et al., 2019). thus, supervisor incivility could lead to a host of negative factors, including high workplace stress. the present study also found that client incivility was positively predicting workplace stress. customer incivility was positively related to emotional job demands and burnout experienced by employees, and coworkers' incivility was also positively related to burnout (kim & qu, 2018). the employees are under pressure to meet the client’s demands. hence, client incivility can significantly influence employees’ perceived workplace stress. further, work self-efficacy negatively predicted workplace stress in the present study. this finding is in line with findings of previous studies (dijk, 2009; prahara & indriani, 2019). employees who are confident in executing the course of action to manage a wide range of work situations may experience less workplace stress. interestingly, workplace incivility did not predict ocb significantly in the present study. this finding is contradictory to previous research findings. workplace incivility had significant indirect effects on ocb mediated through burnout (liu et al., 2019) among employees from different types of industries. the findings related to workplace incivility and ocb in this present study could be attributed to the professional context of the participants who are from the it industry. we hypothesized that workplace incivility would negatively predict ocb since those subjected to workplace incivility may try to give it back to others by not engaging in ocb. however, the present study's finding related to workplace incivility shows that it did not predict ocb. it is possible that in the it industry, the employees who experience workplace incivility do not respond to it by engaging in incivil behavior avoiding ocb but may be responding to it in different ways. it is also possible that the relationship between workplace incivility and ocb is not a straightforward one; rather, it may be mediated by several potential factors like work engagement (jawahar & schreurs, 2018). all internal factors are chosen in the present study, john henryism (jh) and work selfefficacy significantly positively predicted ocb, while probabilistic orientation (po) negatively predicted ocb. a negative relationship is shared between stress and ocb (soo & ali, 2017). hence, individuals with higher active coping may adapt well and engage in ocb. previous studies have also found self-efficacy positively influenced ocb (anfajaya & rahayu, 2020; pratiwi & nawangsari, 2021), and those engaging in approach coping demonstrate higher levels of ocb (lilly & virick, 2013). self-efficacy has a positive effect on employee engagement, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction, all of which can, in turn, positively influence ocb (na-nan et al., 2021). in the present study, it was hypothesized that those high on po would also report higher levels of ocb. however, it is intriguing to note that we found a negative relationship between po and ocb. po reflects a neutral locus of control (narayanan et al., 1984), and the factors of po may be more relevant to an individual coping than interpersonal relationships. further studies may be needed to understand the dynamics involved in the relationship between po and ocb. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 59 annalakshmi et al. (the consequence of workplace incivility among it employees…) there was no significant difference between males and females on the clients' incivility they reported. the study is on it employees, where gender may not play a prominent role compared to other industries. it is plausible that clients' behavior towards employees in the it sector may depend more upon the competency and work efficiency of the individual, with gender playing a minimal role. no gender difference is observed on jh and po in the present study. it indicates that irrespective of gender, expending high levels of effort to cope with the stressors and accumulating physiological costs is the same for all employees. however, a study has found that gender moderated the relationship between behavioral disposition of jh and blood pressure (dressler et al., 1998), and this contradicts the finding of the present study. further research is required to understand how gender influences jh. po reflects matured personality and a worldview that enables individuals to understand the big picture instead of getting lost in minute details. it reflects an outlook that helps individuals perceive all outcomes with equanimity. in this study, there is no gender difference in po, both genders included in the study were given to po at similar levels. this study has no gender difference in workplace stress and work self-efficacy. it indicates that whatever be the stressor, the stress experienced by individuals depends on how they perceive the event and not on the gender of the person. certain studies (geller & hobfoll, 1994) have reported that women and men experience similar levels of work stress. in contrast, some studies have found that women experience higher levels of work stress than men (antoniou et al., 2006; michael et al., 2009), while others report that men experience higher levels of stress than women (loosemore & waters, 2004; rivera-torres et al., 2013). however, the present study's findings did not show any gender difference in workplace stress. as the present study participants were from the it industry, where mental competence matters more than physical competence, gender may not have a significant role in workplace stress. the same factor, i.e., the nature of work in the it industry, may be used to explain the lack of gender difference in work self-efficacy. it was also found from the present study that there is no gender difference in ocb. this finding implies that ocb depends on each individual's voluntary commitment towards an organization and is not predicted by gender. previous studies have shown that altruism and civic virtue lead to work self-efficacy, ultimately leading to engagement in ocb (shahidi et al., 2015), and perception of organizational justice also leads to ocb (moorman, 1991). in addition, studies have indicated that organizational involvement, task orientation, and altruistic behavior are contributors to ocb (turnipseed, 1996), and resilient individuals also show responsibility and ownership, which predicts ocb (paul et al., 2016). psychological factors rather than gender appear to influence ocb. with regard to resilience, the present study found no significant gender difference. it may indicate that despite any gender, people can bounce back from a threatening or stressful situation. this finding is supported by other studies (bezek, 2010). however, a few studies have identified that women reported lower resilience than men (erdogan et al., 2015; hirani et al., 2016). it is interesting to note that while men scored higher on resilience than women, the association was not significant when trauma type was controlled (portnoy et al., 2018). though the present study has some significant findings, the study also has a few limitations that need to be duly acknowledged. first is the use of self-report measures for collecting data. there is a possibility for social desirability bias in the study, which cannot be ruled out entirely. second, as it is an online survey, participants may try to provide answers to present themselves favorably. they may also feel bored or exhausted while doing the survey online on their own. also, a qualitative study can provide better insight as it can provide more elaborated information to describe complex matters. in practical terms, the study provides a sense of urgency for an empirical investigation of workplace incivility. it also highlights the importance of gender as a factor in organizational behavior-related studies. from the study, organizations can understand the importance of applying suitable od interventions to create an effective work environment 60 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) annalakshmi et al. (the consequence of workplace incivility among it employees: …) and nurture positive personality characteristics of the employees. if the management exhibits fair interpersonal treatment, their employees will be committed to the organization's goals, which will lead them to display positive employee actions. management needs to epitomize the behaviors they want their employees to take on. higher active coping (jh) and work selfefficacy of the employees should be boosted by offering professional development opportunities and self-management training, which would help them cope effectively with situations that cause stress. however, more studies are required to understand the relationship dynamics between po and ocb. conclusion findings of the present study indicate that females are more vulnerable to workplace incivility than males. females specifically faced higher supervisor and coworker incivility than males. therefore, it is important to address these issues efficiently and empower women to ensure the sustainable development of society and remove gender inequality. however, workplace incivility did not predict ocb significantly. john henryism and work self-efficacy positively predict ocb, while probabilistic orientation negatively predicts ocb. references adams, g. a., & webster, j. r. 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encompassing satisfaction on multiple levels, positive beliefs about life, and a greater experience of positive emotions than negative ones (diener et al., 2013). it refers to an overall assessment of an individual's quality of life-based on internal standards, such as life satisfaction and positive and negative emotions. people define happiness by subjective evaluation or liking of their life (hitokoto & uchida, 2014). however, most agreed that happiness is characterized by relative permanency, a predominately pleasurable emotion that ranges in value from simple satisfaction to profound joy in living and a natural desire for its continuation. thus, happy individuals usually have pleasant feelings and are generally satisfied with their life (hitokoto & uchida, 2014). happiness manifests itself differently across different cultures. individuals have unique paths to attain happiness in every cultural context, as personal value varies regarding what is considered good or bad (uchida & oishi, 2016). in indonesia, its cultural diversity results in various perspectives on happiness. for example, the toba batak culture recognizes happiness associated with having numerous male offspring (hutapea & suleeman, 2018). derived from suryomentaraman's philosophy, happiness for javanese is characterized as a state of peace, comfort, absence of conflict, freedom from unfulfilled desires, and liberation from attachments (nashori et al., 2013). in javanese culture, happiness is believed to be achieved article info abst ract article history received march 20, 2022 revised february 17, 2023 accepted may 23, 2023 javanese, with their unique values, behaviors, and habits, represent the largest population among the many ethnicities in indonesia. they adhere to specific values to maintain happiness in their lives, namely narima (acceptance) and rila (compliance). these values have psychological significance as they encompass resilience and the ability to regulate emotions. furthermore, from a psychological perspective, resilience and emotion regulation play crucial roles in shaping the happiness of the javanese population. therefore, this study explores the relationship between emotion regulation, resilience, and happiness among the javanese population. 250 javanese from east java and the special region of yogyakarta were involved in this study. this study utilized the interdependent happiness, resilience, and emotion regulation scales. the findings showed a significant relationship between resilience, emotion regulation, and happiness among javanese. both independent variables accounted for 51.8% of the happiness experienced by the participants. therefore, these findings shed light on the psychological processes and mechanisms underlying happiness among javanese. keywords emotion regulation; happiness; javanese; resilience. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v20i2.42 mailto:taufik_yunanto@staff.ubaya.ac.id 150 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) yunanto (happiness in the javanese context: exploring…) through the adherence to six principles known as the sa principles, namely sabenere (in accordance with reality), sauntunge (as necessary), samestine (as it should be), sakpenak'e (appropriately), and saperlune (as required). according to javanese beliefs, it is believed that happiness resides within an individual who leads a balanced and mindful life (muthia & isbah, 2022). one famous javanese proverb, mangan ora mangan sing penting ngumpul, highlights the importance of social interactions with loved ones, prioritizing social bonds over fulfilling basic needs such as eating. similarly, in sundanese culture, happiness is attained through living a virtuous life, avoiding excess, preserving nature, leading a calm and peaceful existence, attaining glory, peace, independence, and striving for perfection in the afterlife (sumpena, 2012). from the above description of cultural perspectives on happiness in indonesia, it can be inferred that individuals derive happiness from cultivating positive relationships with those around them. this condition aligns with values in the collectivist culture, in which individuals are more likely to derive happiness from fitting into their environment and culture and having positive relationships than from autonomy and independence (matsumoto & juang, 2016) and fosters strong integration from birth, with individuals remaining loyal and caring for one another in their lives (beugelsdijk & welzel, 2018). in this study, the participants were primarily javanese, the largest ethnic group in indonesia (sahrah & yuniasanti, 2020). starting with the majority can benefit from understanding the concept of happiness in indonesia. javanese culture is enriched with prominent values such as narima (acceptance), sabar (patience), waspada-eling (self-awareness), andap asor (humility), prasaja (down-to-earth) attitudes (nashori et al., 2013). furthermore, javanese culture also incorporates teachings in the form of piwulang, specifically aimed at women, emphasizing attitudes of obedience, wholeheartedness, narima (respectfulness), and friendliness towards their husbands. given these distinctive characteristics of javanese culture, exploring the concept of happiness among the javanese population becomes even more fascinating. three javanese individuals were interviewed as a preliminary step in this study. one important finding that emerged was that various life changes require individuals to adapt to achieve happiness. javanese individuals face challenges such as familial issues influenced by their cultural values, difficulties establishing relationships with others, and adjusting to environmental habits (ruswahyuningsih & afiatin, 2015). developing resilience is crucial for confronting life's challenges (hodges, 2017) as it is considered a self-defense mechanism that enables individuals to modify their responses in risky and critical situations at different stages of development (infurna & luthar, 2016). resilience is an individual's ability to rise from stressful situations and then adapt to challenging conditions, facing life's challenges positively (pigaiani et al., 2020). in addition, resilience can be interpreted as a person's ability to adapt to change, adversity, illness, and hardship (helton & smith, 2004). resilience is based on a person's ability to face, accept, and change the difficulties that have been and will be encountered at every stage of human development (pigaiani et al., 2020). it can also improve and maintain an individual's quality of life. on the other hand, resilience is the ability to face challenges and bounce back after difficult experiences (herrick et al., 2014). resilience can be seen as an essential aspect of supporting the stability of an individual's state of happiness in life (infurna & luthar, 2016). seven resilience factors are self-efficacy, empathy, problem analysis skills, impulse control, optimism, and emotion regulation (schueller et al., 2015). someone resilient can control behavior, emotions, and attention when dealing with any issue. in the javanese concept, resilience is characterized by patience, rila, and narima (acceptance) (ruswahyuningsih & afiatin, 2015). past research among javanese adolescents found that personal abilities of adolescents influence the attitude and behavior of javanese resilience (i am) in the form of cognitive skills, feelings of being loved and valuable, selfhumanitas: indonesian psychological journal 151 yunanto (happiness in the javanese context: exploring…) confidence, steadfastness, problem-solving, and the ability to make good use of their resilience resources (i have) as social support, namely family, peers. in addition, external assets, including religious and environmental factors (neighbors), also enable them to have the ability (i can) to overcome stress, depression, bad experiences, and past trauma and rise to improve themselves with positive and independent strength (ruswahyuningsih & afiatin, 2015). happiness is also determined by individuals' ability to regulate their emotions. emotion regulation enables individuals to use emotion regulation strategies to reduce the influence of negative emotions and generate positive emotions, particularly when facing challenges and difficulties. past research found that those with high emotional regulation are likely to experience happiness (chen et al., 2022). in the javanese adolescent context, emotion regulation is believed to maintain harmony and serves as an attempt to avoid conflict (adiyanti et al., 2020), which closely relates to happiness. maintaining a good relationship with others entails working together, receiving and understanding each other, staying calm, and emphasizing unity. a harmonious attitude means avoiding conflict while maintaining relationships with others, thereby enabling quality relationships (adiyanti et al., 2020). according to previous studies, successful emotion regulation has several adaptive outcomes, including better psychological health and a higher level of well-being (hitokoto & uchida, 2014). it enables individuals to effectively harness their emotions, facilitating better coping and goal achievement (wood et al., 2020). on the other hand, emotion regulation can have negative impacts, such as difficulty in solving problems as well as disruptions in social relationships and concentration (prout et al., 2019). emotion regulation involves managing and expressing feelings appropriately and can also be interpreted as a dynamic balance through attitudes and behaviors. it is an intrinsic part of emotional response, encompassing multifaceted attempts to influence emotions' nature, magnitude, and duration through heterogeneous actions (wood et al., 2020). effective and successful emotion regulation flexibly utilizes strategies targeting positive and negative emotions (gross, 2013). limited studies examined the relationship between emotion regulation and happiness in the javanese population. previous studies primarily focused on the relationship between emotion regulation and subjective well-being. emotion regulation is typically defined as how people influence their emotions, including what and when they feel and how emotions are experienced and expressed (wood et al., 2020). it affects the dynamics, speed, and duration of emotional occurrences. furthermore, it has an impact on behavior, experience, and physiology. emotion regulation can reduce, strengthen, or maintain positive or negative emotions based on the individual’s current goals (gross, 2013). interestingly, emotion regulation and resilience are closely related because emotion regulation regulates psychological processes such as problem-solving and attention when a person reaches a resilient state (mcguirk et al., 2018). however, studies that examined these three variables, specifically in the javanese context, have not been found. previous studies revealed both resilience and emotion regulation were related to subjective well-being and were also closely associated with happiness (mcguirk et al., 2018). therefore, it is hypnotized that there is a relationship between emotion regulation and resilience toward happiness in the javanese population. method research design a quantitative method with a correlational design was applied in this study. emotion regulation and resilience are predictors in this study, while happiness is the criterion. 152 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) yunanto (happiness in the javanese context: exploring…) participants this study was conducted on the javanese population, and the inclusion criteria for participants were individuals of javanese ethnicity, of any gender, and self-identified as having a javanese ethnic background. table 1 shows 250 early adulthood javanese between 20-35 years (56% female, mage=25) participated in this study. data were collected using convenience sampling by directly contacting participants and disseminating information through social media platforms such as instagram, whatsapp, and line. participants who expressed their willingness to participate were asked to complete an informed consent form and a questionnaire presented online through a google form. table 1 participants’ demographic data category frequency % sex male 110 44.0 female 140 56.0 age 20-25 143 57.2 26-30 58 23.2 30-35 49 19.6 region east java 130 52.0 special region of yogyakarta 120 48.0 instruments the interdependent happiness scale (ihs) (hitokoto & uchida, 2014) was adapted for this study. the scale comprised nine items that were designed to assess the happiness of individuals who are relationally oriented, quiescent, and ordinary (e.g., ".i believe that i and those around me are happy"), which were translated from english to indonesian, then backtranslated from indonesian to english. afterward, a pilot study was conducted, and items were then analyzed. the results obtained nine items with a total item correlation coefficient ranging from .351 to .547, ensuring that the scale had an alpha coefficient of .881. the second scale used in this study was a resilience scale (vaishnavi et al., 2007) that was adapted and modified (hermaleni, 2012). the scale consisted of 19 that assessed individuals’ ability to adapt to new situations, be flexible, process changes, and have expectations. the scale's reliability with internal consistency showed a cronbach's alpha value of .931 with items correlation index range from .636 to .884. (hermaleni, 2012). the third was the adapted emotion regulation scale (gross, 2013). this scale included context selection, situation modification, changes in attention focus, cognitive changes, and response modulation. the reliability test of the scale showed an alpha coefficient value of .733, indicating that the scale was regarded as reliable. item analysis of the 20 statement items administered to 94 respondents produced 18 acceptable items, with a total item correlation range from .327 to .479. the item numbers of the test results were rearranged before being utilized in the actual study. data analysis multiple regression was applied to analyze the data in this study. the stepwise method determined the predictors with the highest correlation with the dependent variable. this method identifies which resilience or emotion regulation correlates with happiness and determines each variable's significant contribution. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 153 yunanto (happiness in the javanese context: exploring…) results the regression analysis results revealed that both resilience and emotion regulation accounted for 51.8% of the variation in happiness (r = .713, r2 = .518, f(.243) = 102.898; p< .001) (table 2). the partial analysis showed that both resilience (ß = .620; p < .001) and emotional regulation (ß = .383; p < .001) significantly correlated with happiness. specifically, resilience contributed 30.3%, and emotion regulation contributed 21.5% to happiness. table 2 result of multiple regression variables unstandardized coefficient ß standard error standardized coefficients beta f t p constant .928 3.385 102.898 .243 <.001*** resilience .620 .043 .583 8.768 <.001*** emotion regulation .383 .032 .344 4.248 <.001*** note: *** p < .001; ** p < .01; * p < .05 furthermore, each aspect of resilience and emotion regulation aspect was examined to determine its contribution to happiness. table 3 shows the results of the multiple regression analysis on the resilience variable, revealing that only the aspect of having expectations has a significant impact on happiness (r = .677; r2 = .488; f(4,235) = 49.339; p < .001). table 3 result of multiple regressions analysis: aspects of resilience on happiness variables unstandardized coefficient standardized coefficients beta t p ß standard error constant 2.464 4.382 .343 .732 adapt to new situations .718 .433 .173 1.878 .065 flexible -.083 .362 -.013 -.243 .882 process of change .465 .348 .122 1.240 .156 have expectation 2.537 .329 .504 7.326 <.001*** note: *** p < .001; ** p < .01; * p < .05 the analysis of the emotion regulation variable showed that only the cognitive changes contributed significantly to happiness. table 4 presents the results of multiple regression for each aspect of emotion regulation on happiness (r = .530; r2 = .344; f(2,235) = 44.589; p < .001). table 4 result of multiple regression of aspect of emotion regulation toward happiness variables unstandardized coefficient standardized coefficients beta t p ß standard error constant 32.361 3.282 9.843 <.001*** situation selection .156 .172 .079 .962 .342 situation modification .013 .151 .043 .157 .455 changes in attention focus .335 .352 .011 .223 .235 cognitive changes 1.021 .223 .446 4.531 <.001*** response modulation .454 .356 .214 .177 .366 note: *** p < .001; ** p < .01; * p < .05 154 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) yunanto (happiness in the javanese context: exploring…) discussion the results showed emotion regulation and resilience significantly predict happiness among javanese in early adulthood. both resilience and emotion regulation were positively correlated to happiness. moreover, resilience and emotion regulation simultaneously accounted for 51.8% of happiness among javanese. these results support the proposed hypothesis, confirming a tested relationship between resilience, emotion regulation, and happiness. therefore, the higher the resilience among the javanese, the higher their happiness and vice versa. also, the higher the emotion regulation among the javanese, the higher their happiness and vice versa. every human has a way of finding happiness, depending on their culture (compton & hoffman, 2019). the conditions affecting a person's happiness were from individual and collective cultures (diener et al., 2013). moreover, the positive potential of happiness is influenced by culture (schueller et al., 2015). the current study showed that resilience and emotion regulation were personal sources contributing to individual happiness among javanese. this finding is in line with a previous study that found that javanese characteristics associated with resilience and emotional regulation, such as self-acceptance, positive social relationships, and ability to adapt to the environment, were related to happiness (ruswahyuningsih & afiatin, 2015). this study also aligns with a previous finding that resilience and emotion regulation significantly predict happiness (prout et al., 2019). resilience plays a crucial role in fostering happiness within individuals, while emotion regulation facilitates positive emotional experiences and contributes to personal happiness (csikszentmihalyi, 2014; dwiwardani et al., 2014). individuals with effective emotion regulation skills tend to experience positive emotions daily (adiyanti et al., 2020). individuals who showed resilience and emotion regulation also exhibited social support, prosocial behavior, optimism, and happiness (chopik et al., 2019). consequently, these factors play a crucial role in promoting personal flourishing. resilience and emotion regulation contribute to an individual's flourishing by fostering personal growth, positive relationships, and engagement with the broader community (bono et al., 2019). resilience and emotion regulation facilitate the experience of positive emotions, which, in turn, have a significant impact on social relationships. social connections are considered a psychological aspect contributing to happiness (taormina, 2015). moreover, resilience significantly contributed to the high happiness levels among the javanese population. these results align with a previous finding that the javanese community, a multicultural society, can experience happiness through resilience (dwiwardani et al., 2014). the community exhibits greater resilience when faced with life problems, as they tend to reflect on them. a previous study also shows how javanese actively undertake selfimprovement activities in response to challenges. javanese resilience was characterized by their ability to explore positive emotions and utilize their resilience resources (ruswahyuningsih & afiatin, 2015). consequently, it can be understood that javanese display resilience by reflecting on problems and perceiving the positive aspects. individuals who exhibit resilience in the face of challenges tend to achieve complete happiness within themselves (wiese et al., 2018). resilience among javanese stems from individual efforts and social support rooted in their strong collectivist culture. following the findings, a collaborative environment is instrumental in fostering happiness in the daily lives of javanese. javanese have a cultural value expressed by the phrase mangan ora mangan sing penting ngumpul, emphasizing the importance of coming together and sharing meals. as an implication for the javanese community, it is crucial to establish a positive environment and foster mutual support through various activities that promote a sense of togetherness, thereby cultivating resilience in individuals. social support and resilience play an equally significant role in fostering subjective well-being among individuals (kong et al., 2021). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 155 yunanto (happiness in the javanese context: exploring…) the results of this study showed that specific aspects of resilience, that is, having expectations, significantly predicted happiness. having expectations refers to the condition where individuals navigate life's challenges with an optimistic outlook, maintaining hope for the future and believing in their aspirations (dwiwardani et al., 2014). expectations are essential for individuals as they fluctuate depending on the situation and circumstances. those who are optimistic about life are more likely to experience happiness according to their perspective (taormina, 2015). the current study showed a relationship between aspects of emotion regulation, namely cognitive changes that predict the happiness of javanese. cognitive changes occur when individuals alter their judgments regarding the emotional significance of a situation, adapting their thinking about the circumstances. javanese individuals with effective emotion regulation tend to feel lighter when dealing with problems and avoid excessive rumination, reflecting the concept of rila in javanese culture. in line with the aforementioned arguments, when individuals can accept and willingly embrace situations that cannot be changed, they experience a sense of calmness and minimize the adverse effects they might otherwise experience. these results align with a previous study; when javanese experience stress or pressure from challenges, they tend to shift their thinking toward narima ing pandum (acceptance) to maintain their happiness (ruswahyuningsih & afiatin, 2015). this principle emphasizes the importance of accepting one's fate. narima implies recognizing one's uniqueness and not feeling jealous of others, as javanese believe that god has ordained the course of human life (pradanta et al., 2015). this mindset prepares javanese for any potential in life, enabling individuals to be better equipped. for different situations, facilitating adaptability and increased happiness (wiese et al., 2018). the concept of narima is similar to the concept of gratitude. gratitude encompasses emotion, cognitive activities, and attitudes (ma et al., 2013). when individuals can express gratitude, it gives them a right to positive emotions, cognitive processes, and perspectives. evaluating positive experiences increases the likelihood of positive evaluations and enhances happiness. for future studies, it is important to investigate the role of resilience and emotion regulation in happiness within a larger population, considering more region-specific details. this study is particularly relevant given that central java and east java have the largest javanese populations, with central java alone accounting for approximately 34 million people (sofianto, 2021). each region exhibits different javanese cultural characteristics, as seen in central and east java (wijayanti & nurwianti, 2010). however, this study did not delve into the depth of the role of cultural aspects in predicting happiness. therefore, future studies are expected to explore the role of cultural appreciation in predicting happiness, potentially utilizing open questionnaires. this study did not consider external factors such as religiosity, despite javanese being known for their strong sense of community and religious devotion (budiasmoro, 2014). conclusion resilience and emotion regulation have a significant role in happiness in javanese. specifically, in the context of javanese, this study framework confirmed that adapting to new situations, being flexible, embracing change, and having expectations should be accompanied by the role of cultural aspects. this condition will enable individuals to lead a positive life through situation selection, modification, changes in attention focus, cognitive changes, and response modulation. when examining the aspects of resilience individually, only the aspect of having expectations contributed to happiness. in relation to emotion regulation, only cognitive change contributed to happiness. therefore, the javanese are expected to develop 156 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) yunanto (happiness in the javanese context: exploring…) the aspects of having expectations and cognitive change, as these factors can contribute to their happiness. acknowledgment the authors would like to thank the research assistant of this research, who helped collect data and all of the participants who participated in this study. declarations author contribution. tary, as the single author, established the research topic, collected data, analyzed data samples, produced the report, and editing. funding statement. any funding mechanism does not support this study. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references adiyanti, m. g., nugraheni, a. a., yuliawanti, r., ragasukmasuci, l. b., & maharani, m. 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(2020). social support networks among young men and transgender women of color receiving hiv pre-exposure prophylaxis. journal of adolescent health, 66(3), 268–274. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2019.08.014 http://lingua.soloclcs.org/index.php/lingua/article/view/25 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10879-019-09423-w https://doi.org/10.1007/s10879-019-09423-w https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2014.920405 https://doi.org/10.22435/jek.v20i2.4731 https://doi.org/10.15575/idajhs.v6i1.329 https://doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.1964 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpr.12103 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2007.01.006 https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12322 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2019.08.014 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 19 (1), february 2022, 13-22 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://dx.doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i1.8 self-adjustment phenomena among high school students: the role of coping strategy and parenting style alif muarifah1, intan hashimah mohd hashim2, dian ari widyastuti1 1guidance and counseling study programme, universitas ahmad dahlan, indonesia 2school of social sciences, universiti sains malaysia, malaysia corresponding author: alif.muarifah.uad@gmail.com introduction high school students need to have self-adjustment to minimize the negative impacts of the issues they face (turashvili & turashvili, 2015). self-adjustment helps maintain positive relationships between individuals and the environment over time and in various situations (hidayah, 2021) and the extent to which individuals engage in intelligent social behavior and adapt to social context directly (moritsugu et al., 2016). therefore, they are more satisfied contributing to their social role (mudhovozi, 2012), fostering prosocial behavior, establishing a positive friendship, decreasing aggressive behavior and social anxiety (ryan & shim, 2008). failure in self-adjustment leads to depressive disorders due to environmental stress and behavioral disorders characterized by mood changes such as being short-tempered, sad, easily offended, and aloof (ladd & parke, 2021). based on the importance of self-adjustment described earlier regarding personal and social impacts for high school students, it is essential to explore the factors contributing to self-adjustment. coping strategy as an internal factor may contribute to self-adjustment. an individual with a coping strategy can manage critical situations and adjust to the stressful environment (turashvili & turashvili, 2015). a coping strategy is an effort to address the adverse event and minimize stressors (folkman & moskowitz, 2004). the coping strategy includes searching for information, preparing for an action plan, looking for social support, and art icle info ab st r act article history received october 14, 2021 revised january 28, 2022 accepted february 9, 2022 self-adjustment is one of the social skills that individuals urgently need. self-adjustment helps individuals build social relationships positively with others, groups, and their environment. this study aimed to explore the factors that influence self-adjustment, both internal and external factors. participants in this study were 116 grade xi high school students in yogyakarta selected with proportional random sampling. the instruments in this study were the self-adjustment scale, problemfocused coping scale, emotional-focused coping scale, authoritarian parenting style scale, authoritative parenting style scale, and permissive parenting style scale. multiple linear regression was used to analyze the data. the findings indicate highly significant relationships between coping strategies, parenting style, and self-adjustment. afterward, the result shows that every parenting style (authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive parenting style) and both coping strategies (problemfocused coping and emotion-focused coping) contributed to selfadjustment. for practical implications, any programs designed to promote positive self-adjustment among adolescents may focus on internal factors, such as coping strategy and parenting style as external factors. keywords coping strategy; high school student; parenting style; self-adjustment. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://dx.doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i1.8 mailto:alif.muarifah.uad@gmail.com 14 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) muarifah et al. (self-adjustment phenomena among high school students…) controlling emotion (c. s. carver & connor-smith, 2010). lazarus and folkman (1984) classified coping strategies into two: problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping. previous research among university students points out that problem-focused coping plays a significant role in late adolescents’ self-adjustment and becoming administrators in student organizations (semaraputri & rustika, 2018). problem-focused coping is an effort to change the situation that causes problems focuses on tasks or actions that can eliminate or improve problems (carroll, 2020). problem-focused coping aims to solve problems by creating positive attitudes (stephenson & delongis, 2020). emotional-focused coping controls the emotional response to the demand of the situations (lenz, 2010). emotional-focused coping is emotion-based coping with settling stressful relationships between individuals and the environment (biggs et al., 2017; compas et al., 2001). emotional-focused coping involves distracting attention or avoiding to keep away from a problem (biggs et al., 2017). the benefits of emotional-focused coping are helping individuals to cope with emotions through cognitive processes such as rejection, withdrawal, and dissociation in uncontrolled situations (corbin et al., 2013). individuals will use emotional-focused coping when a problem is perceived to be out of control; minimizing the negative impact is to stay away from threats and eliminate negative feelings that make them feel better (hager & runtz, 2012). the most decisive environmental factor in helping high school students is family (wardani & setyawan, 2020). in the high school students’ age, individuals are more selfreliant and decrease their dependency on parents. however, legally, they are bound to parents, and their parents still support the basic needs in life. parents are the main contributors in instilling social skills to adapt to social contexts outside the family (scharf et al., 2011). selfadjustment is highly connected to parenting style (kim & chung, 2003; turner et al., 2009). the parenting type applied by parents will determine the development of an individual’s social competence (berger & mclanahan, 2015). empirical studies by some researchers found a relationship between parenting style with the development of an individual’s selfadjustment in all development domains and across all developmental periods (bornstein, 2013; zakeri & karimpour, 2011). parenting styles are classified into authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive (d. baumrind, 2013). ahmad et al. (2020) convey a correlation between parenting style (authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive) and self-adjustment among junior high school students. nonetheless, the research result did not reveal differences in the relationship of each type of parenting with self-adjustment. there are still certain shortcomings in which the role of each parenting style on self-adjustment has not been addressed entirely (ahmad et al., 2020). the authoritative parenting style is parenting that prioritizes the needs and abilities of individuals by applying the demands of maturity according to the age of individual development (kuczynski, 2002). the authoritative parenting style, also known as democratic parenting, demands responsiveness on children (h. wang, 2014). parents with an authoritative parenting style will support children’s quality in their age by setting standards to shape positive behavior in the future (ahn, 2019). this parenting style requires parents to recognize the developmental needs of the children and maintain a positive relationship between parents and child by guiding their children warmly respectfully, using an excellent communicative style while promoting collective control, standards, power, and rational expectations. the authoritative parenting style between parents and children accepts the twoways concept in which both parties are considered to influence their behavior and self-attitude (d. baumrind, 2013). authoritarian parenting style is a parenting style that is demanding but unresponsive (d. baumrind, 2013). parents with an authoritarian parenting style try to control children's behavior and attitudes following an absolute standard set unilaterally; parents fully influence children's attitudes and behavior (d. baumrind, 2013). authoritarian parenting is not always humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 15 muarifah et al. (self-adjustment phenomena among high school students…) dangerous for families. for example, in certain regions, especially asian-americans, authoritarian parenting is seen as caring for and giving attention to children (ahn, 2019). permissive parenting styles are child-centered, with higher warmth and low control (mehrinejad et al., 2015). the permissive parenting style uses freedom to enforce routines or shape children’s behavior; when children make mistakes, parents understand rather than punish them (smetana, 2010). parents with permissive parenting styles are more tolerant, not demanding, and accept the child's learning conditions and outcomes (biggs et al., 2017). self-adjustment is an essential psychological attribute for high school students. this study examined the external and internal factors that influence self-adjustment, given the importance of self-adjustment. it sets to answer the following two research questions: 1) what type of coping strategy is more dominant in increasing self-adjustment? 2) what parenting style is more effective in increasing self-adjustment? method participant one hundred and sixteen (116) students from two public and two private high schools in yogyakarta participated in this study. participants were selected through the proportional random sampling technique by establishing several criteria: students of grade xi, age ranged between 16-18 years, having both parents still alive, mother's education must be at least high school, and mothers have permanent jobs. instrument a likert model scale was used to collect data on self-adjustment, authoritarian parenting style, authoritative parenting style, permissive parenting style, problem-focused coping, and emotional-focused coping. the self-adjustment scale has indicators of objective thinking, sense of humor, responsibility, responsiveness, and satisfaction reflected in the theory of selfadjustment by some experts (achenbach, 1995; carey, 1998; schneiders, 1964). the results of the field trial analysis on the self-adjustment scale resulting 39 items with a reliability coefficient (α) = .947 and discrimination index ranging from .657 to .718. the scale of the problem-focused coping is reflected by the active indicators of coping, planning, suppression of competing actives, restraint, seeking social support. emotionalfocused coping is reflected by indicators of escapism, minimization, self-blame, positive judgment (aldwin & revenson, 1987; charles s. carver et al., 1989; lazarus & folkman, 1984). the reliability analysis on problem-focused coping obtained a coefficient of α = .933, while on emotional-focused coping, α =.842. forty-six items were used as a research instrument based on the analysis results. the authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive parenting style scale emphasizes the elements of the indicators of discipline, control, reinforcement, and problem-solving (d. baumrind, 1989; hurlock, 1978; g. s. pettit et al., 1997; a. russell, 1997). the reliability analysis results on each parenting style scale obtained α = .783 for the authoritarian, α = .917 for the authoritative, and α = .504 for the permissive. the discrimination index on the scale of authoritarian parenting style, authoritative parenting style, and permissive parenting style ranged from .625 to .696, .638 to .719, and .647 to .705, respectively. forty items were used as a research instrument based on the analysis results. data analysis data in this study were analyzed by parametric statistics using spss 19.0 software for windows. multiple linear regression techniques were applied to determine the role of each parenting style and coping strategies toward self-adjustment. 16 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) muarifah et al. (self-adjustment phenomena among high school students…) results the role of authoritative parenting style, authoritative parenting style, permissive parenting style, problem-focused coping, and emotion-focused coping to self-adjustment can be seen in table 1. the results showed the r square = .992, f = 1.4377 with a significance level of p = .000. these results indicate that parenting styles and coping strategies simultaneously contribute to self-adjustment. the contribution generated by all variables to self-adjustment is 99.2%. tabel 1 major hypothesis test variable r r square f value sig conclusion problem focused coping; emotional focused coping, authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive on selfadjustment .996 .992 1.4377 .000 significant table 2 shows the role and contribution of each independent variable to self-adjustment without controlling other independent variables. all independent variables showed a significance level of p = .000, meaning that each parenting style: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive, and each coping strategy: problem-focused coping and emotional-focused coping have a significant role in self-adjustment. based on the zero-order correlation, the correlation between problem-focused coping and self-adjustment is slightly higher than that of emotion-focused coping. while in the three parenting styles, the highest correlation is found between authoritative parenting style with self-adjustment, followed by authoritative and permissive parenting, respectively. table 2 minor hypothesis test variable zero-order beta t value sig conclusion problem focused coping .953 1.040 10.219 .000 significant emotion focused coping .929 1.067 9.962 .000 significant authoritarian .801 1.238 8.589 .000 significant authoritative .810 1.224 8.686 .000 significant permissive .789 1.257 8.461 .000 significant discussion this study discusses self-adjustment in students from public and private high schools in yogyakarta. the findings of this study indicate that coping strategy and parenting style are significant contributors to the self-adjustment of high school students in yogyakarta. although conducted in different research and cultural settings, the results of this study are consistent with the results of the previous studies, which found coping strategies are essential and influential predictors in predicting adolescent self-adjustment (noor et al., 2016). coping strategies facilitate an individual’s self-adjustment (rahat & i̇lhan, 2016), increase optimism, problem-solving abilities, and individual environment control (baqutayan & mai, 2012 ). this study examines two coping strategies: problem-focused and emotional-focused coping in predicting self-adjustment ability. both strategies are essential and contributed significantly to self-adjustment for our sample. problem-focused coping is related to modifying and solving problems; these efforts aim to manage emotional distress (cho et al., 2013). individuals with problem-focused coping will develop strategic planning that can change unpleasant situations; if the strategy is deemed ineffective or does not work well, humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 17 muarifah et al. (self-adjustment phenomena among high school students…) individuals will ask for suggestions or innovative solutions that involve social support (aqeel et al., 2017). individuals will consistently re-evaluate what has happened and what can be done to manage the situation to be more effective (lazarus & folkman, 1984). these are some processes that explain the importance of problem-focused coping on self-adjustment. previous studies found a significant role of emotion-focused coping in self-adjustment. emotion-focused coping can simplify the way individuals respond to the demands (skinner et al., 2003). the goal of emotion focus coping is to reduce negative emotions, manage feelings of distress, and deal with stress symptoms (smith et al., 2007). individuals with emotion-focused coping can be demonstrated by avoidance and wishful thinking (mccabe et al., 2004). individuals will avoid all responsibilities or demands that are felt beyond their capabilities (okanli et al., 2016). the use of emotion-focused coping effectively leads to psychosocial adjustment (dennison et al., 2009). this study found the role of parenting style in predicting high school students’ selfadjustment. a series of previous studies have investigated the various positive effect of each parenting style on the process of instilling and developing self-adjustment skills (c. mckinney et al., 2011). conformity in adopting parenting styles can optimize the selfadjustment ability of the adolescent (cliff mckinney et al., 2014). every individual has different characteristics and environmental situations, so do the parents; they have different parenting styles (c. mckinney et al., 2011). this study applied three parenting styles: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. the authoritative parenting style has a slightly higher contribution than the authoritarian and permissive parenting style. this research result reveals that the authoritative parenting style positively contributes to self-adjustment, implying that the more authoritative parents apply, the higher the self-adjustment of high school students. this research result is aligned with steinberg et al. (2013) that an individual with authoritative parenting has better selfadjustment, social, and academic levels. parents with authoritative parenting carried out their control in more flexible ways. parents try to direct a child's behavior using applied rules and standards conforming to social norms. the control applied with discussion strategy. the authoritative parents use a child-centered communication style; parents will spare some time to discuss and explain their decisions that need to be agreed upon (pilarinos & solomon, 2017). this study found that authoritarian parenting style positively correlates with selfadjustment among high school students in yogyakarta. the research result is different from the previous research by dwairy, marwan, fayad & benyaqoub (2013) and varma et al. (2018), conveying that the authoritarian parenting style negatively affected teenage selfadjustment because it is deemed too strict and not warm. however, this parenting style did not inflict any danger to mental health (dwairy et al., 2006). on the other hand, this research result is also aligned with dwairy, achoui, abouserie, & farah (2006), explaining that parents who implement authoritarian parenting use the concept of self-discipline in instilling social values. understanding social values will ease a person to adjust to the environment. this understanding builds positive behavior that corresponds to the norms expected by society or the environment (chao & tseng, 2002). subsequently, this research result shows that the permissive parenting style provides a positive role in self-adjustment. this statement can be interpreted as the more permissive parenting applied, the higher self-adjustment of high school students. this tendency is because the interaction between children and parents continues. the permissive parenting style provides warmth, emotional support, and freedom to explore (wischerth et al., 2016), which later benefits shape a child's creativity and responsibility. on the other hand, when an individual has good emotional support and gets the trust from the closest people, that person is prone to increase their self-adjustment (d. wang & fletcher, 2016). our research has limitations, such as the amount of research subject and the school type only limited to high school. it needs to do further research on other types of high school, such 18 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) muarifah et al. (self-adjustment phenomena among high school students…) as vocational high school, religious teaching-based high school, or boarding school. further research also may examine family factors influencing self-adjustment, aside from parenting style. conclusion coping strategies and parenting styles influence the self-adjustment of high schools students. in general, problem-focused coping contributes slightly higher than emotional-focused coping in self-adjustment. whereas among the three parenting styles, the authoritative parenting style has the highest contribution to self-adjustment, followed by the authoritarian and permissive parenting styles. therefore both coping strategies and parenting styles are essential in influencing self-adjustment. for practical implications, any programs designed to promote positive self-adjustment among high schools students should focus on internal and external factors. references achenbach, t. m. 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(2011). parenting styles and self-esteem. procedia social and behavioral sciences, 29, 758–761. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.11.302 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s1877042811027637 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 20 (1), february 2023, 11-20 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humantias.v20i1.208 resipatisme: a psychoeducation to reduce the tendency of klithih behavior in adolescents detty putri pratiwi oktavia1, nur azmi zulhida1, laila rachim1, ahmad affan2, wulan suci fitrianingsih1, sri kushartati1 1faculty of psychology, universitas ahmad dahlan, indonesia 2faculty of literature, culture, and communication, universitas ahmad dahlan, indonesia corresponding author: sri.kushartati@psy.uad.ac.id introduction the special region of yogyakarta is one of the regions in indonesia famous for its diverse culture and the friendliness of its citizens. many local and foreign tourists make yogyakarta the primary destination for their visit during the holidays. in addition, yogyakarta is dubbed the city of students because many prestigious schools and universities are the leading destinations for young people in the archipelago to study. even so, yogyakarta is not an area that is free from cases of violence. one of the cases that became viral and disturbed the public was the klithih case. klithih behavior itself is a form of aggressive behavior. in javanese, klithih is a vocabulary that means a form of ordinary walking activities at night without a clear purpose (jatmiko, 2021). if taken literally, the term klithih is not a criminal act. still, klithih behavior can be an act of violating the law if it is accompanied by aggressive or violent behavior. however, the term klithih in yogyakarta is a group of teenagers who go around using vehicles to look for teenagers or other school students who are considered enemies (fuadi et al., 2019). klithih perpetrators usually consist of junior high school and senior high school students, including vocational high schools, or even teenagers who dropped out of school (septiani & zuhdy, 2020). an increasing statistical data on klithih cases in yogyakarta from 2020 to november 2021 was found based on the regional police record, with 25 reports and 65 perpetrators in art icle info ab st r act article history received september 9,2022 revised january 5, 2023 accepted january 18, 2023 klithih, a javanese term, was originally an ordinary night stroll without a clear purpose. klithih becomes an act of violating the law if it is accompanied by aggressive or violent behavior. in recent years, klithih cases in yogyakarta have increased and become public attention, with almost the average perpetrators being students. this study aimed to reduce aggressive behavior in adolescents with a tendency to klithih behavior by developing resipatisme, a psychoeducation intervention consisting of emotion regulation, empathy, assertiveness, and altruism. a quasi-experimental quantitative method, with one group pretest-posttest design, was applied in this study. an aggressive behavior scale was used to collect the data. the wilcoxon signed rank test was applied to compare the data before (pretest) and after (posttest) intervention. the results show a significant difference between pretest scores and posttest scores. this finding implies that resipatisme psychoeducation can reduce aggressive behavior in adolescents. therefore this psychoeducation may be applied to prevent the tendency of klithih behavior. keywords altruism; assertiveness; emotion regulation; empathy; klitih. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humantias.v20i1.208 mailto:sri.kushartati@psy.uad.ac.id 12 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) oktavia et al. (resipatisme:a psychoeducation to reduce…) 2020 to 55 reports and 95 cases in 2021. from these data, it is known that klithih perpetrators consist of 80 students and nine unemployed people with 28 cases of abuse, 23 cases of using sharp weapons, and 1 case of destruction of public facilities. moreover, jogja police watch (jpw) recorded 12 street crimes known as klithih throughout 2022. the negative impacts of klithih behavior carried out by groups of adolescents include (septiani & zuhdy, 2020): (1) death and serious injuries suffered by perpetrators, victims, and victims public; (2) damage to public facilities in the vicinity of the incident location; (3) victims and the community will experience fear and trauma; (4) the mental breakdown of students as the next generation of the nation's youth in indonesia; (5) the quality of education in indonesia is declining because it cannot be a place for youth to develop positively. from a social psychology perspective, aggression is physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt someone. dehue reveals that it includes both physical aggression (hurting someone’s body) and social aggression (such as bullying, cyberbullying, insults, harmful gossip, or social exclusion that hurts feelings (myers & twenge, 2018). berkowitz distinguishes between hostile and instrumental aggression (aronson et al., 2016). hostile aggression is an act of aggression stemming from feelings of anger and is aimed at inflicting pain or injury. there is an intention to hurt the other person in instrumental aggression, but the hurting takes place as a means to some goal other than causing pain. buss and perry (1992) state aggressive behavior as behavior or behavioral tendencies intended to harm others physically and psychologically. this theory explains that aggressive behavior has four main aspects: physical, verbal, anger, and hatred. this aggressive behavior is a problem that often occurs in adolescents (yunalia & etika, 2020). factors influencing klithih behavior are poor parent-child relationships, commitment to deviant peer groups, and low academic motivation (febriani, 2018). at the same time, the factor determining klithih behavior is conformity with friends (fuadi et al., 2019). this study develops psychoeducation to reduce the tendency of klithih behavior in adolescents titled resipatisme. this psychoeducation combines emotion regulation, empathy, assertiveness, and altruism, along with discovering the causes. resipatisme was chosen as a form of intervention because every aspect may reduce aggressive behavior in adolescents. a previous study conducted an emotional regulation training program with 17 participants aged 15 to 17 years old, resulting in the level of aggressiveness of the participants decreased after being given emotional regulation training (putra et al., 2019). the results of this study indicate that the emotion regulation given effectively reduces aggressive behavior and increases positive emotions in adolescents. emotional regulation is a process of recognizing, maintaining, and regulating positive and negative emotions, automatic or controlled, visible or hidden, and conscious or unconscious (gross, 2014). emotion regulation involves changes in the dynamics of emotions from the time they arise to the magnitude, duration, and offsets of behavioral, experiential, and physiological responses. emotion regulation can influence, strengthen, and maintain emotions, depending on the individual's goals. research on empathy training found that empathy training was effective in reducing the tendency of aggressive behavior in junior high school students (lika, 2019). students become more aware of their own emotions and learn to be sensitive to the feelings of others around them. in addition, they also become motivated to pay attention to their friends because a high ability to empathize makes individuals behave prosocially. empathy is the ability to feel the emotional state of others, feel sympathetic, try to solve problems, and take the perspective of others (baron & byrne, 2002). research on assertive training found that assertive training can reduce aggressive behavior in 29 teenage boys (sari et al., 2015). assertiveness is a positive self-statement by always respecting others to add satisfaction to individual life and the quality of relationships with others (alberti & emmons, 2002). previous research among high school students in iran humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 13 oktavia et al. (resipatisme: a psychoeducation to reduce…) found an increase in assertiveness, resulting in a decrease in aggression (mofrad & mehrabi, 2015). altruism is a voluntary action taken by a person or group to help others without expecting anything in return (myers, 2012). a previous study found a negative relationship between altruism and aggression; the higher the altruism, the lower the aggression, and vice versa (rushton et al., 1986). moreover, a study among african american adolescents found altruistic behavior in boys is critical in moderating antisocial behavior among adolescents who face community violence (rious & cunningham, 2018). previous studies have not found an intervention that simultaneously covers all aspects of adolescent emotion regulation, empathy, assertiveness, and altruism. some studies only focus on one aspect, even though the results obtained effectively reduce the tendency of aggressive behavior. therefore, this study develops psychoeducation to reduce the tendency of klithih behavior in adolescents by combining emotion regulation, empathy, assertiveness, and altruism. this study aimed to determine changes in aggressive behavior in adolescents before and after being given the resipatisme psychoeducation intervention. the hypothesis proposed in this study is that resipatisme psychoeducation may reduce aggressive behavior in adolescents. resipatisme psychoeducation is expected to benefit the community, including the school to provide appropriate treatment early as a preventive effort against increasing cases of klithih in students. and in particular, adolescents to be able to manage their emotions and psyche so that they do not fall into aggressive behavior, especially being perpetrators of klithih. method research design this study used a quasi-experimental quantitative research method. a quasi-experimental design is an experiment that does not place the participant into the experimental or control group randomly (hastjarjo, 2019). this study has no control group as a comparison due to the limited number of research participants. this study used a one-group pretest-posttest design with resipatisme psychoeducation as an intervention for a group of research participants. the dependent variable score data was taken first before the intervention as a pretest score. the pretest score will be compared with the posttest score to determine the changes that occur after treatment (azwar, 2017). table 1 describes the research design of one group pretest-posttest design (hastjarjo, 2019). table 1 experimental design pretest intervention posttest t1 x t2 t1 : test before intervention t2 : test after intervention x : intervention carried out to the participants by conducting resipatisme psychoeducation participants twenty students of a senior high school in the city of yogyakarta who were selected using screening with the aggressive behavior scale participated in this study. the screening was administered to all grade xi students, and the scale score was also used as a pretest data. 14 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) oktavia et al. (resipatisme:a psychoeducation to reduce…) only students with a high tendency of klithih behavior or aggressive behavior based on the scale score are invited to participate in this study. instruments the aggression behavior scale was used to collect the pretest and posttest data. the aggression behavior scale is modified from an instrument used in a previous study that contained aspects of physical, verbal, anger, and hatred (saputra & handaka, 2017). based on the instrument try-out, 12 items on the aggressive behavior scale has an item discrimination index ranging from .361 to .646. the reliability index of the scale is .870. the scale is a summated rating method with four options: always, often, sometimes, and never. in addition, focus group discussions were carried out with participants to gather data on the causes of adolescents' aggressive behavior and to find out what they felt before and after participating in resipatisme psychoeducation. the resipatisme psychoeducation the resipatisme psychoeducation combines four psychological aspects, emotion regulation, empathy, assertiveness, and altruism. table 2 shows the structure of the resipatisme psychoeducation intervention plan. table 2 intervention plan meeting session activity time target 1 i conducting rapport building, forming group norms, and administering pretest sheets 30 minutes participants ii emotion regulation psychoeducation 60 minutes participants iii assertiveness psychoeducation 90 minutes participants 2 iv empathy psychoeducation 180 minutes participants 3 v altruism psychoeducation 180 minutes participants 4 vi forming focus group discussions and administering posttest sheets 120 minutes participants this study consists of several stages, as follows: 1. interviews with guidance and counseling teachers and distributing aggression behavior scales to research participants were conducted in the first stage. the interviews were conducted to determine the participant's characteristics and record students’ aggression behavior who will be the research participants. the scale score was used as an initial screening for research participants and a pretest score. 2. the second stage was conducting resipatisme psychoeducation for four meetings within three weeks. a. the first meeting held two psychoeducation, emotional regulation psychoeducation, and assertiveness psychoeducation. emotional regulation psychoeducation contained material about emotions, the introduction of emotion sheets, and the practice of breathing and muscle relaxation techniques. participants were directed to recognize and understand their own emotions, then were trained to regulate the emotions being felt through relaxation by psychologists as facilitators. assertive psychoeducation uses the role-play method. participants were divided into small groups and did minidramas according to the case studies that had been prepared. afterward, the participants were asked to discuss their experiences during the role-playing session. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 15 oktavia et al. (resipatisme: a psychoeducation to reduce…) b. empathy psychoeducation was conducted in the second meeting. participants were invited to watch a bullying-themed film and an interactive discussion while being given an empathy sheet. the purpose of the empathy sheet was to find out what the participants felt and did when they became a victim or perpetrators of bullying. c. altruism psychoeducation was implemented in the third meeting at the indonesian cancer child care foundation yogyakarta. participants were directed to play and learn through science experiments with children having cancer. gas balloon experiments, miniature volcanoes, and water ink experiments were carried out. in addition, the participants wrote down good wishes for children having cancer in a special place called the wishing tree. this altruism psychoeducation aimed to foster a sense of mutual help among participants. 3. the last stage was giving the participants a posttest within one week after the last psychoeducation. the posttest aimed to determine resipatisme psychoeducation to reduce aggressive behavior among participants after being given the intervention. data analysis wilcoxon test was applied to determine the difference between pretest and posttest data. data analysis was conducted with spss 19.0 program. results table 3 shows the results of the wilcoxon test analysis of pretest and posttest data on aggression behavior among adolescents. the finding shows a significant difference in aggressive behavior between the pretest and posttest scores (z= -3.824; p< .001). it can be concluded that resipatisme psychoeducation reduce aggressive behavior in adolescents. the hypothesis is accepted. table 3 wilcoxon signed rank test test statistics pretest posttest z -3.824 asymp. sig (2-tailed) .000 before the intervention, the aggressive behavior of all participants was in the high category (x > 24). meanwhile, after the intervention, the participants experienced a decrease in their scores. figure 1 shows the detailed changes in each participant's scores. by observing the decrease in the score, there are three categories of participants: (1) four participants experienced a decrease in the score of aggressive behavior but were still in the high category, (2) 14 participants experienced a decrease in the score and turned into a moderate category, (3) a participant experienced a decrease in the score and changed into a low category. however, one participant has the same score between the pretest and posttest. 16 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) oktavia et al. (resipatisme:a psychoeducation to reduce…) figure 1 pretest and posttest of each participant table 4 shows the pretest and posttest scores using the aggression behavior scale. it can be seen that nearly all participants have a decrease in the score of aggressive behavior and also a change in the category. table 4 pretest and posttest scores name pretest score category posttest score category a 35 high 14 medium b 33 high 15 medium c 32 high 17 medium d 31 high 21 medium e 31 high 26 high f 29 high 26 high g 28 high 21 medium h 28 high 15 medium i 28 high 24 medium j 28 high 16 medium k 28 high 18 medium l 27 high 19 medium m 27 high 18 medium n 27 high 16 medium o 27 high 21 medium p 26 high 25 high q 26 high 26 high r 26 high 20 medium s 25 high 13 medium t 25 high 3 low the results of the interviews obtained from the focus group discussion at the last session illustrated that the participants previously behaved aggressively both verbally and physically. they bully others, involved in student brawls, hitting, kicking, fighting, and joining motorcycle gangs. internal family problems, being a victim of bullying in the past, defending 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 pretest 35 33 32 31 31 29 28 28 28 28 28 27 27 27 27 26 26 26 25 25 posttest 14 15 17 21 26 26 21 15 24 16 18 19 18 16 21 25 26 20 13 3 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 pretest posttest humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 17 oktavia et al. (resipatisme: a psychoeducation to reduce…) friends who are bullied by others, considering verbal bullying such as ridicule or cursing as joking material, and feeling satisfaction after doing violence are several main causes for the emergence of aggressive behavior. in addition, the participants admitted having difficulty recognizing and controlling their emotions during unpleasant conditions. however, after being given resipatisme psychoeducation, the participants can recognize the emotions that were felt consciously, control the negative emotions that were being felt, dare to express what they felt when invited to negative things, and be able to empathize with the surrounding environment. discussion the study results imply that resipatisme psychoeducation reduces aggressive behavior among adolescents, known as klithih. resipatisme psychoeducation involves four aspects, emotion regulation, empathy, assertiveness, and altruism. several previous studies examined the role of each aspect to aggressive behavior. this study's results align with a previous study that found emotional regulation can reduce aggressive behavior in school-age children (syahadat, 2013). data from the focus group discussion implies before participating in emotion regulation psychoeducation, the participants have difficulty recognizing and controlling their emotions during unpleasant conditions. however, after being given emotion regulation psychoeducation, they could recognize their emotions and control the negative emotions. based on the emotion regulation sheet results, the participants gave a high rating to the trigger of their emotions. however, the emotional rating decreased after performing breathing and muscle relaxation techniques. the results of this study are also in line with a study on children that group plays therapy increased empathy and then reduced aggressive behavior (iswinarti & hidayah, 2020). other research also found empathy training based on specific deficits can help in the intervention and prevention of certain aggressive behaviors (yeo et al., 2011). in empathy psychoeducation, participants watched the entire film with the theme of bullying and being active during the discussion session. based on the results of the empathy sheet filled in by the participants, after watching the film, they also felt empathy for the victim because they could feel the events experienced, the pain of being a victim of bullying, feeling sorry, sad, and wanting to help the victim. in addition, the focus group discussion results found that a sense of empathy emerged when they saw the victim of bullying. the participants did not want to be a bully like in the film because they understood that these were negative actions that hurt others. a study among adolescents found a relationship between assertive communication skills and aggressive behavior (yunalia & haryuni, 2020). in the assertive psychoeducation of this study, participants were trained to dare to express their feelings and opinions to others with mini-drama role play. each participant was tasked with playing a character in a given case study. based on the focus group discussion session, participants could not be assertive by saying "no" when faced with situations that were not in accordance with what they wanted. however, after playing a role using a role-playing technique, the participants admitted that they were more daring to express their feelings when invited to negative things. as a result, if they agree, the participants will say agree. if not, they will refuse in the right ways. this study result is also in accordance with research, which found that prosocial altruistic behavior was negatively related to aggression, particularly proactive aversive aggression (persson, 2005). based on the reflection sheet in altruism psychoeducation, the participants feel happy, satisfied, and grateful after participating in the activity. in the focus group discussion session, the participants admitted that they were more grateful for their life and became more concerned with fellow human beings without distinction. 18 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) oktavia et al. (resipatisme:a psychoeducation to reduce…) based on the results of group interviews after participating in resipatisme psychoeducation, the participants admitted to being more sensitive and aware of every emotion that was felt consciously. they know how to control negative emotions that are being felt, say no and act decisively if invited to negative things, feel empathy with people who have less good conditions than themselves, and are more grateful for life and the surrounding environment. however, one participant did not experience a change in the scores. this participant was identified as unable to communicate his feelings and opinions. therefore, he was less involved in the psychoeducation process. based on this study's findings, resipatisme psychoeducation may be adapted to the conditions of the research participants and the area where the intervention is carried out. however, this study has limitations. first, not being thorough in ensuring that the school will be used as the place for the intervention because when approaching implementation, there must be permission from other parties so that schools can grant psychoeducation permits. second, the psychoeducation schedule that has been prepared beforehand does not match the implementation, causing delays in carrying out resipatisme psychoeducation. conclusion resipatisme psychoeducation is an effective intervention to reduce aggressive behavior in adolescents, known as klithih. a significant difference in aggressive behavior between before and after being given resipatisme psychoeducation has been found. participating in student brawls, bullying others, hitting, kicking, and fighting, and being members of motorcycle gangs are the type of aggressive behavior found in this study. these aggressive behaviors are caused by internal family problems, having been a victim of bullying in the past, defending a friend who is bullied by others, considering verbal bullying such as ridicule or cursing as a joke, and feeling satisfaction after doing the behavior aggression. therefore, it is essential to understand the risk factors and forms of aggressive behavior, and resipatisme psychoeducation may be applied to prevent klithih among adolescents. acknowledgment the research team would like to thank the ministry of research, technology and higher education (ristekdikti) of the republic of indonesia, simbelmawa and ahmad dahlan university [2022] for providing support in the form of funds and opportunities to carry out research. declarations author contribution. all authors develop the research topics. dppo, naz, lr, aa, and wsf develop research proposals and become experiment co-facilitators. dppo, naz, lr, wsf, and sr develop the resipatisme psychoeducation module. naz and lr prepare research instruments. aa designed all research materials. sr assists and guides research preparation and supervises research implementation. funding statement. the ministry of research, technology, and education has funded the research of the humanities social research student creativity program (pkm-rsh) with the program's implementation for four months, starting from june august 2022. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 19 oktavia et al. 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(2020). hubungan antara kemampuan komunikasi asertif dengan kejadian perilaku agresif pada remaja [the relationship between assertive communication skills and the incidence of aggressive behavior in adolescents]. care: jurnal ilmiah ilmu kesehatan, 8(2), 159–167. https://doi.org/10.33366/jc.v8i2.1362 https://doi.org/10.1002/jcop.21936 https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.50.6.1192 http://seminar.uad.ac.id/index.php/snbkuad/article/view/82 https://doi.org/10.18196/ijclc.v1i2.9647 https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v10i1.326 https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.2011.568986 https://doi.org/10.31101/jhes.1358 https://doi.org/10.33366/jc.v8i2.1362 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 19 (1), february 2022, 67-78 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://dx.doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i1.11 quality of sibling relationships and identity formation: identification processes as a mediator ciptari dhienda aurellya, darmawan muttaqin faculty of psychology, university of surabaya, indonesia corresponding author: darmawan.muttaqin@staff.ubaya.ac.id introduction identity formation is a central psychosocial developmental task during adolescence and continues throughout life (branje, de moor, spitzer, & becht, 2021). furthermore, erikson stated the dynamics of identity formation as described by identity achievement and identity confusion (montgomery, 2020). identity achievement occurs when adolescents determine what they are, how they are, and the goals they want to achieve. individuals who achieve a coherent identity tend to have positive psychosocial development such as having a positive self-concept (morsünbül, crocetti, cok, & meeus, 2016), meaningful life (schwartz et al., 2015), life satisfaction (morsünbül, 2013; piotrowski, 2018; ritchie et al., 2013; sugimura et al., 2015), and tend to engage in helping behavior (crocetti, benish-weisman, & mcdonald, 2020; nelson & padilla-walker, 2013). on the contrary, identity confusion occurs when adolescents cannot determine goals and commitment to various identity choices considered the basis of individual adult identity (montgomery, 2020). individuals who experience identity confusion show psychosocial developmental deviations such as art icle info ab st r act article history received january 11, 2022 revised february 16, 2022 accepted february 21, 2022 identity formation is an adolescent developmental task that continues throughout life. its process cannot be separated from the role of the significant person for adolescents, including siblings. therefore, this study aims to examine the identification process (modeling and deidentification) as a mediator in the relationship between sibling relationships in identity formations commitment, in-depth exploration, and reconsideration of commitment. four hundred adolescents aged 1221 years participated in this study. the indonesian version of the utrechtmanagement of identity commitments scale (u-mics), the sibling relationship questionnaire (srq), and the sibling influence scale (sis) were used to measure identity formation, sibling relationship quality, and identification process. data analysis was performed using regression analysis and the sobel test. the results showed that the identification process could be a mediator between the quality of sibling relationships and identity formation. also, the differences in quality among siblings lead adolescents to take different paths of the identification process, modeling, or de-identification, which impact the process of identity formation differences. adolescents involved in modeling can learn and imitate older siblings to achieve an optimal identity. on the other hand, adolescents involved in de-identification find it more difficult and experience more challenges in achieving an optimal identity. keywords adolescents; identification process; identity formation; quality of sibling relationships; siblings. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://dx.doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i1.11 mailto:darmawan.muttaqin@staff.ubaya.ac.id 68 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) aurellya & muttaqin (quality of sibling relationships and identity formation: identification processes as a mediator) experiencing anxiety (crocetti et al., 2015; michikyan, 2020; morsünbül et al., 2016), depression (waterman et al., 2013; weisskirch, 2019), and tend to engage in unlawful behavior (crocetti et al., 2020; schwartz et al., 2015). the concept of adolescent identity formation has undergone development. several theoretical models have been proposed to understand the process of adolescent identity formation (schwartz, zamboanga, luyckx, meca, & ritchie, 2013). in the last decade, crocetti, rubini, & meeus (2008) developed a three-dimensional model of identity that includes commitment, in-depth exploration, and reconsideration of commitment. in addition, crocetti (2018) explained that initially, adolescents have an identity commitment that comes from their parents, which later they explored in-depth by seeking relevant information related to identity choices. the results lead adolescents to experience satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their identity commitments. therefore, when adolescents feel dissatisfaction with their previous identity commitments, they improve or choose a more satisfying identity choice. a previous study on identity formation in indonesia discovered that its process could not be separated from the significant role of other people as it relates to adolescents (muttaqin, 2020). this study result indicates that parents, friends, boyfriends, and girlfriends play a substantial role for adolescents during the process of identity formation (kindelberger, mallet, & galharret, 2020; ominyi, adepeju, & matthew, 2019; trost, eichas, ferrerwreder, & galanti, 2020). nevertheless, parents play a significant role in adolescent identity formation, specifically while approaching the early stage (crocetti & meeus, 2014). moreover, in the family, intra-generational interactions also occur between siblings and intergenerational interactions between parents and children (kenny & cook, 2020). the study on the role of siblings in identity formation is limited compared to the parents. presently, only two studies stated the role of a sibling in identity formation (crocetti, branje, rubini, koot, & meeus, 2016; wong, branje, vandervalk, hawk, & meeus, 2010). whereas siblings also have a role in adolescent development, specifically when they act as friends and even best friends, trustworthy people, and role models (howe, persram, & bergeron, 2020). in addition, siblings also provide emotional support, acceptance, intimacy, and warmth (wikle, jensen, & hoagland, 2018). therefore, it is not surprising that siblings' presence helps adolescents achieve optimal self-adjustment and emotions such as having self-concept, self-esteem, autonomy, and establishing warm relationships with friends and other people (gungordu & hernandez-reif, 2020; smorti & ponti, 2018). their presence also has a positive impact on adolescents on academic performance and career development (aguirre & matta, 2021; gurantz, hurwitz, & smith, 2020; nicoletti & rabe, 2019; rogers, guyer, nishina, & conger, 2018; vleuten, weesie, & maas, 2020). adolescents with siblings, specifically elderly ones, are more likely to have a model in behavior. older siblings can serve as role models and sources of emotional support (howe et al., 2020; hughes, mcharg, & white, 2018). without exception, their presence serves as role models and sources of support when performing the process of identity formation (ruiz, 2012). however, the older siblings act as models to the younger ones when there is a positive sibling relationship and have certain competencies (whiteman, mchale, & soli, 2011). this condition is based on attachment theory, which prioritizes emotional attachment as a manifestation of positive sibling relationships (fraley & tancredy, 2012), allowing the younger siblings to ask questions, exchange ideas, and win insights from older siblings in identity formation. on the other hand, when siblings do not have positive relationships, misunderstandings and poor communication will occur, making them difficult to form their identity (buist, deković, & prinzie, 2013). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 69 aurellya & muttaqin (quality of sibling relationships and identity formation: identification processes as a mediator) the relationship between sibling relations and identity formation may not be direct because the younger siblings identify the older sibling first (killoren, alfaro, & kline, 2016). wong et al. (2010) discovered that adolescents achieve optimal identity formation by modeling older siblings. this modeling is based on social learning, allowing siblings to observe and learn from each other (howe et al., 2020; hughes et al., 2018). the modeling process directs younger siblings to learn and imitate the behaviors displayed by older siblings (whiteman, bernard, & mchale, 2010). this process leads them to explore various identity options and determine commitments that the older sibling represents. in contrast, alfred adler described the process of de-identification, which refers to the tendency for siblings to define themselves differently from one another (vleuten et al., 2020; whiteman et al., 2010). younger siblings involved in de-identification aim to protect themselves from social comparisons with older siblings and as an effort to show their uniqueness than older siblings (killoren et al., 2016; whiteman, mchale, & crouter, 2007). this condition leads the younger sibling to explore different identity options with the older sibling. in addition, younger siblings may have difficulty determining identity commitment due to the absence of examples and direction from older siblings. in this situation, this study focuses on younger siblings based on the theory and previous study, which states that an older sibling has a more significant influence on a younger sibling than otherwise. previous studies discovered that sibling relationships' quality is related to identity formation (crocetti et al., 2016; wong et al., 2010). however, the latest study conducted by killoren et al. (2016) discovered that quality sibling relationships direct younger siblings through the modeling process compared to the de-identification of older siblings. this finding shows different mechanisms in the relationship between sibling and identity formation mediated by the identification process. therefore, this study aims to examine the identification process, namely modeling and de-identification as mediators in the relationship between sibling relations and identity formation, including commitment, indepth exploration, and reconsideration of commitment. method participants participants in this study consisted of 400 adolescents aged 12-21 years (m = 19.67 sd = 2.463) who had at least one older sibling with a maximum age gap of 4 years. furthermore, they consisted of 106 (26.50%) and 294 (73.50%) adolescent boys and girls, respectively. participants were 45, 107, and 248, which indicates (11.25%) early, (26.75%) middle, and (62.00%) late adolescents, respectively. also, data were collected using convenience sampling techniques by contacting participants directly and disseminating information on social media such as twitter, instagram, line, and whatsapp. participants willing to be involved in the study are asked to fill out an informed consent and study questionnaire, presented online through a google form. measures identity formation the indonesian version of the utrecht-management of identity commitments scale (umics; muttaqin, 2017) consists of 26 items used to assess identity formation. also, it consists of three subscales such as commitment (10 items, for example, "my education makes me feel sure of myself"), in-depth exploration (10 items, for example, "i make a lot of effort to keep finding out new things about my best friend"), and reconsideration of 70 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) aurellya & muttaqin (quality of sibling relationships and identity formation: identification processes as a mediator) commitment (6 items, for example, "in fact, i'm looking for a different education"). the umics response uses five options ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). in this study, u-mics has a reliability coefficient of .857 (citc = .253 .644) for the commitment subscale, .689 (citc = .227 .512) for the in-depth exploration sub-scale, and .781 (citc = .406 .571) for the reconsideration of commitment subscale. quality of sibling relationships the warmth/closeness subscale of the sibling relationship questionnaire (srq; furman & buhrmester, 1985) consists of 27 items used to assess the quality of sibling relationships. furthermore, it uses seven behavioral indicators of sibling closeness: prosocial behavior, intimacy, companionship, similarity, attention, admiration of the sibling, and affection. sample of items, for example, "how much do you and this sibling tell each other things you don't want other people to know?" and "how much is there a strong feeling of affection (love) between you and this sibling?"). responses to the warmth/closeness subscale of srq use five response options ranging from 1 (hardly at all) to 5 (extremely much). srq was adapted to indonesian using forward-back translation following guidelines from international test commission (2017). in this study, the warmth/closeness subscale of the srq has a reliability coefficient of .960 (citc = .403 .750). identification process the sibling influence scale (sis; whiteman, bernard, & mchale, 2010) consists of 18 items used to assess their identification process. furthermore, it consists of two sub-scales such as modeling (8 items, for example, "from watching my sister/brother, i have learned how to do things") and de-identification (10 items, for example, "i try to be different from my sister/brother"). the sis response uses five options ranging from 1 (never) to 5 (very often). sis was adapted to indonesian by involving two translators from english to indonesian, two reviewers, and two translators from indonesian to english. the adaptation process follows the guidelines of the international test commission (2017). in this study, sis has a reliability coefficient of .910 (citc = .551 .810) and .872 (citc = .294 .763) for the modeling and de-identification subscale, respectively. data analysis data analysis was performed through the ibm spss version 25 program to test the study hypothesis, namely the role of modeling and de-identification as mediators in the relationship between the quality of sibling relationships and identity formation. the mediator analysis was conducted using the approach of baron and kenny (1986) by performing regression analysis, which includes: (1) the quality of the sibling relationship to modeling/de-identification (path a), (2) the quality of the sibling relationship (path c') and modeling/de-identification (path b) to commitment/in-depth exploration/reconsideration of commitment, and (3) the quality of the sibling relationship to commitment/in-depth exploration/reconsideration of commitment (path c). in addition, the sobel test (sobel, 1982) was conducted to determine the direct and indirect role of the quality of sibling relationships. modeling/de-identification is stated to play a mediator role in the relationship between the quality of sibling relationships with commitment/in-depth exploration/reconsideration of commitment when the indirect significance role is less than .05. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 71 aurellya & muttaqin (quality of sibling relationships and identity formation: identification processes as a mediator) results table 1 shows the results of regression analysis which discovered that the quality of the relationship with siblings predicts the identification process of both modeling (r2 = .636, ß = .798, p < .001) and de-identification (r2 = .045, ß = -.212, p < .001). modeling also predicts the adolescent identity formation on the dimensions of commitment (r2 = .147, ß = .185, p < .05) and in-depth exploration (r2 = .142, ß = .178, p < .05). however, modeling fails to predict the adolescent identity formation on the reconsideration of commitment dimension (r2 = .047, ß = .059, p > .05). de-identification predicts the formation of adolescent identity on the dimensions of commitment (r2 = -.036, ß = .174, p < .001), in-depth exploration (r2 = -.054, ß = .256, p < .001), and reconsideration of commitment (r2 = -.072, ß = .338, p < .001). in addition, the results of regression analysis also show that the quality of sibling relationships can predict commitment (r2 = .052, ß = .185, p < .001), in-depth exploration (r2 = .079, ß = .282, p < .001), and reconsideration of commitment (r2 = .012, ß = -.108, p < .05). figure 1 shows the relationship between sibling relationship and each dimensions of identity formation with identification process as mediator. table 1 regression analysis the quality of sibling relationships, the identification process, and identity formation variable r2 ß b s.e. t p sr => modeling (path a) -.636 -.798 -.963 .519 26.378 .001 sr => de-identification (path a) -.045 -.212 -.222 .730 -4.336 .001 modeling => commitment (path b) -.147 -.185 -.125 .563 -2.295 .022 modeling => in-depth exploration (path b) -.014 -.178 -.110 .508 -2.250 .001 modeling => reconsideration (path b) -.047 -.059 -.053 .859 --.709 .479 de-identification => commitment (path b) -.036 -.174 -.135 .558 -3.533 .001 de-identification => in-depth exploration (path b) -.054 -.256 -.182 .493 -5.376 .001 de-identification => reconsideration (path b) -.072 --.338 -.391 .811 -7.013 .001 sr => commitment (path c) -.052 -.227 -.185 .040 4.651 .001 sr => in-depth exploration (path c) -.079 -.282 -.210 .036 5.861 .001 sr => reconsideration of commitment (path c) -.012 -.108 -.131 .060 -2.165 .031 note s.r. = sibling relationship figure 1. regression analysis the quality of sibling relationships, the identification process, and identity formation note sr = sibling relationship, mod = modeling, di = de-identification, com = commitment, exp = in-depth exploration, rec = reconsideration of commitment 72 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) aurellya & muttaqin (quality of sibling relationships and identity formation: identification processes as a mediator) the direct effect of the quality of sibling relationships is reported in table 2. the quality of sibling relationships cannot directly predict the three dimensions of adolescent identity formation, namely commitment (direct effect = .065, t = .990, p > .05), in-depth exploration (direct effect = .059, t = 1.759, p > .05), and reconsideration of commitment (direct effect = -.187, t = -1.870, p > .05) when controlling for modeling. however, the results of the sobel test (table 2) discovered that modeling acts as a mediator in the relationship between the quality of sibling relationships and identity formation on the dimensions of commitment (indirect effect = .120, z = 2.285, p < .05) and in-depth exploration (indirect effect = .106, z = 2.240, p < .05). on the other hand, when de-identification is controlled, the quality of sibling relationships has a direct effect on commitment (direct effect = .215, t = 5.360, p < .05) and in-depth exploration (direct effect = .251, t = -3.340, p > .05). furthermore, de-identification acts as a mediator in the relationship between the quality of sibling relationships and commitment (indirect effect = -.030, z = -2.696, p < .05), in-depth exploration (indirect effect = -.040, z = -3.340, p < .05), and reconsideration of commitment (indirect effect = -.087, z = -3.361, p < .05). table 2 direct and indirect effect of the quality of sibling relationships toward identity formation through the identification process variable value s.e. t/z p modeling as mediator sr => commitment (path c’) -.065 .563 -1.990 .323 sr => in-depth exploration (path c’) -.059 .508 -1.759 .079 sr => reconsideration of commitment (path c’) -.187 .859 -1.870 .062 sr => modeling => commitment -.120 .053 -2.285 .022 sr => modeling => in-depth exploration -.106 .047 -2.240 .025 sr => modeling => reconsideration of commitment -.056 .079 -1.708 .479 de-identification as mediator sr => commitment (path c’) -.215 .558 -5.360 .001 sr => in-depth exploration (path c’) -.251 .493 -7.067 .001 sr => reconsideration of commitment (path c’) -.044 .811 --.750 .454 sr => modeling => commitment -.030 .011 -2.696 .007 sr => modeling => in-depth exploration -.040 .012 -3.340 .001 sr => modeling => reconsideration of commitment -.087 .023 -3.366 .001 note s.r. = sibling relationship discussion this study examines the identification process as a mediator in the relationship between the quality of sibling relationships and identity formation. the results found that the indirect effect of the quality of sibling relationships through the identification process towards identity formation was more significant than the direct effect. the results discovered that the modeling identification process is a mediator between the quality of sibling relationships and identity formation on the dimensions of commitment and in-depth exploration. in addition, de-identification mediates the quality of sibling relationships with the three dimensions of identity formation, namely commitment, in-depth exploration, and reconsideration of commitment. these results show that the quality of relationships with siblings that indicate positive relationships facilitates adolescents to model their older siblings to achieve optimal self-identity formation. on the other hand, when adolescents de-identify siblings because of negative relationships, they will experience a more complicated process of identity humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 73 aurellya & muttaqin (quality of sibling relationships and identity formation: identification processes as a mediator) formation. therefore, this shows that the quality of relationships with relatives leads to the difference in the identification process, resulting in different identity resolutions. although there have been no similar studies examining the mediator variables between the quality of relationships with siblings and identity formation, this study supports a previous study that discovered that sibling relationships play a role in identity formation (wong et al., 2010). in addition, crocetti et al. (2016) also found that a positive relationship with siblings was associated with identity commitment. this study also found that the quality of sibling relationships can encourage adolescents to carry out in-depth exploration and commitment. however, this study found that the quality of sibling relationships had a more significant indirect effect on adolescent identity formation through the identification process. the result can be an alternative to the dynamics of the relationship between the quality of sibling relationships and identity formation that have been discovered in previous studies (crocetti et al., 2016; wong et al., 2010). sibling relationships influence each other's cognitive, social, and emotional development as good relationship quality is characterized by a high level of warmth and closeness (alekseeva, kozlova, baskaeva, & pyankova, 2014; ponti & smorti, 2019; smorti & ponti, 2018; sommantico, donizzetti, parrello, & de rosa, 2019). the positive relationship creates a belief in the younger sibling that the older ones are good role models. furthermore, modeling is characterized by the opportunity for adolescents to learn from each other through observation (howe et al., 2020; vleuten et al., 2020). adolescents ask questions about many things and exchange ideas to obtain valuable insights to help form their identity. this finding is in line with a previous study that discovered that the quality of good relations with siblings directs adolescents to perform modeling (wong et al., 2010). the modeling process conducted by adolescents helps them discover goals and directions in the future, choose alternatives of life that are suitable with the self-sense that they want to develop, and choose the direction of work in the future (schwartz et al., 2011). according to observational learning theory, younger siblings can learn and observe the values and interests of older siblings. moreover, a study conducted by wong et al. (2010) discovered that older siblings reach self-identity maturity earlier than younger siblings. in this condition, the younger sibling is likely to have the same commitment and deep exploration as the older sibling who first reached identity commitment through the modeling process. however, not all sibling relationships are full of love, support, and friendship. there are also forms of hostile relationships and display aggressive behavior (hamwey & whiteman, 2021; kim & kim, 2019; tucker, sharp, van gundy, & rebellon, 2019). this poor relationship quality leads adolescents to perform de-identification. this relationship makes adolescents strive to overcome potential feelings of inferiority and develop qualities different from older siblings (whiteman et al., 2011). the lack of communication also makes adolescents lose the opportunity to learn and observe each other. adolescents who tend to de-identify will develop different attributes, activities, and behaviors from older siblings to find identity in their way. under these conditions, adolescents who experience deidentification find it more difficult to achieve optimal identity formation because they do not commit, explore in-depth, and reconsider commitments. in general, this study contributes to further explaining the relationship between quality of sibling relationship and identity formation discovered previously (crocetti et al., 2016; wong et al., 2010). this study complements previous research by proposing the role of the identification process as a mediator between the quality of sibling relationships and identity formation. the findings indicate that the quality of the relationship with siblings formerly 74 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) aurellya & muttaqin (quality of sibling relationships and identity formation: identification processes as a mediator) makes adolescents perform the modeling process on older siblings before achieving optimal identity. the quality of positive relationships with siblings helps develop identity commitment, similar to their older siblings. adolescents experiencing modeling can imitate and learn from older siblings, which helps form identities. however, it is possible to rule out the possibility of older siblings having the opportunity to process the younger ones. in addition, it is interesting to question the quality of sibling relationships over the long term, specifically when siblings no longer live together due to education, work, and marriage (gilligan, stocker, & jewsbury conger, 2020). the positive quality of sibling relationships can be a source of support other than parents in identity formation. on the other hand, poor sibling relationships tend to lead adolescents to de-identify. de-identification makes it more difficult for adolescents to achieve an optimal identity. this study expands the investigation of the role of the family, which is still limited to the role of parents in examining the formation of adolescent identity by involving the identification process. sibling, specifically older sibling, can be significant person who also helps adolescents form an identity. this study has several advantages that complement the previous research (crocetti et al., 2016; wong et al., 2010), considering the age difference between siblings to be four years. siblings who are close in age are more likely to imitate each other. jensen, pond, and padilla-walker (2015) revealed that it is more likely to see relationship dynamics in siblings close in age than those at distant age. siblings who are closer in age tend to perform the process of comparing themselves to one another. however, the results of this study contribute to understanding the role of the identification process in the relationship between sibling relationship quality and adolescent identity formation. on the other hand, some limitations are that this study uses a cross-sectional design. it cannot explain the stability and changes of the identification process variables, the quality of sibling relationships, and identity formation that can be explained while using a longitudinal design. conclusion this study concludes that older siblings can play a significant role in the process of identity formation. the role of siblings depends on the quality of the relationships between siblings. the differences in quality that exist lead adolescents to carry out different identification processes, namely modeling and de-identification, which have a different impact on identity formation. adolescents who perform modeling can learn from and imitate older siblings to help achieve optimal identity. even though they both direct adolescents to perform identity formation, de-identification adolescents will be more difficult and experience more challenges that they must face to achieve optimal identity. references aguirre, j., & matta, j. 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atmojo et al., 2020; irawati & jonatan, 2020; martin et al., 2019; rasmitadila et al., 2020). the online learning situation has begun to cause psychological impacts on students, stemming from network connection problems, limitations in working on group projects, delivery of materials deemed not as clear as in-class instructions, changes in academic scheduling, and an overwhelming amount of coursework. these problems have caused psychological distress among students (fauziyyah et al., 2021; kartika, 2020) and might lead to mental health problems (chen & lucock, 2022; holmes et al., 2020). mental health is a state of wellbeing where individuals are aware of their abilities, work productively, and contribute to society when facing problems (johan et al., 2022). the main factors that cause low levels of wellbeing among students are social isolation and distancing (li et al., 2021), art icle info ab st r act article history received may 10, 2022 revised december 16, 2022 accepted january 5, 2023 online learning has become a solution for the world of education, including universities, during the covid-19 pandemic. every student behaves differently in addressing online learning in their lives. this research aimed to explore the role of self-regulated learning on psychological distress among university students in the online learning process during the covid-19 pandemic. four hundred sixteen students participated online survey and completed depression anxiety stress scale – 21 and the online self-regulated questionnaire. the correlation results show that self-regulated learning negatively correlates with depression, although the level of depression is mild to moderate. besides that, students in the third and fourth years of study found that they had a higher score of depression on online learning than the first and second years of study. therefore, the capacity to motivate and identify the direction of self-regulated learning will make students actively participate in online learning and could adapt to online learning during the covid-19 pandemic. thus, more self-regulate learning relates to lower depression among students. keywords covid-19; depression; online learning; self-regulated learning; social support. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humantias.v20i1.73 mailto:honeywahyuni@staff.ubaya.ac.id humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 41 elgeka & pujibujoyo (psychological distress: the role of self-regulated learning…) wherein students feel unable to connect with friends and families, lose a sense of autonomy, experience doubt, and become more sensitive (meo et al., 2020). a previous study found that 29% of students have depression, 70% have anxiety, and 46% have stress during online learning (maulana, 2021). anxiety is a negative emotional state that emerges from intuition and somatic tension, indicated by increased heart rate (ewell et al., 2022). anxiety could adversely impact students’ learning outcomes, related to reduced capacity to concentrate on learning, decreased memory functions, and even reduced capacity to analyze problems (hasanah et al., 2020). stress is a relationship between an individual and the environment that an individual evaluates to exceed their resources (von keyserlingk et al., 2022). when various problems emerge and are not handled promptly, this could cause cognitive disruptions and create tensions that could lead to stress (biggs et al., 2017). students face various forms of physical irritation in their online learning process, including disruption in sleep patterns, headaches, restlessness, irritability, and physical fatigue. all these symptoms emerge as a response to the stress faced by the students (muslim, 2020; wahyuni, 2018). if the various disruptions the students face are not handled promptly, another psychological problem could occur, i.e., depression. depression is an invisible disease in which individuals do not realize they have a problem (sulistyorini & sabarisman, 2017). for some, depression is seen as a problem related to an individual’s faith, and not requiring professional help (i.e., from a psychologist or psychiatrist) causes 80% of depression cases not to get the right and adequate help (babicka-wirkus et al., 2021; singh et al., 2020). during the covid-19 pandemic, the depression levels faced by university students have increased compared to normal conditions (hasanah et al., 2020). many depression cases among students are not adequately identified because universities are not conducting the correct measures for depression for their students (lopes & nihei, 2021). a study found several reactions that may emerge when students face depression, including continually crying, skipping class, and self-isolating without knowing why they feel depressed (kamble & minchekar, 2018). additionally, individuals facing depression tend to display feelings of sadness, failure, and worthlessness, as well as the tendency to retract themselves from others and their environment (sulistyorini & sabarisman, 2017). online learning has been found to create an uncomfortable situation among students. moreover, it also has the potential to trigger psychological distress due to the pressure related to academic performance and achievement. several external factors could trigger stress in student learning, including the pressure to achieve, non-interactive teaching methods, and an overwhelming amount of homework and assignments (qalbu, 2018). in addition to these external factors, internal factors could trigger stress in learning, including self-efficacy, hardiness, optimism, achievement motivation, procrastination, and personality types (sutjiato et al., 2015; yusuf & yusuf, 2020). several studies suggested that students’ success in the education process is determined, such as self-regulated learning (fasikhah & fatimah, 2013; kristiyani, 2016; latipah, 2010; sutikno, 2016). self-regulated learning is the main determining factor for success in online learning, wherein independence is the main trait demanded by online learning (barnard et al., 2009). furthermore, previous studies also found that self-regulated learning could affect students’ emotional states, which could help them find solutions for their academic problems in their effort to improve academic performance (latipah, 2010; qalbu, 2018). self-regulated learning uses metacognition, motivation, emotions, and behavior in the learning process (panadero, 2017). students still strive to perform and achieve optimal results during online learning, which could be influenced by self-regulated learning to achieve their life goals despite continually adapting to the online learning process. for students, selfregulated learning may inculcate the capacity to determine their directions for learning, the ability to recognize interests and talents according to the learning materials, the skills to make 42 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) elgeka & pujibudojo (psychological distress: the role of self-regulated learnung…) learning more interesting and fun, as well as the capacity to face uncertain, scary, and confusing, or disappointing situations (nadhif & rohmatika, 2020). in various learning contexts (e.g., offline, online, or blended), self-regulated learning among students is needed as a proactive process in the ever-changing learning environment (zimmerman, 2008). when students demonstrate low levels of self-regulated learning, failure in completing assignments in online learning may occur frequently. nevertheless, students' ability in regulated learning will have positive impacts and has high performance in learning (nadhif & rohmatika, 2020). however, psychological distress could emerge when the assignment burden is high, and the students fail to complete their tasks. psychological distress issues mostly happen from personal and environmental pressures in online learning and could affect students' wellbeing, which may worsen procrastination and make students lose their focus on learning (li et al., 2021; shostak et al., 2021). therefore, this study aimed to explain the role of self-regulated learning when psychological distress occurs among university students in their online learning process during the covid-19 pandemic, as different results are found from previous studies in different countries (shostak et al., 2021). so, the study hypothesizes that there is a negative relationship between self-regulated learning and psychological distress. besides that, this study also analyzes the different classes of psychological distress, whereas several students had experienced in-class learning and changed to the online system. method research design this quantitative correlational study was conducted using the survey technique for collecting data. two variables were observed in the study, i.e., self-regulated learning as the independent variable and psychological distress as the dependent variable, which consists of anxiety, stress, and depression. participants the study involved 416 participants (138 males and 278 females), with ages ranging from 17 to 21 years (m=19.90, sd=.99). the determination of the total participants was obtained by slovin’s sample formula (α error probability = .05) with minimum participants 385 people. the research was conducted between june and september 2021 on active students of universitas surabaya from seven faculties (i.e., pharmacy, law, business and economics, psychology, engineering, biotechnology, creative industry, and medicine). the sampling technique utilized was nonrandom sampling – accidental sampling, i.e., each student who met the research criteria could participate in the study. all participants completed informed consent forms and expressed willingness to participate in this study. all data were collected through online questionnaires (google forms) distributed to undergraduate students. table 1 shows that most of the students in this study came from business and economics, law, and psychology faculties, mainly from the 2018 to 2020 cohorts. additionally, most students (92%) reported stress in online learning for 0 7 months after being engaged in online learning. 50.7% of the participants are still motivated by online learning, mainly from the desire to reach one’s dreams and the desire for achievement. for most of the students, their strategies to cope with stress included resting or doing something that they enjoyed. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 43 elgeka & pujibujoyo (psychological distress: the role of self-regulated learning…) table 1 demographic data of participants characteristics n % sex male 138 33.17 female 278 66.83 age 17 1 .2 18 36 8.7 19 110 26.4 20 124 29.8 21 145 34.9 faculty pharmacy 36 8.7 law 82 19.7 business and economics 92 22.1 psychology 80 19.2 engineering 50 12.0 biotechnology 35 8.4 creative industry 34 8.2 medicine 7 1.7 year of study 1st year 119 28.6 2nd year 128 30.8 3rd year 143 34.4 4th year 26 6.3 experiencing stress in online learning yes 386 92.8 no 30 7.2 duration of students’ stress while engaging in online learning 0-3 months 114 27.4 4-7 months 158 38.0 8-11 months 69 16.6 12-15 months 45 10.8 not experiencing stress 30 7.2 desire to learn while in online learning yes 211 50.7 no 41 9.9 maybe 164 39.4 reasons motivating students to learn online (may choose more than one) desire to reach one’s dream 313 39.08 desire for achievement 236 29.46 demands from family 101 12.61 formality 82 10.24 unknown 8 1.00 other 61 7.61 stress coping strategies (may choose more than one) doing something that one enjoys (playing games, watching film/ drama, sports) 492 36.36 rest (sleep, leaving the tasks/ learning for a while, engaging in social media) 597 44.12 “me” time (eating, chatting with friends or families, taking care of one’s own needs) 220 16.26 giving up (leaving the tasks without completing them, copying from friends) 39 2.89 expressing emotions (crying, contemplating) 5 .37 instruments the first instrument used in this study was the depression anxiety stress scale – 21 items (dass-21) adapted in a previous study (muttaqin & ripa, 2021). this instrument measures levels of anxiety, stress, and depression in individuals within one week before completing the survey. the scale consists of 21 items measured with a four-point likert scale (1 = has not occurred to me; 4 = very often occurs to me). an item example included: 44 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) elgeka & pujibudojo (psychological distress: the role of self-regulated learnung…) “i feel difficulty in relaxing.” the discriminating index of items ranges from .435 – .779, with alpha cronbach = .923. dass-21 is a good psychometric scale for measuring depression, anxiety, and stress, whereas each subscale has a specific meaning than others. depression measures the situation, whereas individual experiences self-esteem loss and inadequacy to achieve the goal. anxiety measures the response of individuals when facing a situation that makes them feel anxious. stress measures frustration when an individual keeps under tension tolerance conditions (muttaqin & ripa, 2021). the score of every subscale was calculated by summing up the scores of all items in each subscale. the second instrument used to measure the self-regulated learning variable was the online self-regulated questionnaire (oslq) developed by a previous researcher (barnard et al., 2009). osql was developed for online or blended learning, which has different characteristics from online learning. this instrument consisted of six aspects and 24 items, using a five-point likert scale (1=strongly disagree; 5 = strongly agree). an item example included: “i set clear goals to help me arrange my learning time during online learning.” the discriminating index of items ranges from .310 – .726 with alpha cronbach = .876. data analysis before conducting hypothesis testing, the authors conducted tests of assumption, i.e., normality and linearity. this study employed spearman nonparametric correlation tests for analyzing the data, using the spss application version 21.0 for windows, as the data were not distributed normally. chi-square was conducted to explore the difference of each subscale based on the study cohort. results table 2 shows the category of each variable. it can be seen all variables are in the moderate category, with slightly different trends. table 2 frequency of each variable variable category n % variable category n % selfregulated learning very high 27 6.5 stress extremely severe 26 6.3 high 98 23.6 severe 118 28.4 moderate 182 43.8 moderate 154 37.0 low 74 17.8 mild 78 18.8 very low 35 8.4 normal 40 9.6 anxiety extremely severe 35 8.4 depression extremely severe 46 11.1 severe 96 23.1 severe 78 18.8 moderate 137 32.9 moderate 128 30.8 mild 118 28.4 mild 149 35.8 normal 30 7.2 normal 15 3.6 the average value of students’ self-regulated learning was in the moderate range (43.8%), leaning towards high (23.6%). while students’ anxiety level was in the moderate range (32.9%), leaning towards mild (28.4%). moreover, students’ stress level was in the moderate range (37.0%), leaning towards severe (28.4%). in comparison, depression was in the mild range (35.8%), leaning towards moderate (30.8%). the normality test conducted using the kolmogorov-smirnov test indicated that all variables were not normally distributed (p < .05). the linearity test using curve fit estimates yielded p < .05, explaining that both variables have a linear relationship. however, since the normality test was not met, a nonparametric – spearman rank correlation was conducted to humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 45 elgeka & pujibujoyo (psychological distress: the role of self-regulated learning…) test the hypothesis. the result showed that self-regulating learning only correlated with depression (rho = -.30, p < 0.05). in comparison, self-regulating learning was not correlated with the other two dimensions (see table 3). table 3 the results of spearman rank order correlation variable selfregulated learning anxiety stress depression self-regulated learning anxiety .01 stress -.05 .72** depression -.30** .56** .68** **p < .01 table 4 shows the chi-square analysis on each subscale of psychological distress. it can be seen only depression has differences (χ2 = 8.75, p < .05), in which the third-year students have the highest score of depression than others (m = 228.86). table 4 the results of chi-square characteristics n mean χ2 p anxiety year of study 1st year 119 216.06 1.41 .704 2nd year 128 205.78 3rd year 143 208.63 4th year 26 186.58 stress year of study 1st year 119 195.35 4.73 .193 2nd year 128 207.78 3rd year 143 224.10 4th year 26 186.44 depression year of study 1st year 119 186.04 8.75* .033 2nd year 128 204.04 3rd year 143 228.86 4th year 26 221.29 *p < .05 discussion the results of this study indicated that self-regulated learning is negatively correlated with depression, which means the hypothesis was accepted. self-regulation learning which is students’ capacity to use metacognition, have motivation, and actively participate in the learning process (panadero, 2017), could lead to lower levels of depression. at the same time, the result shows that self-regulated learning among students is at a moderate to high level. at the same time, depression is at a mild to moderate level. several studies in various countries have found that the prevalence of depression in college students continues to increase (eller et al., 2006; ibrahim et al., 2012; reavley & jorm, 2010), particularly during the covid-19 pandemic (hasanah et al., 2020; lopes & nihei, 2021; sahu, 2020; sifat, 2021). students with a high level of self-regulated learning tend to demonstrate better performance in learning and can better adapt to various changes in learning (barnard-brak et al., 2010; biwer et al., 2021; broadbent & fuller-tyszkiewicz, 2018; dörrenbächer & perels, 2016; kitsantas et al., 2008). 46 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) elgeka & pujibudojo (psychological distress: the role of self-regulated learnung…) the adaptation of students supports the assertion that self-regulated learning is one of the key predictors of students’ success in learning (fasikhah & fatimah, 2013; kristiyani, 2016; latipah, 2010; sutikno, 2016), particularly in online learning that demands students’ autonomy (barnard et al., 2009). self-regulated learning allows students to identify their direction for learning, understand their talents and interests through the learning materials, make the learning more interesting, challenging, and fun, and avoid uncertainty, confusion, and disappointment (latipah, 2010; nadhif & rohmatika, 2020). students with low selfregulated learning tend to face problems related to the pressure for achievement, lack of interactivity in instruction, increasing burden of coursework (fawaz & samaha, 2021; qalbu, 2018), low levels of support from friends and family (fawaz & samaha, 2021; van harmelen et al., 2016), lack of self-efficacy, hardiness, optimism, achievement motivation, procrastination, and personality types (sutjiato et al., 2015; yusuf & yusuf, 2020). all these problems make students experience anxiety and depression more easily (islam et al., 2020). it is unavoidable that even though students demonstrated adequate levels of selfregulated learning, most participants reported that they have experienced stress (92.1%) related to online learning, particularly in the first 0 to 7 months of online learning (65.4%). besides that, the previous research found that mental health problems commonly happen at 17-29 years old (beiter et al., 2015; fauziyyah et al., 2021; romadhona et al., 2021), whereas participants in this research aged 19-21 years old. each individual has self-regulated learning, which results in different responses to changes in learning and instructions; some students would have difficulty concentrating or exert great effort in the new learning environment selfadjustment (li et al., 2021; schunk & greene, 2018). as the foundation, the social cognitive framework asserted that individuals should interact adequately between personal, behavioral, and environmental factors to optimize self-regulated learning. however, in reality, students often feel socially isolated and distanced in online learning (li et al., 2021), unable to connect with friends and family, and become more sensitive (meo et al., 2020). a previous study established that students able to adapt to change and choose to learn independently by reducing interaction with classmates and instructors have higher self-regulated learning than their counterparts (broadbent & fuller-tyszkiewicz, 2018). while online learning during the covid-19 pandemic is not by choice, using self-regulated learning strategies has become a crucial matter to consider by all educational institutions (barak et al., 2016; broadbent & fuller-tyszkiewicz, 2018; delen et al., 2014; lin & tsai, 2016) data demographics showed a difference in depression in cohort years, especially in the third year of study (m = 228.86), which has the highest mean rank of depression. in 2018, students had face-to-face learning, which is teacher-centered learning (focusing exclusively on instructions and guidelines from teachers). however, in 2020 the condition changed. online learning is student-centered, whereas tools can carry out student evaluations, and students can access information from various documents. besides that, the quality of learning depends on the teachers' level of digital training and teaching style (gherheș et al., 2021). in online learning, students might focus less and miss deadlines for different tasks (nazarlou, 2013). students with solid and clear learning objectives, e.g., having a strong desire to reach their goals or dreams and desire for achievement (68.54%), tended to have greater resilience in online learning. students with the skills and strategies for self-regulated learning could focus on reaching their academic performance (barnard-brak et al., 2010). however, problems would often occur throughout the online learning process. network connectivity, limitations in completing group assignments, delivery of materials not as straightforward as in offline instructions, changes in academic calendar and scheduling, and an overwhelming amount of assignments may cause anxiety, stress, and depression for students (fauziyyah et al., 2021; kartika, 2020). students employ various strategies to reduce their stress levels in online learning, including rest, doing things they enjoy, and engaging in “me time” activities. the students humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 47 elgeka & pujibujoyo (psychological distress: the role of self-regulated learning…) prefer to leave the tasks or activities related to learning and do hobbies and sports, giving them a chance for oneself to relax and communicate with friends or families. the strategy that focuses on problems is usually used by individuals when dealing with various events that cause stress and can be controlled (basith et al., 2021). on the contrary, an individual might use emotion-focused coping to reduce the emotional distress associated with a stressful situation. in emotion-focused coping, an individual cannot control the situation that is the source of the stressor (bakhtiar & asriani, 2015). the limitation of this research is that researchers only analyze the impact of selfregulated learning on psychological distress without using other antecedents to give a comprehensive perspective of students' psychological distress during online learning and the difficulties when adapting. besides, the data demographic of students' coping strategies during the covid-19 pandemic is not analyzed profoundly. further research involves life satisfaction, general health, teaching technique, and coping strategies during the transition period between online learning to face-to-face learning that will impact college students' lives. conclusion online learning during the covid-19 pandemic impact college students' lives, including psychological distress (depression, anxiety, and stress). depression in a different year of study happened, especially for the third year, and mostly had mild to moderate depression. students' capacity to be motivated and actively participate in the learning process impact their performance in learning and their ability to adapt to various changes in learning. selfregulated learning allows the student to identify the direction for learning, talents, and interests through the learning materials, making them easy to adapt to every circumstance. in turn, the higher the self-regulated learning, the lower depression among students, and vice versa. acknowledgment the authors would like to thank the university of surabaya for the internal grants obtained, all students of the university of surabaya who have been willing to assist in data collection, and all the university of surabaya lecturers who have been willing to distribute the questionnaire to their students. declarations author contribution. hwse designed the research, collected and analyzed the data, and wrote the article. jkp conducted the data collection process. funding statement. this research was funded by the research and community service institution (lppm) of the university of surabaya. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references anthony, e. 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(2008). investigating self-regulation and motivation: historical background, methodological developments, and future prospects. american educational research journal, 45(1), 166–183. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831207312909 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0153715 https://doi.org/10.1002/jcop.22561 https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831207312909 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 21 (1), february 2024, 91-99 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i1.394 exposure to violent video and aggressive behavior among public secondary students, kwara state, nigeria samuel kolawole ajiboye1*, oluwatoni esorun2, bolaji oladejo3 1department of counsellor education, university of ilorin, nigeria. 2saskatoon open door society, saskatoon, saskatchewan, canada. 3command science secondary school, saki, oyo state, nigeria corresponding author: ajiboye.sk@unilorin.edu.ng*, toniesorun@gmail.com, bolajioladejo2015@gmail.com this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction a conducive school environment is a major factor that enhances adequate teaching and learning among teachers and students, respectively. therefore, the school is always expected to be a space where students can enjoy protection, calmness, and violence-free educational activities. however, the phenomenon of aggressive behavior among students has become an issue of concern to stakeholders because of the multiplier effects on the students (both the victims and perpetrators). while the victims may develop aversive behavior towards article info abstract article history received march 22, 2023 revised june 3, 2023 accepted august 1, 2023 aggressive behavior is a range of acts that result in physical and psychological harm to the perpetrator, and other students, thus hindering learning activities. this study investigated the relationship between exposure to violent videos and aggressive behavior among public secondary students in kwara state, nigeria. the survey method with a correlational design was adopted. a total sample of 381 participants was involved using the stratified random sampling technique. a research-designed questionnaire titled exposure to violent videos and aggressive behaviour questionnaire (evabq) was used to collect the data. pearson’s product-moment correlation and t-test statistics were used to analyze the hypotheses. results revealed a positive relationship between exposure to violent videos and aggressive behavior. the results showed statistically significant differences in exposure to violent videos and aggressive behavior among public secondary students based on gender and age. male respondents were more exposed to violent videos and had more aggressive behavior than females. in contrast, students below 15 years old were more exposed to violent videos and exhibited aggressive behavior than 15 years and above. therefore, school counselors should sensitize public secondary students to the influence of exposure to violent videos on aggressive behavior, especially among males and students below 15 years old. keywords aggressive behavior; exposure; violent video. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i1.394 mailto:ajiboye.sk@unilorin.edu.ng mailto:toniesorun@gmail.com https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 92 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) samuel kolawole ajiboye et.al (exposure to violent video and aggressive behavior among public…) attending school because of fear of being attacked, the aggressor, on the other hand, might be afraid of punishments due to involvement in aggressive behavior (rakhmi, 2020). aggressive behavior is an antisocial, deviant, and unacceptable act that hinders students' teaching and learning activities. aggression could be viewed as any behavior or action aimed at harming a person or damaging physical property (rakhmi, 2020). it is characterized by acts of physical violence, shouting, swearing, harsh language, gossiping or spreading rumors about a classmate, and purposely breaking the classmate’s property, among others. aggression may involve deliberate and unjustified physical or emotionally violent actions directed at someone of the weaker ability to protect or defend self. thus, aggression occurs when an imbalance in strength reflects enforced subordination and dominance. the stronger students could unjustly dominate weak colleagues, causing them (the latter) to develop fear and subsequent school avoidance behavior in some cases. nevertheless, aggression could also be extended to someone of more strength and domination. in most cases, the purpose of aggression is to express anger toward another person. aggression is a form of maladaptive behavior among students with debilitating consequences on the victims' academic, social, and emotional performances. this phenomenon occurs more often among secondary school students owing to their levels of reasoning as young boys and girls in school. aggressive behavior involves direct and indirect actions: direct form involves hitting, kicking, offensive sarcasm, and threat, while indirect action involves destroying relationships, humiliation, intimidation, and others. if factors associated with aggressive behavior could be identified, there can be opportunities for stakeholders in the education sector to proffer solutions to the phenomenon. the contents of violent videos, especially students' exposure to these movies and games, may predict their subsequent aggressive behavior. the impact of violent videos on maladaptive behavior among students cannot be overemphasized due to the imitation of characters in violencefocused scenes. exposure to violent media can potentially influence many unpleasant behaviors, including aggressiveness. both online and offline videos have become major sources of entertainment, especially for school-age children. videos could come in different ways depending on the producer's intention and the circumstances that motivated the production. nevertheless, violent videos are prevalent in the film industry owing to the fact that young boys and girls enjoy viewing them because of curiosity. violent movies and games are prevalent among young students because they like fantasy and enjoy imitation more than adults (hassan et al., 2009). the crux is that the contents of most of these movies or games are violence-related. thus, the term violent video (both movies and games) describes the phenomenon since violent movies or games dominate the sites. in some cases, students might get exposed to violent videos unintentionally but as a way of catching fun with friends. however, how they get involved would not matter but how much they spend their time watching such movies or playing games. in addition, because of their age and stage of development, secondary school students are likely to be influenced by violent scenes they view and engage in for whatever reasons (shao & wang, 2019). by way of description, video movies and games are considered violent when the activities therein depict intentional attempts by actors (human and non-human) to inflict harm on others. in some instances, the scenes may involve extreme violence, such as criminal acts, which the viewers may consider harmless since they enjoy watching the movies or playing the games. 80% of the most popular video or online movies or games in the market are violent in nature (dietz, 1998). different authors have categorized various types of video movies. these violent video movies can be viewed or played as games on various devices such as arcade machines, computers, home consoles, over the internet, mobile phone devices, and others. this condition makes the videos simply accessible to secondary school students because they can easily use various devices as much as they desire, especially in the 21st century’s rapid knowledge of technology. videos with social and educative or pure fun could humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 93 samuel kolawole ajiboye et.al (exposure to violent video and aggressive behavior among public…) be worth viewing (kubey & larson, 1990). still, movies that contain violent and offensive messages are useless to students because they could be influenced negatively. twelve types of videos students use are animation, stop motion, mixed media, screencast, animated demo, live action, live stream, interactive, 360, vr, whiteboard, and videographic (shao & wang, 2019). while the game can influence acts of sadism in the players owing to the pleasure of torture derivable from the game scenes. another violent video game that students commonly play is hitman, in which players of this game learn the art of cold-blood assassination because the hitman would have to engage many destructive weapons, such as knives, guns, clubs, and explosives. there are many other violent video movies and games, but the common factor in video games’ contents, which depict aggression, chaos, conflicts, destruction, and callousness, can induce trauma (oskenbay et al., 2016). the exposure of secondary school students to violent videos can potentially influence different maladaptive behaviors, especially aggressiveness (shao & wang, 2019). initial viewing of violent videos may often persuade students to increase the amount of time spent watching because the horrors, actions, and unrealistic dramas contained which would continually trigger curiosity and subsequent obsession when viewing the movies, and even after, the students learn the behavior of the actors in the scenes regardless of its unacceptability. this influence occurs through imitation, demonstration, and internalization of violent acts. thus, it becomes easier for students who view violent videos to be involved in aggressive behavior. this condition supports the view of the social learning movement that learning takes place through observation and imitation. social learning theory proposes that learning occurs through observation, imitation, and modeling and is influenced by factors such as attention, motivation, attitudes, and emotions (cilliers, 2021). the theory accounts for the interaction of environmental and cognitive elements that affect people's learning. people observe behavior either directly through social interactions with others or indirectly by observing behaviors through media (cilliers, 2021). actions that are rewarded are more likely to be imitated, while those that are punished are avoided. thus, students are likely to behave differently from the videos they watch and exhibit some of what has been learned, regardless of the acceptability. due to different factors, students in public secondary schools are more likely to be exposed to video viewing than their counterparts in private schools. first, most public schools have shorter school times, allowing students to engage in other activities such as video viewing to catch fun or play games. secondly, the population of students in public schools is always large, making it difficult to monitor every student's activities; some of them could engage in video viewing on cell phones or even sneak out of the school to video viewing centers. other factors predispose public secondary school students to video exposure, especially violent videos, such as accessibility to video centers and peer influence. a previous study on attitude and motivation for social networks among secondary school students in oredo local government area of edo state found that male respondents engaged more on social networks while younger students were motivated to engage on social networks owing to loose schedules (omorogbe & iguodala, 2018). literature has shown the association between exposure to video movies and maladaptive behaviors. a longitudinal study of 450 children about their media habits and aggressive behavior found that aggressive behavior in adulthood could be predicted by how many violent movies one has watched as a child (huesmann & taylor, 2014). thus, exposure to violent videos by secondary school students could potentially put them at risk of exhibiting aggressive behavior in adulthood. a cross-sectional study in riyadh, saudi arabia, among public and private high school students on the relationship between video game use and aggressive behavior found a positive relationship between the use of video games and aggressive behavior, with a significant difference between male and female respondents as well as participants in different levels of education (al-harbi, 2019). a previous study also 94 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) samuel kolawole ajiboye et.al (exposure to violent video and aggressive behavior among public…) found a positive correlation between media violence exposure and school aggression, with more male respondents alluding to exposure to media violence and perpetrating school aggression (baker & ayyd, 2018). further, a study found that playing violent video games increased aggressive behavior, aggressive affect, aggressive cognition, and psychological arousal (anderson & bushman, 2001). another study among saudi arabian youth in riyadh found that playing video games increased aggressive behaviors (aleissa et al., 2022). previous studies have different results on the difference in aggressive behavior based on gender. a study found no difference between male and female participants’ exposure to violent media use (northup, 2013). however, in another study, males chose more physically aggressive methods than females, though verbal aggression is prominent among females, in which male bullies assembled a group of followers and enjoyed a status fight (rakhmi, 2020). several studies on aggressive behavior have been conducted in nigeria. a study in six public secondary schools in ogun state, nigeria, found a high prevalence of aggressive behavior among students (owoaje & ndubusi, 2010). in benin city, nigeria, four in every five school children reported having suffered from the aggressive behavior of other schoolmates (egbochuku, 2007). a study among the students of babcock university nigeria found an inverse relationship between the amount of time spent viewing violent movies and the level of aggressive behavior (brown & marin, 2009). a study among adolescents in calabar municipality and calabar south local government areas, cross river state, nigeria, revealed that violent videos are significantly related to violent behaviors and substance abuse among adolescents (nkang et al., 2015). previous studies revealed a correlation between violent video viewing and deviant behaviors (such as aggressiveness, aggression, substance abuse, and other behaviors). therefore, this study deemed it fit to investigate the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggressive behavior among public secondary school students in kwara state, nigeria. thus, the following hypotheses were formulated and tested in the study: 1. there is no significant relationship between exposure to violent videos and aggressive behavior among public secondary school students in kwara state, nigeria. 2. there is no significant difference in the exposure to violent videos among public secondary school students in kwara state, nigeria, based on gender. 3. there is no significant difference in the aggressive behavior of public secondary school students in kwara state, nigeria, based on gender. 4. there is no significant difference in exposure to violent videos among public secondary school students in kwara state, nigeria, based on age. 5. there is no significant difference in the aggressive behavior of public secondary school students in kwara state, nigeria, based on age. method research design the survey method with a correlational design was adopted for this study. the respondents' informed consent was obtained to fulfill ethical procedures. participants the study population comprised all senior secondary school students in kwara state, which amounted to 25,618 students (male= 13,760; female= 11,858). three hundred eighty-one samples were prescribed for a population of this magnitude at a 5.0% margin of error and 95% confidence level (krejcie & morgan, 1970). the purposive sampling technique was used to select secondary schools with heterogeneous populations. further stratified randomization was adopted to select the participants across the moderating variables of the study. table 1 shows the distribution of respondents based on gender and age. the percentage of male humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 95 samuel kolawole ajiboye et.al (exposure to violent video and aggressive behavior among public…) respondents is slightly higher than that of females. in contrast, the percentage of respondents below 15 years old is twice that of 15 years old and above. table 1 distribution of respondents based on gender and age variable f % gender male 209 54.9 female 172 45.1 n 381 100.0 age below 15 years 264 69.3 15 years and above 117 30.7 n 381 100.0 instrument the researchers-designed structured questionnaire type of instrument entitled “exposure to violence video and aggressive behavior questionnaire (evabq)” was used to collect the required information from the respondents. examples of the items are: “i watch videos that involve fighting”; and “i hit other students like the scenes i watched in videos.” after being subjected to the test-retest procedure, the 30-item (15 items on exposure to violence videos and aggressive behaviour each) questionnaire possessed a reliability coefficient of .83. data analysis pearson product moment correlation (ppmc) was applied to test hypothesis one. at the same time, the t-test statistic was used to test hypotheses two to five. results the pearson product moment correlation results in table 2 reveal a calculated r = .37, critical r = .19, and p = .00. since the calculated r is greater than the critical r at p = .00 (p < .05), the null hypothesis was therefore rejected. there is a significant positive relationship between exposure to violent videos and aggressive behavior among public secondary school students. table 2 relationship between exposure to violent video and aggressive behavior among public secondary school students in kwara state, nigeria  sd df cal. r crit. r p exposure to violent video 43.81 7.30 379 .37 .19 .00 aggressive behavior 47.11 5.69 the result in table 3 revealed a significant difference between males and females in their exposure to violent video (p = .00). male respondents are more exposed to violent video than their female counterparts. table 3 the mean, standard deviation, and t-test on exposure to violent video based on gender gender n  sd df cal. t crit. t p male 209 44.58 6.13 96 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) samuel kolawole ajiboye et.al (exposure to violent video and aggressive behavior among public…) 379 2.16 1.96 .00 female 172 38.70 7.42 the result in table 4 shows a significant difference in respondents' aggressive behavior based on gender (p <.05). male ( =47.56) has more aggressive behavior than female ( =45.03). table 4 mean, standard deviation, and t-test on aggressive behavior based on gender gender n  sd df cal. t crit. t p male 209 47.56 5.92 379 2.01 1.96 .04 female 172 45.03 5.61 table 5 shows a significant difference in exposure to violent video based on age (p = .00)). however, respondents below 15 years old ( = 50.37) are more exposed to violent video than those 15 years old and above ( = 42.08). table 5 mean, standard deviation, and t-test on exposure to violent video based on age age n  sd df cal. t crit. t p below 15yrs old 264 50.37 6.26 379 3.12 1.9 .00 15yrs old and above 117 42.08 7.14 the result in table 6 reveals that the null hypothesis was rejected (p = .00). hence, there was a significant difference in the aggressive behavior of public secondary school students in kwara state, nigeria, based on age. respondents below 15 years old ( = 48.79) showed more aggressive behavior than those 15 years old and above ( = 43.06). table 6 mean, standard deviation, and t-test on aggressive behavior based on age age n  sd df cal. t crit. t p below 15yrs old 264 48.79 7.01 379 2.89 1.96 .00 15yrs old and above 117 43.06 5.57 discussion the findings of this study revealed a positive association between exposure to violent videos and aggressive behavior among public secondary school students. this result implies that the more students are exposed to violent videos, the possibility of a higher exhibition of aggressive behavior, and vice versa. the contents of violent videos that the students are exposed to could significantly trigger different aggressive behavior as a way of imitating the violent characters in the scene. thus, exposure to violence on television, cellular phones, movies, video games, or the internet would increase the risk of aggressive behavior, humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 97 samuel kolawole ajiboye et.al (exposure to violent video and aggressive behavior among public…) especially among adolescents exuberance. this finding agrees with the results of a metaanalysis that exposure to violent movies and games is related to increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive affect, aggressive cognition, and psychological arousal (anderson & bushman, 2001). further, this study's findings support the previous study's result that involvement in violent videos increased aggressive behaviors among youth in riyadh, saudi arabia (aleissa et al., 2022). the result of null hypothesis 2 revealed a significant difference between male and female public secondary school students in the exposure to violent video. male participants are more exposed to violent videos than their female counterparts. one may attribute the reason to the fact that the masculine nature of male students would predispose them to hard tasks as contained in violent videos, hence the source of their motivation for seeking to watch such movies (shao & wang, 2019). on the other hand, females are likely to prefer movies that contain mild activities such as domestic activities and vocational training. the present study's finding negates the previous study, which found no difference between male and female participants’ exposure to violent media use (northup, 2013). the result of null hypothesis 3 revealed a significant difference between male and female respondents in their aggressive behavior. the male has more aggressive behavior than the female. this result may owe to the fact that male students engage in violent physical activities more than female group probably because of masculinity's strength, which is more domicile in males. this result aligns with an earlier study that reported that males chose more physically aggressive methods than females, though verbal aggression is prominent among them (rakhmi, 2020). thus, aggressive behavior could be viewed as a phenomenon typical of male students. the null hypothesis 4 revealed a significant difference in exposure to violent video based on age. thus, respondents below age 15 were more exposed to violent videos than counterparts aged 15 and above. one may ascribe the reason to the fact that public secondary school students aged 15 and above are much more likely to be in senior classes, which involves preparation for external examinations that determine the fulfillment of their aspiration in life, such as career since the result of such examinations are used for admission into higher education as well as job placements. those below 15 years old are likely to still have the luxury of time to engage in violent video since they are only writing school-based examinations. unlikely private secondary school students who are adequately monitored and taught public secondary school students may not likely be restricted or strictly engaged, promoting students’ exposure to various videos (omorogbe & iguodala, 2018). the result of null hypothesis 5 revealed a significant difference in aggressive behavior among public secondary school students based on age. respondents below 15 years old have more aggressive behavior than counterparts aged 15 years and above. as reflected in this study, where public secondary school students below 15 years old are exposed more to violent video, such conditions may be responsible for their involvement in aggressive behavior more than those of 15 years old and above. this finding suggests that younger students perpetuate aggressive behavior more than older ones. this result supports the findings of a previous study that aggressive behavior is exhibited differently across variables such as gender and age (rakhmi, 2020). this study's findings imply that school counselors sensitize public secondary school students to the positive correlation between exposure to violent videos and aggressive behavior. when working on solutions to exposure to violent videos and aggressive behavior among students, attention should be placed more on males and students below 15 years. counselors should collaborate with other agencies to develop regulatory policies on students’ access to violent videos. however, this study has several limitations. this study was only concentrated on public secondary school students and left out their counterparts in private schools, thereby limiting the findings to the former. in addition, just a fraction (sample) of the population was used in the study, which could affect the generalization of the findings. 98 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) samuel kolawole ajiboye et.al (exposure to violent video and aggressive behavior among public…) the instrument was developed by the self-developed by the researchers and not adopted nor adapted from existing types. conclusion the study concluded that exposure to violent videos would increase the exhibition of aggressive behavior among students, which portends danger to teaching and learning in schools. thus, the more students are exposed to violent videos, the higher the tendency for aggressive behavior, and vice versa. in addition, male students and those below 15 years old are likely always to be exposed to violent videos and aggressive behavior, which suggests that more attention is required on these students in relation to the phenomenon. acknowledgment we acknowledge the kwara state ministry of human capital development and principals of the secondary schools that were involved in this study form the permission granted to conduct this study in their schools. equally, we appreciate the willingness and cooperation of all the respondents in this study. we as well acknowledge the department of counsellor education, university of ilorin for introducing the researchers to the institutions used in this study. finally, we appreciate the reviewers of this article for their useful suggestions. declarations author contribution. first author is the main coordinator of the team and originator of the topic and concept, developer of the background to the study, interpretation and discussion of findings as well as funding of publication fees. second author participated in the development of the research objectives, question, hypotheses, data analysis as well as funding of publication fees. third author participated in data collection, analysis, discussion of findings as well as funding of publication fees. funding statement. the authors did not receive funding for research, manuscript writing, and publication of this article. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references aleissa, m. a., alenezi, s., saleheen, h. n., bin talib, s. r., khan, a. h., altassan, s. a., & alyahya, a. s. 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(2019). the relation of violent video games to adolescent aggression: an examination of moderated mediation effect. frontiers in psychology, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00384 https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.606533 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1018709905920 https://doi.org/10.1080/09718923.2007.11978400 https://doi.org/10.1177/009365090017001006 https://doi.org/10.58464/2155-5834.1123 https://doi.org/10.1136/ip.2010.029215.610 https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.200120.042 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00384 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 19 (2), august 2022, 148-160 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i2.49 coping strategies to predict the psychological well-being of college students during the covid-19 pandemic karina angelica, monique elizabeth sukamto, clara citra chandra, kelvin andrea faculty of psychology, universitas surabaya, indonesia corresponding author: monique@staff.ubaya.ac.id introduction the emergence of the covid-19 pandemic has led to the implementation of physical distancing in indonesia through work from home (wfh) and study from home (sfh) policies. these policies also affect the learning process in higher education by implementing distance or online learning. previous studies on college students in several regions in indonesia, such as lampung, medan, and jakarta, showed that students experienced mild, moderate, to severe anxiety and stress in undergoing distance or online learning during the covid-19 pandemic (harahap et al., 2020; nurcita & susantiningsih, 2021). when carrying out online education, college students experience constraints, including difficulty concentrating and understanding lecture material, unstable internet signals and networks, less than optimal lectures in explaining lecture material, and too many assignments with short deadlines (hasanah et al., 2020). the psychological impacts of the covid-19 pandemic on college students have also been extensively studied in various countries, including italy as the first country to implement a lockdown in europe (villani et al., 2021). a study among 787 university students in australia shows that 31.5% of study participants had very low well-being (dodd et al., 2021). research on 291 first-year college students in france showed that most art icle info ab st r act article history received december 28, 2021 revised july 14, 2022 accepted july 22, 2022 the covid-19 pandemic in indonesia has forced college students to undergo online learning. various problems that arise due to this pandemic, especially those related to academic achievement, can disrupt the students' psychological well-being. this study investigated coping strategies' role in predicting college students' psychological well-being during the pandemic's first wave. two hundred eleven students participated online in this quantitative study and completed the shortened version of the psychological well-being scale and the brief cope inventory. the regression analysis results show that problem-focused coping strategies, such as planning and the use of instrumental support, significantly predict the increase in female students' psychological well-being. in contrast, only active coping positively predicts psychological well-being in male students. dysfunctional coping strategies, such as behavioral disengagement and denial, significantly predict the decline in female students' psychological well-being. on the other hand, venting showed a significant role in predicting the increased psychological well-being of female students. emotion-focused coping strategies do not significantly predict psychological well-being in female and male students. therefore, regarding the psychological well-being of college students during the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic, coping strategies, especially problem-focused and dysfunctional strategies, contribute differently to female and male students. keywords college students; coping strategy; covid-19; online learning; psychological well-being. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v19i2.31 mailto:monique@staff.ubaya.ac.id humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 149 angelica et.al. (coping strategies to predict the psychological well-being of college students…) participants reported increased anxiety and moderate to severe stress levels since the beginning of the covid-19 confinement period (husky et al., 2020). a literature review of eleven studies conducted in several countries found that the psychological effects of the covid-19 pandemic on college students were anxiety, depression, stress, post-traumatic stress disorder, and post-traumatic growth (ratunuman et al., 2021). first-year female college students were more likely to have higher anxiety, depression, stress, and posttraumatic stress disorder than male and older students. according to research on jordanian undergraduate students, the transition to online learning during the covid-19 pandemic caused several problems, which include technology, mental health, time management, and balancing life and education (maqableh & alia, 2021). dissatisfaction among students was caused by distraction and reduced focus, technology and internet connectivity issues, insufficient support, increased workload, increased difficulty in exams and quizzes, poor interaction with colleagues and lecturers, psychological issues, and management. moreover, the covid-19 pandemic impacted the psychological well-being of university students (ebrahim et al., 2022). these various psychological impacts can interfere with the psychological well-being of college students. according to ryff and keyes (1995), psychological well-being is a multidimensional domain. psychological well-being includes self-acceptance, environmental mastery, purpose in life, positive relations with others, personal growth (sustainable growth and development), and autonomy (the capacity for self-determination). previous studies have shown that college students' psychological well-being can be influenced by several factors, including social support and religiosity (abdillah et al., 2021; eva et al., 2020), stress, and emotional regulation (gunawan & bintari, 2021), academic stress (pratiwi et al., 2021), and coping strategies (abbas et al., 2020; abdillah et al., 2021; guszkowska & dąbrowska-zimakowska, 2022; pratiwi et al., 2021; sagone & de caroli, 2014). research by abdillah et al. (2021) on 145 college students in surakarta showed coping strategies mediated by the correlation between religiosity and psychological wellbeing. coping strategies and academic stress could also be significant predictors of the psychological well-being of first-year students in yogyakarta during the pandemic (pratiwi et al., 2021). problem-focused coping strategies, emotion-focused coping strategies, and dysfunctional coping strategies are the three main types of coping strategies (carver, 1997; carver et al., 1989). problem-focused coping strategies include active coping, the use of instrumental support, and planning, all of which aim to solve a problem or change the source of stress. active coping is the process of taking active steps, such as taking immediate action, increasing one's efforts, and gradually increasing one's coping efforts to eliminate or avoid a stressor or reduce its effects. the use of instrumental support is an attempt to seek advice, assistance, or information. in contrast, planning is thinking about how to deal with the stressor, which involves developing an action plan, deciding steps to take, and determining the best way to deal with the problem. emotion-focused coping strategies include using emotional support, religion, humor, acceptance, and positive reframing to reduce or manage the emotional distress associated with a situation. dysfunctional coping strategies refer to coping strategies that are only felt helpful at first but ineffective if used continuously or in the long term, such as self-distraction, behavioral disengagement, denial, substance use, self-blame, and venting (carver, 1997; carver et al., 1989). self-distraction or mental disengagement is an act of doing various alternative activities to distract a person from a problem or task. the activities include daydreaming, escaping through sleep, or watching tv. behavioral disengagement is a reduction in a person's efforts to deal with stressors or complete cessation of efforts to 150 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) angelica et.al. (coping strategies to predict the psychological well-being of college students…) achieve goals disrupted by stressors. behavioral disengagement is frequently associated with feelings of helplessness and is most likely to occur when people anticipate poor coping outcomes. denial is not accepting a stressor or problem or attempting to act as if the stressor did not exist. unless the stressor can be profitably ignored, this strategy only creates additional problems because denying the reality of the event allows the event to become more serious, making it more difficult to cope. similarly, focusing on and venting emotions (e.g., distress or upset) can hinder adjustment and distract people from active coping efforts to get out of problems if used for long periods. a study of 183 italian college students aged 20 to 26 showed that the reinterpretation coping strategy (problem-focused coping) predicted increased psychological well-being. still, the avoidance coping strategy (dysfunctional coping) negatively predicted psychological well-being (sagone & de caroli, 2014). thus, college students, who expressed a state of psychological well-being, actively deal with problems and stressful events without using avoidance and escape strategies. research on 198 first-year university students in yogyakarta during the pandemic showed that academic stress negatively predicted psychological well-being, whereas coping strategies positively predicted psychological well-being (pratiwi et al., 2021). first-year students who could carry out effective coping strategies would have increased psychological well-being. a study of 1330 polish university students aged 18 to 30 found that maladaptive coping was the strongest negative predictor, whereas coping by positive reappraisals and coping by actions were positively significant but less predictive for the students' psychological well-being during the second wave of the covid-19 pandemic (guszkowska & dąbrowska-zimakowska, 2022). in this study, maladaptive coping includes behavioral disengagement, self-blaming, denial, substance use, and venting. in comparison, coping by positive reappraisals were humor, acceptance, and positive reframing. in contrast, coping by actions were active coping, physical activity, planning, and doing something else. studies on coping strategies' role in predicting college students' psychological wellbeing in indonesia and other countries were quite often conducted before the covid-19 pandemic (abbas et al., 2020; abdillah et al., 2021; sagone & de caroli, 2014). however, similar studies on college students during the pandemic were relatively few (guszkowska & dąbrowska-zimakowska, 2022; pratiwi et al., 2021). pratiwi et al. (2021) showed that coping strategies could contribute as a predictor of psychological well-being in undergraduate students, especially freshmen, in yogyakarta, but this study examined coping strategies as a whole. this study aimed to investigate the role of coping strategies classified into three types: problem-focused, emotion-focused, and dysfunctional coping strategies to predict psychological well-being in college students during the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic. this study also explored the problems experienced by students during the first wave of the pandemic. previous studies showed gender differences in the use of coping strategies (carver et al., 1989; guszkowska & dąbrowska-zimakowska, 2022; sagone & de caroli, 2014). therefore, this study examined the role of each coping strategy used by female and male students to predict their psychological well-being. method participants participants in this study were 211 indonesian college students (153 females and 58 males) aged 18 to 26 years. the determination of the total participants was obtained through the calculation of g*power 3.1.9.7 (α error probability = .05; power (1-β error probability) = humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 151 angelica et.al. (coping strategies to predict the psychological well-being of college students…) .95) and resulted in a minimum target of 197 participants. the inclusion criteria of this study were male and female students aged 18 to 30 actively participating in online lectures due to the pandemic. data collection was carried out by distributing online questionnaires using google forms to undergraduate students via line and instagram in november 2020. instruments the questionnaire in this study consisted of two scales, i.e., the brief cope inventory and psychological well-being scale, and some additional questions regarding demographic data, such as gender, age, class, and students' residence during the pandemic. in addition, there was also a question about the problems experienced by students during the pandemic: "during this pandemic period, what problems made you stressed or burdened the most?" students could answer this question according to the problems they subjectively experienced or perceived. they were allowed to choose more than one answer from the eleven available options, including 'other' and 'none' (see table 1). the 'other' option was provided so that students could add their answers freely if they were having problems that were not included in the answer choices. coping strategies were measured using the 28-item brief cope inventory (carver, 1997) with a likert scale model (1 = i haven't been doing this at all; 2 = i've been doing this a little bit; 3 = i've been doing this a medium amount; 4 = i've been doing this a lot). this scale consists of 14 subscales, each of which contains two items. carver (1997) categorized 14 subscales into three broad categories of coping strategies, e.g., emotion-focused, problem-focused, and dysfunctional coping strategies. acceptance, the use of emotional support, humor, positive reframing, and religion are subscales categorized under emotionfocused coping strategies. active coping, planning and the use of instrumental support are subscales categorized in problem-focused coping strategies. the other six subscales, selfdistraction, behavioral disengagement, denial, substance use, self-blame, and venting, are categorized as dysfunctional coping strategies. the reliability coefficient (α) in the current sample for each dimension is .701 for dysfunctional coping, .680 for problem-focused coping, and .604 for emotion-focused coping without omitting any items. psychological well-being was measured using a shortened version of the psychological well-being scale (ryff et al., 2021). this short version of the scale consists of 18 items with a likert scale model of 1-7 (1 = strongly agree; 2 = somewhat agree; 3 = a little agree; 4 = neither agree or disagree; 5 = a little disagree; 6 = somewhat disagree ; 7 = strongly disagree). this psychological well-being scale consists of six subscales with three items each. the subscales are autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations with others, purpose in life, and self-acceptance. some items need to be reverse-scored. cronbach's alpha for the current sample is .821 after dropping one item (10) because it had a negative discrimination index. data analysis the data collected was then analyzed. multiple regression analysis was applied to analyze the data using spss (version 25; ibm corp. 2016). results in this study sample, the mean age of the participants was 20 years (sd = 1.32). most participants were female students (72.5%) from the 2017 intake year (32.7%) and lived at their parent's house during the pandemic (88.2%). based on table 1, the most frequently reported problems that made students feel stressed or burdened during the pandemic were many difficult tasks to do, lack of time and discipline, difficulty in understanding lecture 152 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) angelica et.al. (coping strategies to predict the psychological well-being of college students…) material, inability to meet friends, and declining mental health conditions, and financial situation. most of these problems were related to academic matters. table 1 characteristics of participants characteristics female male total n (153) % (72.5) n (58) % (27.5) n (211) % age (years) 18 17 11.1 5 8.6 22 10.4 19 50 32.7 14 24.1 64 30.3 20 26 17.0 17 29.3 43 20.4 21 43 28.1 17 29.3 60 28.4 22 15 9.8 2 3.4 17 8.1 23 2 1.3 1 1.7 3 1.4 25 0 0 1 1.7 1 0.5 26 0 0 1 1.7 1 0.5 intake year 2016 2 1.3 2 3.4 4 1.9 2017 54 35.3 15 25.9 69 32.7 2018 31 20.3 16 27.6 47 22.3 2019 47 30.7 20 34.5 67 31.8 2020 19 12.4 5 8.6 24 11.4 where to stay during the pandemic at home with family 136 88.9 50 86.2 186 88.2 at a relative's house 4 2.6 1 1.7 5 2.4 boarding house 10 6.5 6 10.3 16 7.6 other 3 2.0 1 1.7 4 1.9 problems during the pandemic many difficult tasks to do 119 77.8 44 75.9 163 77.3 lack of time and discipline 103 67.3 33 56.9 136 64.5 difficulty in understanding lecture material 96 62.7 34 58.6 130 61.6 unable to meet friends 90 58.8 35 60.3 125 59.2 declining mental health conditions 72 47.1 30 51.7 102 48.3 financial condition 70 45.8 28 48.3 98 46.4 declining grades 44 28.8 15 25.9 59 28.0 declining physical health conditions 31 20.3 10 17.2 41 19.4 worsening relationship with family 23 15.0 7 12.1 30 14.2 other 7 4.6 3 5.2 10 4.7 none 1 0.7 0 0 1 0.5 the role of coping strategy dimensions on psychological well-being the regression analysis in table 2 examined the effect of each coping strategy dimension on psychological well-being in total participants, female participants, and male participants. in total participants, problem-focused coping strategies showed a significant positive effect (β = .387, p = .001), while dysfunctional coping strategies had a significant negative effect (β = -.285, p = .001) on psychological well-being. in female participants, problem-focused coping strategies also showed a significant positive effect (β = .376, p = .001), whereas the effect of dysfunctional coping strategies on psychological well-being was negatively significant (β = .337, p = .001). emotion-focused humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 153 angelica et.al. (coping strategies to predict the psychological well-being of college students…) coping strategies did not show significant effects on psychological well-being, both in total (β = .114, p = .129) and female participants (β = .135, p = .115). slightly different in male participants, only problem-focused coping strategies showed a significant positive effect (β = .430, p = .008) on psychological well-being, while the effect of dysfunctional coping strategies (β = -.165 p = .171) and emotion-focused coping strategies (β = .058, p = .711) were not significant. table 2 regression analysis of each dimension of coping strategies on psychological well-being participants predictors standardized coefficients beta (β) t sig. r r square f (sig.) total pcs .387 5.189 .001** .545 .297 29.154 (.001**) dcs -.285 -4.883 .001** ecs .114 1.524 .129 female students pcs .376 4.421 .001** .576 .332 24.633 (.001**) dcs -.337 -5.028 .001** ecs .135 1.584 .115 male students pcs .430 2.771 .008** .496 .246 5.888 (.001**) dcs -.165 -1.387 .171 ecs .058 .372 .711 note: dependent variable: psychological well-being; pcs = problem-focused coping strategies; dcs = dysfunctional coping strategies; ecs = emotion-focused coping strategies * p < .05 ** p < .01 the role of problem-focused and dysfunctional coping strategies on psychological well-being the regression analysis in table 3 showed the effect of each problem-focused coping strategy, such as planning, the use of instrumental support, and active coping, on the psychological well-being of total participants, female participants, and male participants. the results showed that in total participants, only planning (β = .309, p = .001) and the use of instrumental support (β = .173, p = .007) had significant positive effects on psychological well-being, while the effect of active coping was not significant (β = .136, p = .064). in female college students, planning and the use of instrumental support also significantly affected psychological well-being. planning (β = .342, p = .001) and the use of instrumental support (β = .188, p = .015) showed significant positive effects, whereas active coping had no significant effect (β = .082, p = .331) on psychological well-being. using the enter method, none of the problem-focused coping strategies showed a significant effect among male participants. however, using the stepwise method, active coping had a significant positive effect (β = .424, p = .001) on male college students' psychological wellbeing (see table 4). table 3 also shows the regression analysis of the effect of each dysfunctional coping strategy. results for total participants showed that only behavioral disengagement, denial, and venting affected psychological well-being significantly. behavioral disengagement (β = -.321, p = .001) and denial (β = -.153, p = .031) showed significant negative effects, whereas venting had a significant positive effect (β = .182, p = .005) on psychological well-being. in female participants, initially, when using the enter method, only behavioral disengagement (β = -.331, p = .001) showed a significant negative effect, whereas venting (β = .169, p = .026) showed a positively significant effect on psychological well-being. however, further stepwise testing (table 4) showed that denial was also negatively affected. 154 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) angelica et.al. (coping strategies to predict the psychological well-being of college students…) table 3 regression analysis of each problem-focused and dysfunctional coping strategy on psychological well-being participants predictors standardized coefficients beta (β) t sig. r r square f (sig.) problem-focused coping total p .309 4.282 .001** .471 .222 19.722 (.001**) uis .173 2.717 .007** ac .136 1.861 .064 female students p .342 4.146 .001** .477 .228 14.642 (.001**) uis .188 2.468 .015* ac .082 .976 .331 male students p .198 1.296 .200 .477 .227 5.300 (.003**) uis .155 1.281 .206 ac .278 1.807 .076 dysfunctional coping total sd .028 .442 .659 .472 .223 9.749 (.001**) bd -.321 -4.289 .001** d -.153 -2.177 .031* su -.004 -.056 .956 sb -.090 -1.217 .225 v .182 2.826 .005** female students sd .026 .347 .729 .498 .248 8.009 (.001**) bd -.331 -3.759 .001** d -.153 -1.839 .068 su -.029 -.376 .708 sb -.102 -1.143 .255 v .169 2.246 .026* note: dependent variable: psychological well-being; p = planning; uis = use of instrumental support; ac = active coping; sd = self-distraction; bd = behavioral disengagement; d = denial; su = substance use; sb = self-blame; v = venting * p < .05 ** p < .01 effective contribution of significant coping strategies to psychological well-being table 4 illustrates the coefficient of determination of coping strategies that significantly affected psychological well-being for total, female, and male participants. the coping strategy with the largest coefficient of determination on psychological well-being in total participants was the problem-focused coping strategy (r2 = 20.9%), followed by the dysfunctional coping strategy (r2 = 8.0%). planning (r2 = 17.3%) was the largest problemfocused coping strategy contributing to all participants' psychological well-being, followed by instrumental support (r2 = 3.6%). the largest contribution of dysfunctional coping strategies came from behavioral disengagement (r2 = 16.9%), followed by venting (r2 = 2.6%) and denial (r2 = 2.2%). in female participants, the largest coefficient of determination on psychological wellbeing also came from problem-focused coping strategies (r2 = 20.6%), followed by dysfunctional coping strategies (r2 = 11.4%). the largest contribution of the problemfocused coping strategy to psychological well-being in female students came from planning (r2 = 18.3%), followed by the use of instrumental support (r2 = 3.9%). behavioral disengagement (r2 = 19.2%) was the largest dysfunctional coping strategies which contributed to psychological well-being, followed by denial (r2 = 2.7%) and venting (r2 = 2.2%). similarly, the problem-focused coping strategy (r2 = 21.9%) showed the largest humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 155 angelica et.al. (coping strategies to predict the psychological well-being of college students…) contribution to psychological well-being in male participants, with the largest contribution coming from active coping (r2 = 18%). table 4 the coefficient of determination of coping strategies on psychological well-being model summary total female students male students r square β p r square β p r square β p pcs .209 .458 .001** .206 .458 .001** .219 .468 .001** dcs .080 -.282 .001** .114 -.338 .001** p .173 .376 .001** .183 .377 .001** uis .036 .194 .002** .039 .205 .007** ac .180 .424 .001** bd .169 -.358 .001** .192 -.376 .001** v .026 .174 .006** .022 .148 .041* d .022 -.165 .016* .027 -.179 .024* note: dependent variable: psychological well-being; pcs = problem-focused coping strategies; dcs = dysfunctional coping strategies; p = planning; uis = use of instrumental support; ac = active coping; bd = behavioral disengagement; v = venting; d = denial * p < .05 ** p < .01 discussion this research aimed to examine the role of problem-focused, emotion-focused, and dysfunctional coping strategies in predicting college students' psychological well-being during the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic. according to this research findings, only problem-focused and dysfunctional coping strategies significantly predicted college students' psychological well-being. in contrast, emotion-focused coping strategies did not play a significant role. the problem-focused coping strategy contributed the most to total college students' psychological well-being, followed by the dysfunctional coping strategy. using problem-focused coping strategies could significantly predict improved psychological well-being in total college students, female students, and male students. problem-focused coping strategies aim to solve problems or do something to change the source of stress (carver, 1997; carver et al., 1989). college students who used these coping strategies would be able to adapt and overcome various problems encountered during the first wave of the pandemic and, in turn, have better psychological well-being. the study result was in line with previous research. first-year students in yogyakarta who could carry out more effective coping strategies would have more positive psychological well-being when adapting to online learning models during the pandemic (pratiwi et al., 2021). however, pratiwi et al. (2021) did not divide coping strategies based on three categories as applied in this study. guszkowska and dąbrowska-zimakowska (2022) also mentioned that coping by actions was one of the positive predictors of college students' psychological wellbeing during the second pandemic wave. findings on the dimensions of problem-focused coping strategies showed that only planning and the use of instrumental support significantly predicted increased psychological well-being in total college students and female students. in contrast, active coping had no significant effect. on the other hand, active coping was the only problem-focused coping strategy that significantly predicted improvement in the psychological well-being of male college students. guszkowska and dąbrowska-zimakowska (2022) discovered that during the second wave of the pandemic, female students were more likely to use several strategies, including seeking emotional and instrumental support (asking for advice, help, or 156 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) angelica et.al. (coping strategies to predict the psychological well-being of college students…) information from others) and planning (thinking about how to deal with difficult situations). a study before the pandemic also found that female students used coping strategies that focused more on seeking support from other people and resources than male students (sagone & de caroli, 2014). however, neither guszkowska and dąbrowska-zimakowska (2022) nor sagone and de caroli (2014) examined the role of each problem-focused coping strategy on psychological well-being in female and male college students. thus, this finding extends previous research findings regarding the types of problem-focused coping strategies that increase psychological well-being in male and female students. in this study, we found that planning was a problem-focused coping strategy that highly contributed to total college and female students' psychological well-being, followed by instrumental support. on the other hand, active coping significantly contributed to psychological well-being in male college students. dysfunctional coping strategies negatively affected the psychological well-being of total college students and female students, but not male students. this finding showed that dysfunctional coping strategies could predict decreased psychological well-being in total students and female students. dysfunctional coping strategies in this study include selfdistraction, behavioral disengagement, denial, substance use, self-blame, and venting (carver, 1997; carver et al., 1989). the finding aligns with a previous study that discovered maladaptive coping was the strongest negative predictor of college students' psychological well-being during the second pandemic wave (guszkowska & dąbrowska-zimakowska, 2022). nonetheless, guszkowska and dąbrowska-zimakowska (2022) did not investigate the role of coping strategies based on gender differences in predicting psychological wellbeing as this study did. the role of dysfunctional coping strategy dimensions on psychological well-being will only be discussed in total college students and female students because dysfunctional coping strategies did not significantly predict psychological well-being in male students. only behavioral disengagement, denial, and venting were significant predictors of psychological well-being both in total college and female students. behavioral disengagement contributed the most to dysfunctional coping strategies in both total and female students, followed by venting and denial. guszkowska and dąbrowska-zimakowska (2022) discovered that during the second wave of the pandemic, female students used several strategies more frequently, including venting (expressing negative emotions), and doing something else, denial, and behavioral release (refusing to deal with stress actively). previous research also found a greater tendency to focus on and vent emotions among women than men (carver et al., 1989). behavioral disengagement and denial significantly negatively affected this study, predicting lower psychological well-being. venting, on the other hand, was discovered to play a significant role in predicting improved psychological well-being in both total college students and female students. the research findings differ slightly from those of guszkowska and dąbrowska-zimakowska (2022). they showed that frequent use of behavioral disengagement, venting, and denial were negatively correlated with psychological wellbeing. focusing and venting emotions is a dysfunctional coping strategy because individuals will be fixated on negative emotions for a long time, which can exacerbate suffering (carver et al., 1989). however, during the first wave of the pandemic, college students were required to spend most of their time at home. therefore, limited opportunities to interact directly with friends may have made venting as a cathartic tool that can improve female students' psychological well-being. during the first wave of the pandemic, emotion-focused coping strategies had no significant impact on the psychological well-being of all college students, female or male students. in this study, emotion-focused coping strategies included humor, acceptance, humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 157 angelica et.al. (coping strategies to predict the psychological well-being of college students…) positive reframing, the use of emotional support, and religion (carver, 1997; carver et al., 1989). during the second wave of the pandemic, guszkowska and dąbrowska-zimakowska (2022) discovered coping through positive reappraisal, which included humor, acceptance, and positive reframing, played a significant role in predicting increased psychological wellbeing in college students, whereas coping through seeking support, including instrumental and emotional support and turning to religion, did not affect. the gap in the results of these two studies could be attributed to the different conditions that college students face. students were required to quickly adapt to various changes related to the implementation of online learning during the first wave of the pandemic, so they had to make direct efforts to take online lectures and do college assignments. as a result, problem-focused coping strategies played a larger role in college students' psychological well-being than emotion-focused coping strategies. this finding was in contrast to the second wave of the pandemic, when students may become more familiar with and adapt to online learning, using emotionfocused coping strategies like humor, acceptance, and positive reframing more likely to improve psychological well-being. this study discovered some academic-related issues that mostly caused students to stress or burden during the first wave of the pandemic. most college students reported having many difficult tasks to do, a lack of time discipline, and difficulty understanding lecture materials, which was consistent with previous research (hasanah et al., 2020; maqableh & alia, 2021). this condition was also related to a lack of opportunities to meet with their lecturers and college friends to discuss lecture materials or tasks. transitioning from offline or physical classes to online classes affects time management and students' learning-life balance, resulting in dissatisfaction among most students (maqableh & alia, 2021). these problems became apparent as more students lived with their families and had obligations other than distance learning. academic affairs are real and objective, so using problemfocused coping strategies, such as planning and instrumental support by female students and active coping by male students, were quite effective in improving their psychological wellbeing. the limitation of this study lies in the lack of balance between female and male student participants. during the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic, data could only be collected online using a google form distributed via line and instagram. so the data obtained was determined mainly by the willingness of college students who use social media to fill out online questionnaires, most of whom were female college students. as a result, the findings of this study must be more carefully generalized, particularly for male students. further research can be suggested to explore coping strategies and psychological well-being in college students during the transition from pandemic to endemic covid-19. college students also need the ability to adapt from online learning that has been carried out for approximately two years to face-to-face learning. therefore, it will be interesting to examine the coping strategies used by male and female students and their role in psychological wellbeing during the transition period. conclusion during the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic, only problem-focused and dysfunctional coping strategies were significant predictors of college students' psychological well-being. problem-focused coping strategies predicted increased psychological well-being in male and female college students. planning and using instrumental support predicted female students' psychological well-being, whereas active coping predicted male students' psychological well-being. dysfunctional coping strategies only significantly predicted psychological wellbeing in total college students and female students. in total college and female students, only 158 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) angelica et.al. (coping strategies to predict the psychological well-being of college students…) behavioral disengagement, denial, and venting were significant predictors of psychological well-being. behavioral disengagement and denial were associated with lower psychological well-being, whereas venting was associated with higher psychological well-being. therefore, understanding the different coping strategies used by female and male students is needed to enhance college students' psychological well-being. acknowledgment this article was presented online in the student conference faculty of psychology, universitas surabaya, 2020. declarations author contribution. the first author compiles research designs, collects data, conducts theoretical studies, and compiles research drafts. the second author is the corresponding author, doing literature reviews, analyzing and interpreting data, performing translation, and proofreading. the third and fourth authors contribute to compiling research questionnaires and collecting data funding statement. this research was partially funded by the student conference committee and partly by the author independently. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references abbas, a., eliyana, a., ekowati, d., saud, m., raza, a., & wardani, r. 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(2021). impact of the covid-19 pandemic on psychological well-being of students in an italian university: a web-based cross-sectional survey. global health 17, 39. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-021-00680-w. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.69.4.719 https://doi.org/10.12691/education-2-7-5 https://doi.org/10.12691/education-2-7-5 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-021-00680-w humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 21 (1), february 2024, 65-76 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i1.353 mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and marital satisfaction of mother with toddler on family resilience during pandemic sri redatin retno pudjiati, khusnul khatimah, tiffany lisa marsaulina, firyal fahirah fadilah, and aulya diesa maretha faculty of psychology, universitas indonesia, indonesia corresponding author: retno-pj@ui.ac.id introduction since 2020, the world has been facing the global spread of the covid-19 outbreak (pandemic), and indonesia is one of them. this pandemic has caused various changes in aspects of human life due to the necessity to carry out physical distancing and home quarantine as well as the implementation of large-scale social restrictions (lssr), in mid-2020 and continued with public activity restrictions for outdoor activities (humas sekretariat kabinet republik indonesia, 2021). these impacts changing routines, where outdoor activities usually carried out in offices, schools, or other public places are limited and even closed to avoid crowds and encourage work, study, and play activities to be carried out at home (work from home). along with this sudden change in routines, problems arise, adding more stressors, especially within the family. the provision of carrying out various activities from home affects the routines changing of each individual in a family. family members spend time together in the same place 24 hours a day, but at the same time, this brings another stressor. while everyone in the house has their own activities and responsibilities that they must do, parents might face financial problems, future uncertainty, and loss of emotional control (frustration), which can lead to increased anxiety, stress, and negative emotions (winurini, 2020). in addition, in a pandemic article info abstract article history received: march 16, 2023 revised: august 5, 2023 accepted: august 24, 2023 the covid-19 pandemic has both positive and negative impacts on individuals in affected areas. for mothers who have many roles at home, this impact can cause stress due to sudden changes in the family. therefore, it is important to know whether mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and marital satisfaction are important factors for family resilience. this study used a quantitative approach to examine the roles of those factors. data obtained using walsh family resilience questionnaire, interpersonal mindful parenting, selfefficacy parenting task index-toddler scale short form and enrich marital satisfaction (ems) scale were analyzed by multiple regression. based on data from 116 mothers who have toddlers (mage = 28.46, sd = 3.14), it is known that the associations of mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and marital satisfaction predict 50% of family resilience positively. furthermore, marital satisfaction provides the largest significant unique contribution, followed by a smaller contribution by parenting self-efficacy, while mindful parenting did not. this shows that internal and external factors by the mother both contribute to creating a resilient family during the covid19 pandemic, thus, it is essentially important to ensure that mothers receive good support from their partners and are confident in providing positive care for their children. keywords family resilience; mindful parenting; parenting self-efficacy; marital satisfaction; mother. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i1.353 mailto:retno-pj@ui.ac.id 66 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) sri redatin retno et.al (mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and marital satisfaction of…) situation, a mother is required to be able to juggle many responsibilities such as working (for those who work), doing housework (e.g. cooking), and caring for and/or supervising toddler's activities (playing and learning). this is because mothers with toddlers are the most important key figure in this development stage for the child to develop a secure attachment and regularity in "play" activities (pallant, 2020). therefore, if the mother's focus is divided between caring for toddlers and doing house chores while helping other family members who also have work and school at home, mothers psychological state might collapse at one point. furthermore, mothers are demanded to adapt to the sudden changing routines at home and outside. this is why 'it's important to know whether mothers with toddler have good family resilience so they can together adapt to the situation well. family resilience is a dynamic interaction process that occurs within the family and how the family adapts to life challenges (walsh, 2016). according to walsh, a family is a functional unit that works as a system where the family resilience results from a process. family resilience depends on the family's strengths and resources when facing problems together, such as the covid-19 pandemic (walsh, 2020). this construct has three main subdomains, namely family belief systems which is related to beliefs and values instilled in the family, organizational factors which is related to structure and connectedness within the family, and family communication style which is related to communication processes done by family members (walsh, 2016). previous research shows that for families to remain resilient in the covid-19 pandemic situation, as one of the main life challenges currently, family belief systems have an important role in encouraging family members to be able to find positive meaning (meaning-making) and positive-outlook of problems and challenges that arise simultaneously (gayatri & irawaty, 2022). this could help mothers to find any good aspects out of the negative situation (pandemic) so they could stay positive, and the toddlers also got positive influence during "play" session. in addition, organizational factors act as a source of support to create flexibility so that families can rebound when facing various stressors during home quarantine and work/study from home (walsh, 2020). being flexible in facing sudden changes of routines is needed so family members can all help each other complete their responsibilities together. lastly, a good communication process also plays an important role because it means family members can convey feelings and solve problems that arise together like when the mother needs time to take a break from interacting with toddlers and ask the spouse to help her so mother can gain herself again and get back with a better state. as mentioned above, various variables are potential as protective factors in how family resilience is well formed in the family. mothers, as the key figures for toddler developmental tasks and those with more responsibilities, especially in the covid-19 pandemic, are directly faced with problems related to their relationship to their spouses and children, especially toddlers. therefore, ‘it is only fair to look at which factors from a mother-toddler and motherfather relationships highly relate to family resilience dynamics. from the mother's point of view, the relationship between mother and toddler can be observed in how the mother raises and cares for her child dearly. this is especially more important for toddlers because they need the mother's role as a key figure in parenting to help them grow properly (miller, 2016). good parenting is done when mothers put their minds into their children's activities attentively. this parenting is called mindful parenting. mindful parenting is a new concept that integrates practices and principles of mindfulness into the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of parents in a parenting context, engenders compassion, acceptance, and kindness in the parent-child relationship, as well as the presence of attentive parents in the parent-child interactions (duncan et al., 2009). in indonesia, mindful parenting has been one of the main strategies of the ministry of education and culture to encourage parents and teachers to nurture 'child's development positively at home and school (kiong, 2015). mindful parenting consists of five dimensions, namely listening attentively (eling), acceptance in a non-judgmental way of self and child, humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 67 sri redatin retno et.al (mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and marital satisfaction of…) understanding of self and 'child's emotional states, self-regulation in parenting relationships, and compassion towards self and child (welas asih) (duncan et al., 2009; kiong, 2015). by applying mindfulness practices in the interaction between mothers and toddlers, especially during covid-19 pandemic, they can develop a good parent-child connection and learn to enjoy the moment more (heifetz, 2022). several previous studies reported that parental and maternal mindful parenting are associated with more positive parenting styles, reduced parenting stress, positive interactions between parents and children, as well as positive effects on the psychological functioning of parents and children (sofyan, 2018; wong et al., 2019). this positive interaction could be related to a positive communication style. 'that's why it is important to know whether 'mothers' use of good mindful parenting in nurturing their 'child's development during the covid-19 pandemic help enhance family resilience. while mindful parenting is an important factor due to the presence of positive interaction between mothers and toddlers, prior research shown that parental competence, or 'parent's feeling and beliefs about their competency in parenting, is one of the key variables in predicting protective factors of family resilience (ardelt & eccles, 2001). because mother is the key figure in 'toddler's development, it would be insightful to find if 'mother's feelings and beliefs about their competence, or self-efficacy, in her parenting would be best at predicting family resilience. parenting self-efficacy itself is defined as an estimate of the judgment given by an individual related to his competence as a parent, or how parents perceive the ability to shape behavior and encourage positive child development (coleman & karraker, 1998). the parenting self-efficacy construct provides an overview of the knowledge possessed by parents related to parenting skills appropriate for the child's development as well as confidence in carrying out duties as an older person. parents with high parenting self-efficacy tend to show positive parenting practices and behaviors and could create comfortable and enjoyable nurturing environments. in contrast, low parenting selfefficacy allows parents to feel more overwhelmed when faced with multiple parenting hurdles, to the point of triggering parental stress. based on coleman & karraker (1998), originally there are seven different parenting subdomains considered appropriate to describe the domain of parenting self-efficacy. first, emotional availability refers to the emotional relationship that exists between children and parents, as parents can hint at and understand the emotional expression of children. second, nurturance is related to how parents raise, appreciate, and display an empathetic response to their children. third, protection is related to how parents protect children from danger. fourth, discipline is related to how parents apply discipline and provide limits to children. fifth, play, related to activities parent-directed child play, especially in the early years of development children. sixth, teaching is related to how parents play an important role in seeking the development and education of children. seventh, instrumental care, or routine, is related to how parents apply routines appropriately to the child. prior research has found that mindful parenting could reduce 'mothers' (of school-aged children) parental stress (srifianti et al., 2022), and this could further help increase 'mothers' well-being. study has shown that parenting self-efficacy has a strong positive affect on family resilience during the covid-19 on parents with children aged 4 to 18 years old (cihan & var, 2022) but 'it's not really known for children under 4 years old (toddler). another relationship to be looked up is mother-father relationship as the main caregivers in the family. crisis covid-19 can influence 'couples' marital satisfaction because of access to the outside world (like close friends or extended family members), so they could only rely on support from each other. marital satisfaction is defined as a mental state that reflects the benefits that are perceived and the effort expended by individuals in a marital relationship (fowers & olson, 1989). this means that someone will feel higher satisfaction towards marriage and spouses if they perceive greater benefits than the effort expended. based on enrich marital satisfaction, marital satisfaction consists of two dimensions: 68 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) sri redatin retno et.al (mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and marital satisfaction of…) marital satisfaction (positive aspects of marriage) and idealized distortion (social desirability aspects) (fowers & olson, 1993). fowers & olson (1989, 1993) identified ten different domains considered the most contributing to marital satisfaction itself; interpersonal problems include communication, resolution of conflict, sex, commitment, and roles, while external problems can come from relatives, friends, children, parenting style, and financial condition. the various domains developed based on various theories and empirical analyses summarized in their research. previous research has found that couples’' couples' satisfaction in their relationships has a strong and greater effect on family resilience during the covid-19 pandemic in hong kong (wong et al., 2022). also, it was found that 'women's level of self-efficacy partially mediated the relationship between 'couples' satisfaction and family resilience (pănoi et al., 2018). however, it was also found that during the covid-19 pandemic, mothers tend to perceive the situation as stressful, which influences their perception of ineffectively caring for their children (gniewosz, 2022). while some studies found different relationships how mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and couples’' couples' satisfaction could influence family resilience independently, more research is needed on this topic. the lack of understanding on how those three factors, from a mother's perspective, could collectively predict family resilience as the three represented a mother's perspective, could collectively predict family resilience as the three represented mother's relationship with other family members. as walsh (walsh, 2016a) has stated before, that family function as a unit where everyone influences each other that makes the family could withstand and rebound from crises and challenges. this is why the current 'study's purpose ought to find if 'toddlers' mothers' mindful parenting, self-efficacy in parenting and marital satisfaction also has strong positive impact directly on family resilience. the formation of family resilience does not only occur because of the adaptation of each individual from each family member but is formed from the interaction between family members who influence each other (walsh, 2016). therefore, this study aims to explore how mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and marital satisfaction of mothers with toddlers enhance stronger family resilience during the covid-19 pandemic. specifically, it is hypothesized that mothers' family resilience is predicted by marital satisfaction, parenting self-efficacy, and mindful parenting together as a whole. another hypothesis is that those factors independently influence family resilience (have their own unique contributions). method this study uses a quantitative approach to explore the factors around mothers that contribute to predicting family resilience, such as mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and marital satisfaction. this research has passed an ethical review from the ethical committee of the faculty of psychology, universitas indonesia with number 067/fpsi.komiteetik/pdp.04.00/2021. participants the sampling method used was the convenience sampling technique (tabachnick et al., 2019). participants in this study were mothers aged 21-40 years and had child(ren) who were toddlers or 1-3 years old at the time the research was conducted (54.31% were male). data collection was carried out online by distributing links to fill out questionnaires for individuals who fit the criteria and are willing to become participants. participants involved in this study were 116 mothers (21 – 37 years old with m = 28.46, sd = 3.14). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 69 sri redatin retno et.al (mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and marital satisfaction of…) table 1 the distribution of study participants instruments there are four main variables examined in this study. first, family resilience was measured using the indonesian adaptation of walsh family resilience questionnaire or shortened as wfrq (walsh, 2016) by nasa (2012). this instrument could be used to measure family resilience represented by one of its member views of how the family face crises and challenges (mother). wfrq originally has a total of 32 items, which are divided into three components belief system, organizational factors, and communication style. but, four items were dropped because of their low rit score, so the total became 28 items. this instrument is a likert scale using four options: (1) very inappropriate to (4) very appropriate. the scale has a good internal consistency coefficient α = 0.931 and corrected total-item correlation ranging from 0.396 to 0.696. second, mindful parenting was measured using indonesian adaptation of interpersonal mindful parenting or shortened as im-p (duncan et al., 2009). im-p originally consists of 31 items divided into five dimensions, namely listening with full attention (lfa), compassion for the self and child (csc), non-judgmental acceptance of self and child (njasc), emotional awareness of selfand child (easc), and self-regulation in the parenting relationship (srpr). this instrument was adapted by marsaulina (2021). but, ten items were dropped because of their low rit score, so the total became 21 items. this instrument is a likert scale using five options: (1) rarely to (5) always. the scale has a good internal consistency coefficient α = 0.870 and corrected total-item correlation ranging from 0.302 to 0.667. third, parenting self-efficacy was measured using the self-efficacy parenting task index-toddler scale short form (septi-ts sf) (coleman & karraker, 1998). septi-ts originally has a total of 53 items which are divided into seven subdomains, however, in this study, the short version was used which consisted of 23 items and four subdomains namely frequency percentage mother's last education high school or lower 15 12.93 diploma (d3) 7 5.88 undergraduate (s1) 81 69.83 graduate or higher (s2 – s3) 13 11.21 mother's employment status employed 60 51.72 unemployed 56 48.28 age of marriage < 5 years 95 81.90 5 – 10 years 19 16.38 > 10 years 2 1.72 family monthly income < idr1.500.000, 5 4.31 idr1.500.000, s/d idr3.000.000, 11 9.48 idr3.000.000, s/d idr4.500.000,13 11.21 idr4.500.000, s/d idr6.000.000, 15 12.93 idr6.000.000, s/d idr7.500.000,13 11.21 > idr7.500.000, 59 50.86 work system in pandemic wfo – wfh 22 18.97 wfo 15 12.93 wfh 23 19.83 time to care for child(ren) in the pandemic increased 70 60.35 equal 46 39.66 staying with with child and/or husband 53 44.54 with parents-in-law 46 38.66 others 19 25.96 70 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) sri redatin retno et.al (mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and marital satisfaction of…) nurturance, discipline, play, and routines. the instrument used for this study was the indonesian adaptation version (lubis, 2015). but, three items were dropped because of their low rit score, so the total became 20 items. this instrument is a likert scale using four options: (1) strongly disagree to (4) strongly agree. the scale has a good internal consistency coefficient α = 0.878 and corrected total-item correlation ranging from 0.323 to 0.653. the fourth variable marital satisfaction was measured using the enrich marital satisfaction (ems) scale (fowers & olson, 1993). the instrument has been adapted to indonesian from the original and consists of 20 items that measure marital satisfaction and idealistic distortion (nishfiyaningsih, 2009). but, three items were dropped because of their low rit score, so the total became 17 items. this instrument is a likert scale using four options: (1) very inappropriate to (4) very appropriate. the scale has a good internal consistency coefficient α = 0.892 and corrected total-item correlation ranging from 0.375 to 0.636. in addition to these four main instruments, participants were also asked about their demographic data such as age, age of children, age of marriage, employment status, family income in a month, and so on. this demographic data is used as complementary data in discussing the results of the analysis obtained (covariate variables). data analysis the data obtained were then analyzed using jasp (jasp team, 2022). the analysis was performed through a pearson correlation test and multiple regression to test the hypotheses proposed. results based on table 2, it is known that the four main variables at least have one indicator that shows a normal distribution (based on the z-score of skewness value or kolmogorovsmirnov or shapiro-wilk significance value > 0.05) so it can be concluded that each variable has a normal distribution (pallant, 2020). table 2 descriptions of instruments / scales variables m min-max sd z skewness ks (sig.) sw (sig.) family resilience 92.78 65 – 112 11.543 -1.604* 0.200* 0.010 mindful parenting 82.93 53 – 105 9.779 -0.347* 0.200* 0.619* parenting self-efficacy 68.31 38 87 8.512 -1.560* 0.200* 0.060* marital satisfaction 53.75 30 68 8.595 -1.604* 0.018 0.004 before carrying out the regression test, assumption tests were first carried out, namely multicollinearity by examining the pearson correlation value and checking for outliers, normality, linearity, and homoscedasticity using the q-q regression standardized residuals plot (pallant, 2020). pearson correlation test results showed that the three main variables, namely marital satisfaction, mindful parenting, and parenting self-efficacy were significantly positively correlated with family resilience. in addition, the r correlation value of marital satisfaction, mindful parenting, and parenting self-efficacy for family resilience did not exceed 0.9, as shown in table 3, so it fulfills the assumption that multicollinearity did not occur. in addition, only a number of children positively correlated with family resilience. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 71 sri redatin retno et.al (mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and marital satisfaction of…) table 3 correlation test variables 1 2 3 4 1. family resilience 2. mindful parenting 0.457*** 3. parenting self-efficacy 0.578*** 0.687*** 4. marital satisfaction 0.644*** 0.427*** 0.465*** mother's age -0.061 -0.108 -0.150 -0.076 number of children 0.198* 0.124 0.070 0.157 family income 0.140 -0.076 -0.098 0.111 age of marriage 0.145 0.074 0.090 0.057 mother's employment status 0.042 0.057 0.090 0.038 mother's education 0.029 0.008 -0.017 -0.013 parenting time -0.070 -0.017 -0.002 0.026 staying with 0.021 -0.054 -0.068 0.071 work system -0.148 -0.130 -0.188 0.116 notes: * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001 next, based on the residual statistics, as shown in table 4, and its standardized residuals histogram, the normality distribution of residual data showed a normal distribution. furthermore, q-q plot standardized residuals follow a diagonal line, and no data deviated far from the line. therefore, it can be concluded that the data has a normal residual distribution and no outliers that exceed the durbin standard value. table 4 residual statistics minimum maximum m sd predicted value 72.804 110.279 92.784 8.271 residual -19.866 21.968 9.659×10-16 8.051 std. predicted value -2.416 2.115 -3.137×10-16 1.000 std. residual -2.498 2.786 4.665×10-4 1.008 multiple regression test was then performed using the jasp program. the results shown in table 5. the association between mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and marital satisfaction significantly predicted family resilience capacity by 50% (r2 = 0.513, adj. r2 = 0.500, p = < 0.001, f2 = 1.41) and showed a very large effect size (cohen j, 1988). therefore, the first hypothesis in this study was accepted that mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and marital satisfaction together positively predict family resilience. this is also supported by the results of the f test, which showed that mindful parenting, parenting selfefficacy, and marital satisfaction simultaneously significantly predict family resilience. table 5 linear regression model r2 adj. r2 r2 change f p h1 0.513 0.500 0.513 39.405 < .001 then, the results of the regression coefficient analysis and part correlation coefficients specifically showed that the marital satisfaction (β = 0.476, t (113) = 6.300, p < .001) significantly made the largest unique contribution (17.22%) and was followed by parenting self-efficacy (β = 0.346, t(113) = 3.675, p < .001) with much smaller contribution (5.86%). however, mindful parenting (β = 0.016, t(113) = 0.179, p = 0.859) did not make a significant 72 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) sri redatin retno et.al (mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and marital satisfaction of…) unique contribution to family resilience. the results also showed that only mindful parenting gave a very small contribution (tabachnick et al., 2019). these are shown in table 6. based on these results, it is known that the second hypothesis was partially rejected, that only mothers' parenting self-efficacy and marital satisfaction significantly gave unique contributions to predicting good family resilience. table 6 coefficients regression predictors b std. error 𝛽 t p variances (intercept) 24.829 7.091 3.502 < .001 mindful parenting 0.019 0.109 0.016 0.179 0.859 0.01% parenting self-efficacy 0.469 0.127 0.346*** 3.675 < .001 5.86% marital satisfaction 0.639 0.101 0.476*** 6.300 < .001 17.22% notes: *** p < 0.001 discussion this study aimed to examine if the combination of internal and external factors around mothers could predict family resilience and which factor gives more contribution. before that, it's worth mentioning that most mothers in this study have spent more time together with their toddlers and working from home so they could directly build positive connections with the children and protect them from the negative effects of the covid-19. knowing that walsh concept of family is seen as a functional system where the members' influence each other and could be measured by asking the perspective of one member about the way their family deals with adversities, this study focused on factors by mothers that could enhance better family resilience during pandemic. the key protective factors of family resilience studied here are related to mother-child relationships: mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and marital satisfaction. firstly, results show that the three variables associated together could predict higher family resilience positively. this means that mothers who have higher self-efficacy in acting positive parenting, while using mindful parenting and getting sufficient support and satisfaction in their marriage lives, will give a higher positive impact on their family's capability and process to adapt during the covid-19 pandemic than the ones who did not have those factors. previously, it was explained that family resilience is the dynamic process of coping and adapting life challenge which rely on the family's strength and resources at the time (walsh, 2016). family resilience consists of three main sub-domains, family belief system, organizational factors, and family communication style. specifically, family belief system is related to parent's self-efficacy in parenting in the way that mother possess positive perspective of the stressful situation and good faith in facing the adversity (james, 2022; walsh, 2016). then, organizational factors is related to mother's satisfaction with the supports they get from spouses (pănoi et al., 2018; walsh, 2016; wong et al., 2022). lastly, communication process is related to collaboration of family members to solve problems together, clarity in communicating with each other, and being compassionate in caring for children mindfully (sofyan, 2018; walsh, 2016a; wong et al., 2022). so, this help explained why the three predictors together are found to be important factors for mother to help enhance family resilience in the covid-19 pandemic. specifically, marital satisfaction has the biggest role. this is consistent with previous research, that marital satisfaction felt by mothers gives a big boost in creating a resilient family because communication with partners as parents or primary caregivers for toddlers goes well even in a pandemic situation (pănoi et al., 2018; rich et al., 2022; wong et al., 2022). then, parenting self-efficacy is proven to provide the second biggest role in creating humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 73 sri redatin retno et.al (mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and marital satisfaction of…) a resilient family for mothers with toddlers. this is in line with previous research that parenting self-efficacy is one of the factors that predict the formation of a resilient family in mothers who have school-age children (gniewosz, 2022). this shows that having better couples' satisfaction should come as the first concern in the family so the family will be resilient in facing crisis situations like the covid-19. the different results in this study are the findings that mindful parenting does not contribute much to family resilience like the other two. that is, even though the mother shows parenting patterns with mindful parenting, other factors such as the mother's satisfaction in married life with her partner and her belief in positive parenting must also accompany it. this is also thought to be due to the mindful parenting in this study being seen at one time in general, it has not reached the point where it can be shown whether the mindful parenting process is routinely carried out or not. in addition, it is also known that most family in this study shows relatively high levels on family resilience, parenting self-efficacy and marital satisfaction. it means that the participants here have good and functioning protective factors that influence their family resilience to be better. additional interesting findings in this study is related to the socio-demographic variables. the only characteristic of the family that had quite a good relationship with family resilience was the number of children, in which more children related to better family resilience. despite the pandemic that limits activities, and most mothers need to juggle more between working, parenting and doing household chores, the fact that more children (toddlers) actually support strong family resilience gives new insight. it is worth to underline that most mothers here have high education backgrounds and relatively high-level income (family income). also, they are mostly working moms who work with full-time wfh (work from home) system or switching in-between wfh and wfo (work from office). furthermore, most families are in an early stage of family life-cycle stage (age of marriage < 5 years), which is early parenting stage, as their first child is still a toddler (walsh, 2002). walsh also stated that different family life-cycle stages might lead to different challenges that need different factors to enhance resilient families. in fact, while these variables all show no moderate or strong direct correlation to family resilience, there might be indirect influences on their family resilience dynamics. this study has some limitations. first, it was not known whether mothers used mindful parenting for all their children (some participants have more than one child) or it was for specific children. knowing this in future research with the same study focus might help explain the pattern in the family process and the development of their family resilience. lastly, many of the families in this study lived with their parents-in-law (39%), so it might be possible that the grandparents were helping the mothers care for children or otherwise mothers are getting other stressors from outside their main family. future research might consider using actor-partner model analysis to explore whether mothers' and fathers' perspectives on the stated three main predictors in this study are correlated to one another as a more comprehensive way to examine what factors influence family resilience. also, explore more in the questionnaire whether the parents get help on parenting toddlers by other relatives or not. conclusion the association of mothers' mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and marital satisfaction collectively contributed to enhancing positive family resilience. this suggests that mothers with higher use of mindfulness in parenting, self-efficacy in parenting, and marital satisfaction, their families will have higher family resilience to help them adapt to the pandemic or even other similar adversities. furthermore, the mother's marital satisfaction and parenting self-efficacy both uniquely contributed positively to family resilience, while 74 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) sri redatin retno et.al (mindful parenting, parenting self-efficacy, and marital satisfaction of…) mindful parenting did not. this means that mothers whose mindful parenting was good still needed other important factors to predict strong family resilience in this covid-19 pandemic. feeling satisfied with marriage life is the biggest factor for mothers to enhance strong family resilience. that's why, in this situation where the covid-19 pandemic made mothers more vulnerable to stress, their partner needs to give enough support to face sudden changes in daily life. in addition to this, more children related to more positive family resilience. acknowledgment acknowledge the parties that make the study possible such as the funding sponsor, the institution that gives permission, the participants, supervisors, etc. do not acknowledge the names listed in the authors of this article. declarations author contribution. first author conceived the presented idea and developed the theory. second author analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript. third, fourth, fifth authors collected and inputted the data from participants. first and second authors discuss the results and final manuscript. funding statement. this research was not funded by any institutions or grants. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references ardelt, m., & eccles, j. s. 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(2019). the role of mindful parenting in individual and social decision-making in children. frontiers in psychology, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00550 https://doi.org/10.1080/17405629.2016.1154035 https://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12588 https://jurnal.dpr.go.id/index.php/aspirasi/article/view/1755 https://doi.org/10.1111/cfs.12934 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00550 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 20 (2), august 2023, 90-101 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v20i2.239 perceived fairness and marital satisfaction: the role of the presence of children with disabilities klarinthia ratri, yudiana ratnasari faculty of psychology, universitas indonesia, indonesia corresponding author: yudianaratnasari@gmail.com introduction marriage is a significant transition and stage in someone’s life as its success impacts people’s lives. one of the success indicators is to attain marital satisfaction (heshmati et al., 2016). marital satisfaction refers to the evaluation of the overall state of their marriage and reflects marital happiness and functioning (schoen et al., 2002). moreover, marital satisfaction was proven to impact someone’s life significantly. high marital satisfaction can lead to higher job satisfaction and better physical and psychological health (dush et al., 2008; rogers & may, 2003). on the other hand, dissatisfaction in marriage can trigger the onset of depressive symptoms in individuals (rogers & may, 2003). the substantial influence of marital satisfaction has prompted diverse studies to identify the factors contributing to higher marital satisfaction (student & student, 2011). these factors are found to be correlated to higher marital satisfaction, not only with its intrapersonal aspects, such as an individual’s personality, attachment, and intellectual maturity, but also its interpersonal aspects, such as sexual satisfaction, compatibility, and conflict resolution (student & student, 2011). article info abst ract article history received october 20, 2022 revised june 19, 2023 accepted june 23, 2023 perceived fairness has been consistently found to have a significant positive correlation with marital satisfaction. furthermore, numerous studies on perceived fairness have been conducted related to parents of children with disabilities, considering the difficulties encountered by these parents due to their children’s specialized needs and demands. as a result, these challenges usually affect their marital relationship more than the other couples. therefore, this study aimed to examine the relationship between perceived fairness and marital satisfaction moderated by the presence of children with disabilities. the indonesian version of the perceived fairness instrument and quality of marriage index were used to measure perceived fairness and marital satisfaction in 335 married indonesian participants, including both parents of children with and without disabilities. data analysis was performed using hayes process. the result showed that perceived fairness was significantly correlated to marital satisfaction in both parents of children with and without disabilities. however, no significant interaction was found by the presence of children with disabilities on the relationship between perceived fairness and marital satisfaction. the results of this study provide a strong implication for mental health practitioners regarding the intervention goals for families and parents of children with disabilities. keywords children with disabilities; division of household chores; marital satisfaction; parenting; perceived fairness. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v20i2.239 mailto:yudianaratnasari@gmail.com humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 91 ratri & ratnasari (perceived fairness and marital satisfaction: the role…) one factor that has been mentioned repeatedly in previous studies to contribute to higher marital satisfaction significantly is the spouse’s perception that they are sharing household responsibilities with their partner, including household chores and childrearing (chong & mickelson, 2016; gosztyła, 2015; simmerman et al., 2001; tsibidaki, 2013). this factor is known as perceived fairness, perceived equality in the division of household responsibilities, including household chores, financial management, and childrearing (claffey & mickelson, 2009). several studies found a consistently significant relationship between perceived fairness and marital satisfaction (chong & mickelson, 2016; kluwer et al., 1996; stevens et al., 2001; wilkie et al., 1998). perceived fairness plays a role in decreasing cognitive appraisal of how stressful the situation of childrearing they are facing, specifically in parents of children with disabilities (willoughby & glidden, 1995). furthermore, numerous studies on perceived fairness have been conducted on parents of children with disabilities (gosztyła, 2015; ki & joanne, 2014; simmerman et al., 2001; tsibidaki, 2013). these studies are important considering the difficulties encountered by parents of children with disabilities and the role that perceived fairness holds in the marital relationship. in general, parenthood represents a significant change that inevitably affects individuals' lives, specifically parents with children with disabilities (risdal & singer, 2004). previous research suggested that parents of children with disabilities experience a higher level of stress, lower mental health, and disturbance in daily life, such as interruption in career and a decrease in leisure time (brobst et al., 2009; risdal & singer, 2004). several studies have explained the impacts experienced by parents of children with disabilities (chen & tang, 1997; mallers et al., 2010). accepting their children’s conditions and limitations, facilitating providers for specialized care, and planning for their future are the common struggles that the parents of children with developmental disabilities experience (chen & tang, 1997). moreover, both developmental and physical disabilities in children demand complex and special care, which in turn become the main challenges for parents of children with disabilities. this condition will lead to lower social interactions, leisure time, and higher sleep disturbances (mallers et al., 2010). additionally, parents of children with developmental disabilities reported higher stressful experiences from managing their children’s emotions and behaviors while worrying about their future at the same time (hoseinnejad et al., 2020; ki & joanne, 2014). in addition to caretaking demands, many studies suggested that financial demands in caring for children with disabilities are significant stressors for parents (chen et al., 2020; ren et al., 2020; vonneilich et al., 2016). compared with children with normal development, children with any disability tend to need special medical treatment, education, and equipment, resulting in a significantly higher financial burden for the parents (bahry et al., 2019). the challenges experienced by parents of children with disabilities and their impacts on their personal lives will also negatively affect their marital relationship. this condition is in line with previous studies that parents of children with disabilities reported a higher number of divorces compared with parents of children without disabilities (hartley et al., 2010; risdal & singer, 2004). specifically, parents of children with asd reported a divorce rate almost twice as high (23.5%) than the others (13.8%) (hartley et al., 2010). nevertheless, various studies have inconsistent results when comparing marital satisfaction between parents of children with and without disabilities. several studies suggested lower marital satisfaction of parents of children with disabilities (doulabi et al., 2019; gosztyła, 2015; hoseinnejad et al., 2020). however, other studies found no significant difference in marital satisfaction between the two populations (holmbeck et al., 1997; lohranpour & chahartangi, 2016; tsibidaki, 2013). even though parents of children with disabilities showed lower levels of parental satisfaction, there is no significant difference in marital satisfaction between parents of children with and without disabilities (holmbeck et al., 1997). another study found no significant difference in marital satisfaction between these two populations, although mothers of children with disabilities reported lower quality of life (tsibidaki, 2013). 92 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ratri & ratnasari (perceived fairness and marital satisfaction: the role…) previous study tried to explain these nonsignificant differences in marital satisfaction between couples with and without children with disabilities by the various factors that contribute to marital satisfaction, namely their coping strategy, the capability of cooperation between spouses, or their resilience level (tsibidaki, 2013). it is possible that even though parents of children with disabilities experience different levels of challenges in childrearing compared to parents of children without disabilities, other factors in the relationships or within themselves contribute more to their marital satisfaction level, hence producing similar marital satisfaction between the two groups. in correspondence with the extensive and complex needs required by children with disabilities, the authors postulate that the couple’s collaboration to divide fair household responsibilities, manifested in their perception of fairness, may reduce the burden of childrearing. this collaboration will lead to higher marital satisfaction among parents of children with disabilities (gosztyła, 2015; ki & joanne, 2014), which explains the higher interest in perceived fairness studies, specifically on parents of children with disabilities. the rise of the important role of perceived fairness in marital relationships could also result from a shift in gender roles in general. frequently, these studies of perceived fairness would emphasize the importance of the father’s role in the mother’s perceived fairness, as childrearing responsibilities usually fall on the role of mothers. specifically, father’s cooperation in caregiving and their positive response in taking more responsibility in the household will enhance their marital quality, which results in higher mother’s marital satisfaction (simmerman et al., 2001; tsibidaki, 2013; willoughby & glidden, 1995). these findings of gender role shift occur specifically in indonesia. despite the strong enforced belief of patriarchy, specifically of superiority in men rather than women in the majority of indonesia’s culture (hadiz & eddyono, 2005), there has been a shift of position in the last couple of decades where women in indonesia begun to gain their place in society by getting higher education, getting more waged jobs, and holding important positions in political organization (schaner & das, 2016). these changes could lead to a higher demand for equality in the household, specifically in household chores and childrearing. this condition is in accordance with a study that wives with higher financial earnings have more power to negotiate a more equal division of childrearing with their husbands (simulja et al., 2014). based on the different challenges between parents of children with and without disabilities and the important role that perceived fairness holds in marital relationships in general, this study aimed to determine the relationship between perceived fairness and marital satisfaction moderated by the presence of children with disabilities in marriage. this study examined if the relationship between perceived fairness and marital satisfaction will differ between parents of children with and without disabilities. the authors hypothesized that the complex and special care required by children with disabilities would lead to a significantly stronger correlation between perceived fairness and marital satisfaction in parents of children with disabilities, as higher demands will result in higher needs of equal division of household chores and childrearing. the implication of the results of this study is to identify if perceived fairness can be targeted as a factor that needs to be emphasized during counseling for this type of family. this implication is in accordance with a study that suggested the importance of finding factors that reinforce the positive adaptation of parents of children with disabilities to support them as a family (risdal & singer, 2004). method research design this quantitative research uses a correlational research design, where the numerical data were gathered from the target population and analyzed to test the associations between variables. data was collected in an online platform, which took approximately 20-30 minutes. this humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 93 ratri & ratnasari (perceived fairness and marital satisfaction: the role…) study has received ethical approval from the committee on research ethics at the faculty of psychology, universitas indonesia, with the number approval 032/fpsi.komite etik/pdp.04.00/2022. participants three hundred and sixty-six married indonesian participants participated through convenience sampling. an informative flyer regarding the research was distributed through various social media and communication platforms such as instagram and whatsapp. the information presented in the flyer included the purpose of the study, the characteristics of the participants required, the contact person, and the questionnaire link. the questionnaire was distributed online using google forms to collect individual data rather than dyadic (couples’ data). the authors controlled the data to be only for participants with children, both with and without disabilities, to minimize possible errors. therefore, 31 participants without children were eliminated, resulting in 335 data comprised of 187 women (56%) and 148 men (44%), with 152 of them (45%) having children with disabilities such as autism spectrum disorder (asd) and physical disability (i.e., deaf, blind). the majority of participants received a high degree of education, and more than 70% of the participants graduated with bachelor, master, or doctorate degrees. all participants were provided with informed consent to state their willingness to agree to fill up the research questions. details of participants’ demographic characteristics and the disabilities diagnosed in participants’ children can be seen in table 1. table 1 participants’ demographics and distribution of disabilities in participants’ children type frequency percentage gender male 148 56% female 187 44% children with disabilities 152 45% without disabilities 183 55% education high school diploma 32 10% vocational study 45 13% undergraduate 152 45% graduate 106 32% duration of marriage 0-5 years 105 31% 6-10 years 46 14% 11-15 years 66 20% >15 years 118 35% disabilities physical disability 96 63% autism spectrum disorder 31 20% adhd/attention issues 9 6% learning difficulties 6 4% down syndrome 4 3% others (microcephaly, multi-disability) 6 4% instruments each participant was first requested to mention the health of their children in a short demographic questionnaire. specifically, parents of children with disabilities were requested to write down their children’s diagnoses and the source of the diagnoses, such as doctors, psychiatrists, or psychologists. 94 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ratri & ratnasari (perceived fairness and marital satisfaction: the role…) perceived fairness was measured using the perceived fairness instrument (claffey & mickelson, 2009). participants rated their perception of fairness in the division of household chores in their marriage, including food preparation, cleaning, household management, yard work, and childrearing. the instrument consisted of 5 items, ranging from 1 (“very unfair”) to 4 (“very fair”), with the highest possible score to achieve was 20. the instrument was translated and back-translated to bahasa indonesia and english (rahmadani, 2021) and had good reliability (α = .77). the sample item and corrected item-total correlation of the instrument are shown in table 2. marital satisfaction was measured using the quality of marriage index (norton, 1983), which included six positive items containing two-scale system types. the first five items were a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). the last item was a 10-point scale ranging from 1 (extremely low) to 10 (extremely high). the total possible score was 45, and the higher score indicated a higher marital quality experienced by the participants. the instrument was adapted to bahasa indonesia (aranti, 2020), with a high coefficient reliability in cronbach alpha (α = .95). the sample item and corrected item-total correlation of the instrument can be seen in table 2. table 2 sample item and corrected item total correlation for each instrument instrument item no. sample item crit range crit/scale perceived fairness 2 cleaning (dishes, vacuuming, laundry, etc.) .70 .54-.81 4 yard work (trash and lawn care) .53 marital satisfaction 1 we have a good marriage .86 .85-.93 5 i really feel like part of a team with my partner .85 data analysis participants’ demographic data were analyzed using hayes process on ibm spss version 23 to test our hypotheses on the moderation effect of the presence of children with disabilities on perceived fairness and marital satisfaction. as additional data, one-way anova was used to see the differences in perceived fairness and marital satisfaction based on demographic data, such as gender, education, and marital duration. results a calculation of hayes process examines the relationship between perceived fairness and the presence of children with disabilities to predict individuals’ marital satisfaction. as shown in table 3, a significant relationship was found between perceived fairness and marital satisfaction, b = 1.30, se = .29, 95% cis = .74, 1.87, p < .01. however, there was no significant relationship between the presence of children with disabilities and marital satisfaction, b = .19, se = .65, 95% cis = -1.08, 1.48, p > .01. moreover, the presence of children with disabilities did not affect the relationship between marital satisfaction and perceived fairness, b = -.09, se = .18, 95% cis = -.45, .26, p > .01. thus, the effect of perceived fairness on marital satisfaction is not moderated by the presence of children with disabilities in a marriage. furthermore, higher perceived fairness was proven to predict marital satisfaction in parents of children without disabilities, b = 1.21, se = 0.13, 95% cis = .96, 1.46, p < .01. a similar result was found in parents of children with disabilities, b = 1.12, se = .13, 95% cis = 0.87, 1.36, p < .01. it can be concluded that higher perceived fairness predicts higher marital satisfaction both in marital couples of children with or without disabilities. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 95 ratri & ratnasari (perceived fairness and marital satisfaction: the role…) table 3 moderation analysis of the presence of children with disabilities on perceived fairness and marital satisfaction analysis variable b se 95%cis moderator analysis perceived fairness 1.30** .29 .74, 1.87 parents of children with/without disabilities .19 .65 -1.08, 1.48 perceived fairness*presence of children with disabilities -.09 .18 -.45, .26 simple slope analysis parents of children without disabilities 1.21** .13 .96, 1.46 parents of children with disabilities 1.12** .13 .87, 1.36 note: *** p < .001; ** p < .01; * p < .05 independent sample t-test and one-way anova were performed to determine which demographic data (gender, education, and duration of marriage) contributes to marital satisfaction and perceived fairness. table 4 shows that among parents of children with and without disabilities, there is a significant difference in marital satisfaction for males (m = 6.66, sd = .94) and females (m = 6.09, sd = 1.3) with t(333) = -4.56, p = .00. in addition, male parents had score of perceived fairness (m = 3.74, sd = .47) that is significantly higher than that of female (m = 3.43, sd = .64); with t(333) = -4.96, p = .00. this study also revealed a significant differences on score for marital satisfaction and perceived fairness in each group parents with and without children. on the contrary, one-way anova analysis shows no significant score of marital satisfaction and perceived fairness based on other demographic data, including level of education and duration of marriage. table 4 differences in marital satisfaction and perceived fairness between parents of children with and without disabilities based on gender male female df t p m sd m sd total sample marital satisfaction 6.66 .94 6.09 1.30 333 -4.56 <.001*** perceived fairness 3.74 .47 3.43 .64 333 -4.96 <.001*** parents of children with disabilities marital satisfaction 6.51 .94 5.96 1.41 150 -2.73 <.010** perceived fairness 3.77 .44 3.30 .66 150 -4.90 <.001*** parents of children without disabilities marital satisfaction 6.78 .93 6.20 1.18 181 -3.61 <.001*** perceived fairness 3.72 .49 3.54 .60 181 -2.12 .030* note: *** p < .001; ** p < .01; * p < .05 discussion the results showed no difference in the relationship between perceived fairness and marital satisfaction among parents of children with and without disabilities. there are several possible explanations for this finding. one of which is the similarities of challenges between the two groups. even though parents of children with disabilities tend to encounter a more complex and demanding childrearing routine, parents of children without disabilities also reported similar parental stress related to their children. these parenting stress include fatigue or lack of sleep, decreased sexual satisfaction, financial stress, and less time for personal life (cooklin et al., 2011; ponnet et al., 2016). these similar sources of stress on childrearing between both groups may lead to similar perceptions of fairness and satisfaction in marital relationships. 96 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ratri & ratnasari (perceived fairness and marital satisfaction: the role…) in addition, the higher challenges of childrearing of children with disabilities may lead to the development of adaptive coping skills in their parents. parents of children with disabilities have a higher cooperative marital relationship than those without disabilities (tsibidaki, 2013). this cooperation refers to the responsibility associated with the condition of their children. as a result, having children with disabilities tends to unify husbands and wives primarily in their shared role as parents (tsibidaki, 2013). aside from their coping as parents, parents of children with disabilities demonstrated a more positive affect and sensitivity toward their spouse compared to parents of children without disabilities (hartley et al., 2017). furthermore, even though parents of children with disabilities encountered a greater level of stress, they also demonstrated remarkable resilience in dealing with the challenges (sanders & morgan, 1997). previous studies showed that the presence of children with disabilities does not necessarily negatively impact their lives and marital relations (tsibidaki, 2013). moreover, several studies revealed that parents of children with disabilities who are divorced or separated had marital issues before the birth of children with disabilities (holmbeck et al., 1997; tsibidaki, 2013). this development of adaptive coping and resilience in parents of children with disabilities may explain why there is no significant difference in the role of perceived fairness in marital satisfaction between parents of children with and without disabilities. this study finding implies that regardless of the presence of children with disabilities, higher perceived fairness leads to higher marital satisfaction. this result aligns with the variety of previous studies on parents of children with and without disabilities (gosztyła, 2015; ki & joanne, 2014; stevens et al., 2001; willoughby & glidden, 1995). generally, the wife’s dissatisfaction with the division of household chores is correlated with higher marital conflict (kluwer et al., 1996). on the other hand, domestic labor is divided into three dimensions: household tasks, emotion-work, and status-enhancement work, and suggested that all three dimensions are significantly correlated to marital satisfaction (stevens et al., 2001). nevertheless, in correlation with our research, findings satisfaction with household chores only influences marital satisfaction in women (stevens et al., 2001). in addition, the division of household chores affects marital satisfaction through the perception of fairness, yet what is perceived as “fair” differs for husbands and wives (wilkie et al., 1998). for wives, doing more than their fair share of household chores and not getting credit for it decreases their sense of justice and fairness. on the other hand, for husbands, a conventional division of household chores increases their sense of fairness. on the other side, specifically for parents of children with disabilities, this result is in accordance with a previous study in which perceived fairness is significantly correlated to marital satisfaction in countries with collective cultures, such as indonesia and china, as they tend to uphold social harmony and group needs more than anything else (ki & joanne, 2014). therefore, sharing and dividing household chores and childrearing in indonesia is perceived as a means to achieve harmony and marital satisfaction. aside from social context, when both parents of children with developmental disabilities cooperate to fulfill their children’s needs, it will strengthen their marriage in the process (benson & gross, 1989). previous studies tend to explain this from the mothers’ perspective, suggesting that the mother’s perception and satisfaction with the father’s help with household chores and caring for children with disabilities significantly correlate to marital adjustment (simmerman et al., 2001). in addition, as mothers usually take a higher burden of childrearing (60%) than fathers, they reported less anger, depression, and anxiety when their spouse helps and takes more responsibility (tsibidaki, 2013). these lower negative emotions in mothers can lead to higher marital satisfaction. not only decreasing negative emotions but sharing childrearing responsibility is also found to lessen the parents’ perspective on the difficulties encountered (willoughby & glidden, 1995). as explained in previous studies on both parents of children with and without disabilities, perceived fairness can rarely be separated from gender roles in marital humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 97 ratri & ratnasari (perceived fairness and marital satisfaction: the role…) relationships (kluwer et al., 1996; stevens et al., 2001; wilkie et al., 1998). hence, an additional analysis is performed to examine the role of demographic data in participants’ marital satisfaction and perceived fairness. it was found that participants’ gender is the only demographic data that has significant relationships with marital satisfaction and perceived fairness. this finding is in accordance with the previous study that gender has the most significant impact on perceived fairness, in which male is reported to have significantly higher perceived fairness than female (gosztyła, 2015). as explained in various studies, it should be considered that women have a bigger responsibility for childrearing (craig & mullan, 2011; stevens et al., 2001). therefore, it is possible that even though husbands perceive that the shared responsibility is fair or that they are helping with household chores and childrearing, the wives do not share the same perception (chong & mickelson, 2016). this condition is most likely to happen, particularly in indonesia. although the law has regulated the equal rights between husband and wife, it also defines a polarized role for each of them. according to the law, the husband is the head of the family, and the wife is the household's mother. thus, the social norm that husbands are the ones who work and wives are the ones who stay at home to manage household and childrearing tasks has been rooted deeply in indonesian culture. a previous study suggested that decades of taking responsibility for caretaking demand have manifested in a higher burden for women, not only doing the responsibility itself but also delegating and thinking about it (gillespie et al., 2019). as a result, despite the shared chores between fathers and mothers, mothers remain to carry a bigger burden. the significantly lower perceived fairness in women supports our finding that women have significantly lower marital satisfaction. as it was found that perceived fairness has a significant positive correlation with marital satisfaction, it is comprehensible that when women experience lower perceived fairness, they also have lower marital satisfaction. there are a few possible reasons for this result. as several studies stated that wives experience higher stress in handling children with disabilities, they may need deeper and more complex resources to cope with the situation and achieve higher marital satisfaction (norlin & broberg, 2013). this result aligns with previous studies that various factors contribute to marital satisfaction in mothers of children with disabilities, including unfairness to self, spousal emotional support, personality, or coping strategy (chong & mickelson, 2016; gillespie et al., 2019). despite the beneficial findings of this study, there are several limitations. firstly, this study did not specify the disabilities of the participants’ children as this study generalized disabilities from developmental disabilities and physical disabilities. consequently, this study could not identify if the findings are relevant specifically for each different type of disability. therefore, future research needs to examine further by controlling the type of disability in participants’ children. another similar limitation is how this study did not differentiate perceived fairness in the context of household and childcare tasks. a previous study emphasizes the importance of independently testing childcare and household tasks, as they found a different impact of the division of housework and childcare tasks on spouses’ perception of fairness and assessments of marital conflicts (newkirk et al., 2017). conclusion the presence of children with disabilities does not influence the relationship between perceived fairness and marital satisfaction. perceived fairness is significantly correlated to marital satisfaction in both parents of children with and without disabilities. this finding highlights the importance of increasing perceived fairness among parents of children with and without disabilities, which can be achieved by bridging the communication gap between parents on the expectation of household chores and childrearing division to reach a mutual 98 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ratri & ratnasari (perceived fairness and marital satisfaction: the role…) understanding of fairness from both parties. furthermore, the intervention can also be implemented to create a responsibility-sharing plan that is perceived as fair for both parties. this implication can be done to understand better and fulfill the wife’s expectation of fairness in the marriage, as females experience lower marital satisfaction and perceived fairness than males. hence, a more thorough understanding and intervention on wives’ perspectives of fairness in household labor are expected to prevent conflict in marriage and create higher marital satisfaction. acknowledgment the author thanks all participants, both parents of children with or without disabilities, for participating in this study. declarations author contribution. the first and second authors co-designed the study. the first author analyzed the data and drafted the article, with feedback and guidance from the second author. funding statement. this study did not receive external funding. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references aranti, h. 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(1995). fathers helping out: shared child care and marital satisfaction of parents of children with disabilities. american journal on mental retardation, 99(4), 399–406. https://doi.org/10.7454/mssh.v18i2.3466 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2001.00514.x https://doi.org/10.25115/ejrep.v11i29.1556 https://doi.org/10.3109/09638288.2015.1060267 https://doi.org/10.2307/353530 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 21 (1), february 2024, 77-90 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i1.382 the relationship between mindfulness and work-life balance: the mediation role of emotional regulation tis'a muharrani, rahmi lubis, suryani hardjo faculty of psychology, universitas medan area, indonesia corresponding author: rahmilubis@staff.uma.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction one of the professional jobs available in the service sector is air traffic controller (atc). according to icao (international civil aviation organization) in annex 11, air traffic control officers provide service that aims to prevent collisions between aircraft and aircraft and other objects in the maneuver area as well as expedite and maintain smooth air traffic. in indonesia, atc officers work under the public corporation (perum) of the indonesian navigation service provider, better known as airnav indonesia. to maintain the ability and performance of an atc while working, the company routinely conducts evaluations regulated by international civil aviation organization (icao) regulations. the regulation controls the validity period of licenses, setting maximum working hours, working shift patterns, work positions, validity periods for medical documents, validity periods for icao english language proficiency (ielp) competencies, and rating validity periods (icao, 1993). atc officers who work at airports that provide 24-hour non-stop article info abstract article history received march 10, 2023 revised august 12, 2023 accepted december 26, 2023 air traffic controller (atc) is one of the occupations in the service sector. atc, like other jobs, has other social tasks outside of work that require the ability to balance work and family or personal and social responsibilities (i.e., work-life balance). this research aims to test the role of emotional regulation in mediating the relationship between mindfulness and work-life balance among atc officers. this research was conducted quantitatively. the data was collected through the work-life balance, emotion regulation, and mindfulness scales and was analyzed using structural equation modeling (sem) operated through the jasp program version 16. 172 employees (59% males) involved in this research. results showed that emotional regulation significantly mediates the relationship between mindfulness and work-life balance. this indicates that atc officers with a mindful condition will consciously be able to direct their attention to focus on the current situation and role. this will affect atc's ability to manage cognitively to provide emotional responses and express emotions according to the needs of the current situation in completing the role at hand and achieving work-life balance. this finding has implications on how management might assist atc officers in improving work-life balance by enhancing emotional regulation skills and mindfulness. keywords work-life balance; mindfulness; emotion regulation; air traffic controller. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i1.382 mailto:rahmilubis@staff.uma.ac.id https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 78 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) tis'a muharrani et.al (the relationship between mindfulness and work-life balance…) service are subject to a shift work pattern that is inseparable from the provisions stipulated in kp 287 of 2015. they also have to work in a specific work schedule comprising three shifts: morning, afternoon, and evening, which makes them prone to having problems managing work-life balance (pearson, 2015). as an individual, an atc officer has other social roles outside of work. this role includes interactions with family, association with friends, and the community in the surrounding environment. an atc officer can act as husband, wife, father, mother, child, or as a member of the community or group in the neighbourhood where he lives. these roles have different demands and obligations. sometimes, those can go hand in hand, but they can also conflict with each other. this can become a problem when an atc cannot balance their work with family or social environment demands. work-life balance is an effort made by an individual to balance the two or more roles he or she is serving (fisher et al., 2009). according to fisher et al. (2009), work-life balance is defined as a multidimensional construct of the use of time, energy, goal achievement, and tension in work and personal life. fisher established four dimensions of work-life balance: work interference with personal life, personal life interference with work, work enhancement of personal life, and personal life enhancement of work. according to poulose (2014), one factor influencing work-life balance is an individual's adaptive ability to recognize, express, regulate, and manage emotions in oneself and others. researchers found that emotion regulation is useful for carrying out work effectively. happy employees tend to have a positive work attitude, don't withdraw, and show productive work behaviour; they also become more successful than unhappy employees (kassem & kelly, 1970). based on the results of a survey conducted on 72 atc officers, 69.44% of them found it difficult to control their emotions. they also admit that they often feel restless, anxious, and unfocused at work and, at the same time, have to think about other roles outside of work that have not been completed. facing those conditions, emtional regulation is an important skill for act officers to help them manage their job and personal lives. emotion regulation is a person's ability to assess, overcome, manage, and express appropriate emotions in order to achieve emotional balance. a high ability to manage emotions will enable individuals to deal with tension in their lives (gross, 2014). according to gross (2015), inappropriate emotional responses can lead individuals in the wrong direction. when emotions seem inappropriate to certain situations, individuals often try to regulate emotional responses so that these emotions can be more useful for achieving goals. thus, we need a strategy that can be applied to deal with emotional situations in the form of emotional regulation that can reduce the experience of negative emotions and maladaptive behavior (gross, 2015). gross describes emotion regulation in the form of strategy, among others cognitive reappraisal, and expressive suppression (gross & john, 2003). according to luberto et al. (2018), effective emotion regulation focuses on an individual's ability to regulate, restrain, and remove negative emotions that arise effectively. this ability can be increased through mindfulness. mindful individuals are able to observe and assess the emotions they feel. individuals are also more prepared to deal with unpleasant experiences (roemer et al., 2015). mindfulness causes individuals to be able to regulate emotions by the attention given to the individual's experience along with acceptance of the experience (yusainy et al., 2019). brown and ryan (2003) define mindfulness as the presence of awareness that is inherent and involves experience from moment to moment. according to baer et. al. (2006), mindfulness is an increase in full awareness by focusing on current experiences (present-moment awareness) and acceptance without making a judgment (nonjudgemental acceptance). mindfulness emphasizes awareness, making the individual fully aware of what is happening in the present moment. brown and ryan (2003) divided mindfulness into two aspects: attention and awareness. conceptually, mindfulness is defined as increasing awareness and focusing on the "now and here" condition, which is carried out purposefully and non-judgmentally (kabat-zinn, 2018). mindful individuals are able to humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 79 tis'a muharrani et.al (the relationship between mindfulness and work-life balance…) observe and assess the emotions they feel as well as deal with unpleasant experiences (roemer et al., 2015). awareness of the emotions felt will increase if the individual has good mindfulness. with good emotional awareness, individuals can regulate emotions effectively so that they can reduce aggressiveness (thohar, 2022). it is also predicted that difficulties in regulating emotions can hinder individual responses to situations due to increased negative emotions and a tendency to daydream. individuals will find it difficult to focus attention, have difficulty thinking and acting, and have difficulty controlling themselves (lokita et al., 2021). mindfulness also can improve individual work-life balance. past research found that individuals who practice mindfulness are satisfied with work-life balance (althammer et al., 2021). a study proved that individuals who do mindfulness activities for only five to ten minutes will have better health, including cognitive, neurological and emotional aspects and make positive changes to their well-being (grunwald, 2018). thus, we expected that higher mindfulness would be related to a work-life balance and that the relationship would be mediated by emotional regulation. research on work-life balance among atc officers is scarce, while research into it is very important as this profession is associated with a high level of focus and awareness. that way, this research will be important to help atc officers and management develop strategies to improve work-life balance so that atc officers can overcome obstacles that arise in work situations and the demands of the family and social environment.thus, this study aimed to examine the role of emotional regulation in mediating the relationship between mindfulness and work-life balance in air traffic controllers. method participants table 1 the distribution of study participants frequency percentage gender male 102 59.3% female 70 40.7% age 26-30 years old 57 33.1% 31-40 years old 88 51.2% 41-50 years old 21 12.2% >50 years old 6 33.5% education level high school 1 0.6% d2 12 1.2% d3 99 57.6% d4 7 4.1% s1 56 32.6% s2 7 4.1% 80 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) tis'a muharrani et.al (the relationship between mindfulness and work-life balance…) table 1 (continued) frequency percentage work period <10 years 113 65.7% 11-20 years 30 17.4% 21-30 years 25 14.5% >30 years 4 2.3% marital status married 153 89% not married 9 11% married period <10 years 138 80.2% 11-20 years 19 11% 21-30 years 13 7.6% >30 years 2 1.2% the population in this study were all atc at soekarno-hatta international airport, totalling 368 people. the sample in this study amounted to 172 employees (59% males) who were chosen through a simple random sampling technique. the majority of the participants have worked for 1 to 10 years, are between the ages of 31 and 40 years, have a diploma level of education and have been married for 1 to 10 years. see table 1. instruments this research used quantitative methods. data was collected through scales with a likert format. the scale used were the work-life balance scale compiled by gunawan (2019) consists of 17 items. this scale aims to measure the dimensions of work-life balance proposed by fisher (2009) including work interference with personal life, personal life interference with work, work enhancement of personal life, and personal life enhancement of work. the distribution of the items are showed in table 2. high and low reliability empirically indicated by a number called the value of the reliability. reliability value of the work life balance scale indicated by cr values of 0.976 and ve 0.707, which means that the work life balance scale is classified as reliable (gunawan, 2019). table 2 distribution of work-life balance scale items note: wipl= work interference with personal life; pliw= personal life interference with work; wepl = work enhancement of personal life; plew= personal life enhancement of work. no dimensions number of items total favourable unfavourable 1. wipl 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 5 2. pliw 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 6 3. wepl 12, 13, 14 3 4. plew 15, 16, 17 3 total 6 11 17 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 81 tis'a muharrani et.al (the relationship between mindfulness and work-life balance…) the emotion regulation scale was compiled by radde et al. (2021). this scale consists of 10 items that aim to measure the aspects of emotion regulation proposed by gross & john (2003), including cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. the distribution of the items is displayed in table 3. the reliability test showed an α value of 0.790 (radde et al., 2021). table 3 distribution of emotion regulation scale items fourteen items of mindfulness scale aims to measure mindfulness aspects which includes attention and awareness was used in this research. the scale was proposed by brown and ryan (2003) and adapted by researchers into indonesian. the internal consistency (alpha) was 0,82 (brown & ryan, 2003). the the distribution of the items is presented in table 4. all scales were distributed to 172 participants who agreed to be involved in this research by signed in the informed consent. we also provided information related to the scale being distributed. after that, we carried out the scoring process on the scale that has been completed. table 4 distribution of mindfulness scale items favourable unfavourable 1. attention 11 2,3,4,5,6,8,13 8 2. awareness 12 1,7,9,10,14 6 total 2 12 14 table 5 goodness-of-fit index no aspect number of items total favourable unfavourable 1. cognitive reappraisal 1,2,3,4,5,6 6 2. expressive suppression 7,8,9,10 4 total 10 10 no aspect nomor aitem total no the goodness of the fit index cut off value 1 x2chi-square ≤ α.df (less than chi-square table) 2 probability ≥ 0,05 3 gfi ≥ 0,90 4 agfi ≥ 0,90 5 cfi ≥ 0,95 6 tli ≥ 0,95 7 cmin/df ≤ 2,0 8 rmsea ≤ 0,08 82 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) tis'a muharrani et.al (the relationship between mindfulness and work-life balance…) data analysis to test the hypothesis, we used the structural equation modeling (sem) which was operated through the jasp program version 16. modelling research through sem allows a researcher to measure the indicators of a concept and measure the influence or degree of relationship between factors whose dimensions have been identified. analysis of the research data was planned using descriptive statistical analysis and inferential statistics. we used a two-step technique to analyze the data. the first step was measuring the variables through the confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) technique in order to obtain the fitness of the combination of the exogenous and endogenous constructs. the cfa model can be accepted if it has a good validity and reliability model data match. the second step was to measure the structure of the full sem model by combining the cfa model from combined exogenous and endogenous constructs that were fit into one overall model (hybrid model) or full model for estimation and analysis. the model is considered as good or fit if it satisfies the overall model fit test or goodness of fit test (haryono, 2016). results based on the fit indexes presented in table 5, it showed that the chi-square value was 1.000, the cfi value was 1.000, and the rmsea was 0.0000, indicating that the model was fit. the results showed that mindfulness positively affects emotion regulation with a path coefficient value of 0.686 with a p-value <0.001. thus, mindfulness has a positive and significant effect on emotional regulation at the air traffic controllers of soekarno-hatta international airport. the results also showed that there are direct effects and indirect effect of mindfulness on work-life balance through emotional regulation. the magnitude of the direct effect of mindfulness on work-life balance was 0.41. based on nurbaiti (2022), we found that the magnitude of the indirect effect of mindfulness on work-life balance was 0.70 x 0.38 = 0.26. meanwhile, the total effect of mindfulness on work-life balance was 0.41+0.26 = 0.67. a stronger relationship or a greater contribution to the results of the study was seen from the coefficients, where the direct effect was greater than the indirect effect. the magnitude of the path value of the direct effect of mindfulness on work-life balance was 41%, which was greater than the path value of the indirect effect that accounted for 0.26 with a contribution of 26%, so it can be concluded that the real influence was the direct effect. that is, there was a direct relationship between mindfulness and work-life balance. figure 1 path diagram based on slf values and path coefficients humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 83 tis'a muharrani et.al (the relationship between mindfulness and work-life balance…) the good nature of convergent validity is demonstrated by a standardised loading factor (slf) value that surpasses 0.5, as recommended by hair et al. (2010). the construct reliability (cr) measure is also a determining indicator that shows whether convergent validity is good or not. hair et al. (2010) stated that a cr value ≥ 0.7 includes good reliability, while a cr value between 0.6 and 0.7 includes acceptable reliability, provided that the indicator variables show good validity. see figure 1. table 6 slf value based on the indicators on mindfulness, emotion regulation, and work-life balance latent variables indicator standardized loading factor (slf) mf1 0.931 mf2 0.916 mf3 0.919 mf4 0.921 mf5 0.918 mf6 0.923 mf7 0.910 mf8 0.928 mf9 0.916 mf10 0.927 mf11 0.927 mf12 0.925 mf13 0.913 mf14 0.917 mf15 0.936 re1 0.938 re2 0.931 re3 0.934 re4 0.937 re5 0.932 re6 0.930 re7 0.930 re8 0.922 re9 0.930 re10 0.952 wlb1 0.930 wlb2 0.925 wlb3 0.943 wlb4 0.926 wlb5 0.921 wlb6 0.916 wlb7 0.927 wlb8 0.909 wlb9 0.936 wlb10 0.915 84 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) tis'a muharrani et.al (the relationship between mindfulness and work-life balance…) table 6 (continued) indicator standardized loading factor (slf) wlb11 0.929 wlb12 0.890 wlb13 0.935 wlb14 0.922 wlb15 0.906 wlb16 0.923 wlb17 0.943 notes: mf=mindfulness, re =emotion regulation, wlb= work-life balance as presented in table 6, it is known that the slf value of all indicators of the latent variables of mindfulness, emotional regulation and work-life balance were above 0.5. ths indicates all the latent were valid. table 7 test the significance of direct and indirect (mediation) influence indicator standardized loading factor (slf) error slf2 ave cr mf1 0.931 0.134 0.867 0.850 0.988 mf2 0.916 0.160 0.839 mf3 0.919 0.155 0.845 mf4 0.921 0.152 0.848 mf5 0.918 0.158 0.843 mf6 0.923 0.149 0.852 mf7 0.910 0.172 0.828 mf8 0.928 0.140 0.861 mf9 0.916 0.161 0.839 mf10 0.927 0.141 0.859 mf11 0.927 0.140 0.859 mf12 0.925 0.144 0.856 mf13 0.913 0.166 0.834 mf14 0.917 0.159 0.841 mf15 0.936 0.124 0.876 re1 0.938 0.119 0.880 0.871 0.985 re2 0.931 0.134 0.867 re3 0.934 0.128 0.872 re4 0.937 0.122 0.878 re5 0.932 0.132 0.869 re6 0.930 0.135 0.865 re7 0.930 0.135 0.865 re8 0.922 0.151 0.850 re9 0.930 0.136 0.865 re10 0.952 0.094 0.906 wlb1 0.930 0.134 0.865 0.853 0.990 wlb2 0.925 0.145 0.856 wlb3 0.943 0.111 0.889 wlb4 0.926 0.143 0.857 wlb5 0.921 0.151 0.848 wlb6 0.916 0.161 0.839 wlb7 0.927 0.142 0.859 wlb8 0.909 0.174 0.826 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 85 tis'a muharrani et.al (the relationship between mindfulness and work-life balance…) table 7 (continued) indicator standardized loading factor (slf) error slf2 ave cr wlb9 0.936 0.124 0.876 0.853 0.990 wlb10 0.915 0.162 0.837 wlb11 0.929 0.138 0.863 wlb12 0.890 0.208 0.792 wlb13 0.935 0.125 0.874 wlb14 0.922 0.149 0.850 wlb15 0.906 0.178 0.821 wlb16 0.923 0.147 0.852 wlb17 0.943 0.110 0.889 notes: mf=mindfulness, re =emotion regulation, wlb= work-life balance hair et al. (2010) states that the ave value ≥ 0.5 indicates adequate convergence. from the ave measure, it is known that the ave values of all scales were > 0.5, which means that those met the characteristics of good convergent validity. meanwhile, based on the cr value, the cr values of all scales were > 0.7, which means that they met the characteristics of good convergent validity. see table 7. table 8 overall model fit test based on table 8, the results showed that the whole model has a good ability in terms of matching the sample data (i.e., good fit). table 9 test the significance of direct and indirect (mediation) influence path path coefficient p-value mf -> re 0.686 < 0.001 mf -> wlb 0.337 < 0.001 re -> wlb 0.321 < 0.001 mf -> re -> wlb 0.220 < 0.001 notes: mf=mindfulness, re =emotion regulation, wlb= work-life balance table 9 showed that mindfulness has a positive and significant effect on emotion regulation, with the coefficient path value 0.686 (p<0.001) (hypothesis accepted). mindfulness has a significant positive effect on work-life balance with a path coefficient value of 0.337) (p<0.001) (hypothesis accepted). emotion regulation has a significant positive effect on work-life balance with a path coefficient value of 0.321 (p<0.001) (hypothesis accepted). the indirect path from mindfulness to work-life balance through emotional regulation was 0.220 (p<0.001); thus, emotional regulation mediates the match size value benchmark value model fit data p-value chi-square 1.0000 > 0.05 yes rmsea 0.0000 < 0.1 yes cfi 1.0000 > 0.9 yes nfi 0.956 > 0.9 yes rfi 0.954 > 0.9 yes srmr 0.013 < 0.1 yes 86 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) tis'a muharrani et.al (the relationship between mindfulness and work-life balance…) relationship between mindfulness and work-life balance (hypothesis accepted). from the results of the data analysis, it is known that the r-square value of emotional regulation was 0.487, which means that mindfulness was able to explain emotion regulation by 48.7%. meanwhile, the r-square value of work-life balance was 0.536, meaning that mindfulness and emotion regulation could explain work-life balance by 53.6%. discussion this study aims to test the effect of mindfulness on work-life balance through the mediation of emotion regulation. the results showed that mindfulness directly and indirectly affected work-life balance through emotional regulation. align with goleman (1998), mindfulness can be useful for identifying emotions and measuring them at a much deeper level of awareness (brown et al., 2011). this indicates that atc officers who are fully mindful would be able to process information cognitively and manage their emotions by thinking again before giving an emotional response to a certain situation. an atc officer would be able to change their mindset before expressing their emotions and then act accordingly to the situation at hand. those with a mindful condition would be able to express their emotions in accordance with the results of cognitive and emotional management that have been done before so that they can suppress excessive expressions that can appear in emotional conditions. they would be able to control their attention, which prevents them from having excessive emotional turmoil. with a mindful state, atc officers also focus on solving current problems and not drag on negative emotions that arise. this would improve their performance because what is currently being done may be resolved quickly with focus and complete awareness, rather than repeating and remembering previous problems. thus, atc officers wold be able to maximize their performance with mindful conditions and well-regulated emotions. the results of this study support several previous studies that revealed that someone who has a high level of mindfulness would be able to observe better and display behaviour that is more appropriate to the situation at hand, not just in the form of an automatic response (dzakiah & widyasari, 2021). this is also in line with the results of a study conducted by roemer et al. (2015), which showed a positive correlation between mindfulness and emotion regulation. when mindfulness increases, emotional regulation also increases, and vice versa. individuals who practice mindfulness would have healthy emotional regulation, reduce distress intensity, restore emotional conditions, and direct the behaviour to be achieved. align with past research that found that individuals who practice mindfulness have a level of satisfaction with their work-life balance (althammer et al., 2021), we found that mindfulness has a positive effect on work-life balance. this indicates that mindful atc officers can consciously direct attention to overcome work distractions that are considered to interfere with personal life and vice versa. atc officers will be able to deal with personal problems that can interfere with their role at work. mindfulness, awareness, and attention are intertwined and related to one another to focus at one time and complete the demands of the atc officers' role both in the work environment and other roles outside work. in addition, atc officers with a mindful condition would be able to direct their attention to maximizing personal abilities so that these abilities become resources that can be continuously updated to enrich individual work performance. their full attention and awareness allow them to focus on utilizing personal skills and managing personal potential that can be utilized to support performance. and vice versa, a mindful atc will consciously direct attention in doing work so that it has a good quality of work life and positively affects the quality of personal life. this is in line with previous research that found that individuals who do mindfulness activities for just five to ten minutes experience improvement in their well-being and health, including cognitive, neurological, and emotional aspects (grunwald, humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 87 tis'a muharrani et.al (the relationship between mindfulness and work-life balance…) 2018). other studies have found mindfulness to be a critical issue, especially related to negative issues in the work environment, which can reduce employee performance in the field of customer service. the results of the study showed that employees with low mindfulness tend to have a strong relationship between work performance and feeling negative in their work environment (babalola et al., 2019). we also found that the regulation of emotions has a positive effect on work-life balance. this suggests that atc officers with good emotional regulation abilities would be able to balance their work and personal lives. those who are able to manage cognition and emotions would provide responses and expressions that are in accordance with the conditions of the role being faced, whether it is a role at work or other roles. the ability to regulate emotions allows atc officers to deal with problems that arise from both personal and work life. by practising emotional regulation, individuals can maintain a state of calmness when faced with challenges in their personal lives. this enables them to effectively address these issues without allowing them to impact their work life and vice versa negatively. atc officers who are able to manage cognitively and provide appropriate responses and emotional expressions will continue to renew skills and potential to maximize roles at work and in their personal lives so that each role will enrich and benefit other roles. in other words, skills gained from work experience will benefit personal life and vice versa. this is in line with poulose & susdarsan (2014) that good emotional regulation wa associated with greater work-life balance. other research conducted on women with multiple roles, namely housewives who also work as teachers, found that emotion regulation has a role in the quality of life of women with multiple roles. women with the ability to regulate their emotions have a better work-life balance and quality of life (siregar et al., 2019). the results also showed that emotional regulation significantly mediates the relationship between mindfulness and work-life balance, indicating that atc officers with a mindful condition will be able to direct their attention consciously to focus on the current situation and role. this will affect their ability to manage cognitively to provide emotional responses and express emotions according to the needs of the current situation in completing the role at hand. if all the roles encountered have been appropriately resolved, they can balance roles in work and others outside the work environment. with a mindful condition and a good emotional regulation process, every role faced has been completed and lived to the fullest so that no role can burden others. the results of this study have implications on how organizations or counsellors can help employees maintain and improve their work-life balance by enhancing their ability to manage their emotions, particularly in facing conflicting roles between work and personal demands. organization and counsellors can also assist atc officer to improve their mindfulness to gain work-life balance in the first place. however, this study has limitations, including some items in all scales that might contain social desirability; for example, on the work-life balance scale, there is a statement mentioning that both at work and in an individual's personal life worsen because the two roles influence each other. on the emotion regulation scale, there is a statement mentioning an individual's emotional state when faced with a stressful situation. in addition, on the mindfulness scale, there is a statement that concludes that the individual does not focus on everything that is being done at the moment. future researchers need to employ other data collection methods, such as interviews and observation, to confirm those items to avoid the tendency of participants to respond according to social or researcher expectations. the other limitation was that this research was carried out within a limited period, so the researcher could not explore the real phenomenon at soekarno-hatta international airport. moreover, the research was only conducted at soekarno-hatta international airport; thus limiting the generalisability of the results. future studies could assess more diverse samples, such as atc officers from different airports or employees at different companies or other professions. the majority of the subjects in this study were in the age range of 31-40 88 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) tis'a muharrani et.al (the relationship between mindfulness and work-life balance…) years, with a diploma level of education background and male sex, who had been married for 1-10 years and had worked for a period of 1 to 10 years. compilation for different populations requires further research. conclusion based on the study's results, it can be concluded that high mindfulness was associated with higher emotional regulation that, in turn, was related to work-life balance among atc officers. those with mindfulness will be able to regulate their emotions and consequently achieve a balance in their role both in the work environment and outside. management can assist atc officers in achieving work-life balance by enhancing their emotional regulation skills, particularly when confronted with negative work or personal or domestic obligations, or by fostering their mindfulness, which enables them to effectively balance their professional and personal lives. acknowledgment the authors express gratitude to the employees of perum airnav indonesia for their participation in this study. declarations author contribution. the first author contributed to designing the study, collecting data, and writing the draft manuscript. second and third authors contributed to supervising study design, consulting data analysis, reviewing manuscripts, and finalizing manuscripts. funding 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(2019). mindfulness sebagai strategi regulasi emosi [mindfulness as an emotion regulation strategy]. jurnal psikologi, 17(2), 174– 188. https://doi.org/10.14710/jp.17.2.174-188 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.02.006 https://doi.org/10.24912/jmishumsen.v3i2.5551 https://doi.org/10.30762/happiness.v2i1.337 https://doi.org/10.14710/jp.17.2.174-188 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 21 (1), february 2024, 53-64 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i1.287 the role of organizational justice as mediator in the relationship between islamic work ethics and work engagement ayu dwi nindyati1, nida ulfia2 1faculty of psychology, pancasila university, jakarta, indonesia 2faculty of psychology, gadjah mada university,yogyakarta, indonesia corresponding author: ayu.nindyati@univpancasila.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction researchers are very interested in work engagement and how it affects organizational performance (alvi & abbasi, 2012). moreover, others noted that work engagement is significant to research due to its potential to improve organizational performance and favorably impact employee, team, and organization outcomes (biswas & bhatnagar, 2013; bakker & albrecht, 2018). past research found that work engagement has a positive influence on achieving organization’s goals (abdulrahman et al., 2022) as it affects employees’ performance, psychological wellbeing, work motivation, responsiveness to organizational change and lower turnover intention (juyumaya, 2022; aboramadan et al., 2022; zhu et al., 2023). research on work engagement has been ongoing for over two decades (bakker & albrecht, 2018). baker and albrecht (2018) use the definition of work engagement based on the research by schaufeli et al. (2007) as "a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption". vigor refers to a high level of energy and mental resilience at work. dedication relates to being strongly involved in a job and experiencing a sense of significance, enthusiasm, and challenge. meanwhile, absorption is characterized by total concentration and working happily, so they article info abstract article history received march 20, 2023 revised january 13, 2023 accepted february 19, 2023 this research aims to examine organizational justice's role as a mediator in the association between islamic work ethic and work engagement among sharia bank employees. the respondents were 86 employees of sharia bank in jakarta. the hypothesis was examined through a mediation test that involved four steps, including three simple regression and multiple regression. the results showed that organizational justice meditates the relationship between islamic work ethic and work engagement among sharia bank employees. employees who strongly uphold islamic work ethics will have a positive perception of organizational justice, which, in turn, leads to higher engagement with their work. these findings have implications on how organizations can enhance employees' work engagement by promoting employees' positive perception of organizational justice. keywords islamic work ethic; organizational justice; work engagement. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i1.287 ayu.nindyati@univpancasila.ac.id https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 54 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ayu dwi nindyati et.al (the role of organizational justice as mediator in the relationship between…) do not feel the passage of time. kahn (1990) defined employees’ work engagement as a process by which members of an organization apply and communicate their physical, cognitive, and emotional selves in the performance of their work duties. based on several definitions of work engagement, the researchers concluded that work engagement is the positive behavior of employees in an organization to improve company performance, which is characterized by passion, enthusiasm, and total concentration at work, despite various challenges. job demands-resources theory proposed that the model of employee engagement is developed by organizational and personal factors (bakker & demerouti, 2017). furthermore, according to this theory, work engagement facilitates the manifestation of job performance because of a combination of job characteristics such as job control, task variety, and personal resources such as abilities, traits, and values. therefore, current researchers also involve personal aspects in their studies (bakker et al., 2014; bakker & demerouti, 2008; bakker & demerouti, 2017). researchers from indonesia also explained that one crucial factor that must be considered when predicting work engagement is the personal element. some personal variables such as efficacy, optimism, and organization-based self-esteem have been employed in several investigations (mandala & nurendra, 2020). thus, this study aims to investigate the significance of the personal factor influencing work engagement that stems from individual values. one of the variables that reflects the value of work for individuals is the concept of work ethic. this implies that ethics needs to be considered individually to increase organizational productivity. as industrial productivity has developed, many countries in both the east and the west have experienced unethical problems, such as the increasing growth of corruption, weak exploitation, and increasingly rampant immoral behavior (ahmad & owoyemi, 2012). furthermore, the study of ethics in business arose due to many recent facts, such as reduced ethical standards in the business community (yesil et al., 2012). in pakistan, for example, unethical behavior has led to critical situations such as low efficiency, reduced income, and even bankruptcy in some companies, such as enron, worldcom, arthur & andersen, pakistan steels miils, pakistan international airlines (pia), and pakistan railways (marri et al., 2012). in indonesia, past research found that work ethics have a favorable effect on employees' performance, with higher employees' work ethics being associated with higher performance (christa, 2023). individual or personal ethics, including work ethics, are related to individuals' beliefs and religion. religious thoughts and beliefs can be reflected in understanding ethics in business life (yesil et al., 2012). this is also supported by luthans (1998), who states that the role of religion will affect individuals' ethical understanding. for example, the protestant work ethic (pwe) is considered to contribute to the economic success of western society. likewise, islamic ethics was considered to contribute to the greatest period of the islamic empire during the eight to fourteenth centuries, as islam is regarded as having the capacity to resolve ethical problems within the muslim community (rokhman & hassan, 2012) inspired by the role of protestant work ethics in the west, this research aims to examine how the concept of islamic work ethics affects work engagement among employees in indonesia. according to the ministry of religious affairs of the republic of indonesia, data in 2022 (retrieved october 29, 2023), indonesia has the world's largest muslim population, with 87% of its population identifying as muslim. based on that, the indonesian government is currently actively promoting islamic finance. thus, in 2002, bank indonesia, the central bank of the republic of indonesia, prepared a blueprint for developing sharia banks in indonesia and supported it by opening sharia bank branches and units. moreover, bank indonesia has formulated a grand strategy for islamic banking development, such as a comprehensive strategy of market development covering bank image, developing various products, improving services, etc. in order to achieve this grand strategy, it is important to have human resources with adequate hard and soft competencies. hard competencies are humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 55 ayu dwi nindyati et.al (the role of organizational justice as mediator in the relationship between…) understood as technical competencies needed by employees to be able to execute their tasks, such as the ability to operate computers and programs. in comparison, soft competencies are an employee's internal capacity that determines their performance, such as communication skills, self-confidence, teamwork abilities, and others (spector, 2021). as a new phenomenon in indonesian banking, sharia bank needs support to establish its sustainability and its employees' hard and soft competencies, including values that reflect on their work ethics to enhance their performance. islamic work ethics is defined as a set of moral principles that distinguish what is right and wrong in islam (farid et al., 2019; rokhman & hassan, 2012). marri et al. (2012) defined islamic work ethics as an orientation towards work through a virtuous approach to human life. this ethic is based on the qur'an as a guide for muslims in all aspects of life. based on these definitions, the researcher concludes that islamic work ethics is a set of moral principles in the world of work that are capable of distinguishing between right and wrong and are based on the qur'an and hadith as a guide for human life. since the qur'an encourages people to be involved in and committed to their work and forbids unethical behavior and unproductive behavior like begging, laziness, and wasting time, muslim employees are likely to be satisfied with their jobs and commit to their organization and little or no intention for leaving their organization (marri et al., 2012). past research found that permanent staff members at an islamic institution in yogyakarta have higher passion and dedication to their work when they adhere to an islamic work ethic, as they believe that muslims should be internally motivated to work as hard as they can, due to the belief that their effort is as important as their worship (mandala & nurendra, 2020). this is consistent with the idea of work engagement, which holds that motivated workers exhibit vigor, devotion, and absorption, based on the previous research on how islamic work ethics influence work engagement, this study advances the previous ones by adding other factors that might influence employees' work engagement in sharia bank. some researchers suggest that, aside from personal aspects, organizational factors might influence employee work engagement (bakker & demerouti, 2008; bakker & demerouti, 2017). the results of research conducted by moliner et al. (2008), as cited in strom et al. (2013) found that one of the antecedents of work engagement is organizational justice. organizational justice is defined as a subjective perception of justice in organizations that is reflected in various aspects of employee work life, such as perceptions of fairness in the distribution of resources and decision-making (mubashar et al., 2022). according to folger and cropanzano (1998) and herr et al. (2018) organizational justice is related to the company's condition, leading individuals to believe that employees are treated fairly which includes procedural justice, which refers to the perceive of fairness about the mechanisms used to allocate outcomes; distributive justice, which refers to fairness regarding outcome distributions, and interactional justice that deals with fairness regarding interpersonal treatment. further, some researchers define organizational justice as justice that directs employees' perceptions of fair treatment received from an organization and their behavioral reactions to that perception. based on the description and previous research about organizational justice, it can be concluded that organizational justice is an employee's perception of justice based on the organization's treatment of the employees (al halbusi et al., 2020; alvi & abbasi, 2012; hameed et al., 2019; jehanzeb & mohanty, 2019). according to schminke et al. (2005), organizational justice is closely related to ethics. the study of ethics focuses on individuals and how individuals' perceptions influence organizations. meanwhile, research on justice also pays attention to situations that affect perceptions of the organization. rokhman and hassan (2012) found a positive correlation between islamic work ethics and organizational justice. employees who perceive their organization treats them unfairly or unjustly will look for opportunities to improve their welfare and take unethical actions to balance the injustice done to them by the organization (rokhman & hassan, 2012). another research found that there is a strong relationship between perceptions of fair treatment in general and ethics. the results indicate that unethical 56 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ayu dwi nindyati et.al (the role of organizational justice as mediator in the relationship between…) behavior decreases when employees believe the company treats employees fairly (zeng & ye, 2016). the previous research that has been explained gives three conclusions. first, mandala & nurendra (2020), found that islamic work ethic affects employee work engagement. second, the research revealed that islamic work ethics influence organizational justice (rokhman & hassan, 2012). third, organizational justice influences work engagement (strom et al., 2013). these conclusions direct researchers to examine the role of organizational justice as a mediator in the relationship between islamic work ethics and work engagement. the researchers assumed that employees with strong islamic work ethics would emphasize justice and welfare in the field of work; in this situation, the employees' feelings about justice will emerge, and employees will generate positive reactions to their work, that is, work engagement. in addition, employees with work attitudes such as islamic work ethic have their own internal motivation to create high morale and dedication. thus, we expected that higher islamic work ethics would be associated with higher positive perceptions of organizational justice, which, in turn, would relate to higher work engagement. we hypothesized that: hypothesis: organizational justice mediates the relationship between islamic work ethics and work engagement method participants participants in this study were 86 (54,4% female, 20-45 years old) employees working in sharia banks with the following characteristics: (1) are muslim, (2) have status as employees in sharia bank, (3) have at least one year of service as they already have sufficient experience in justice and adequately engage with their work. see table 1. this research was conducted using a representative sample. in this study, researchers used a non-probability sampling technique. this technique was chosen because only some in the population have the same opportunity to become a research sample. sampling was done by convenience sampling. convenience sampling is a technique that considers respondents' availability and willingness to become research subjects. the selection of respondents must also pay attention to the characteristics of the respondents determined in this study. table 1 respondent distribution, mean and standard deviation research variable aspect n % mean standard deviation iwe oj we iwe oj we gender male 46 54.40 79.63 75.28 67.89 7.710 13.084 8.252 female 40 45.6 78.55 73.45 65.55 7.785 11.318 8.910 total 86 100 79.13 74.43 66,8 7.718 12.258 8.594 ages 20-25 24 26.7 77.79 71.42 63.96 7.934 11.34 9.332 26-30 42 49.0 78.38 75.57 67.05 7.473 12.146 8.497 31-35 15 18.4 81.6 75.78 70.53 8.365 13.845 7.150 36-40 4 4.6 84 75.25 66.25 3.916 16.07 7.632 41-45 1 1.2 86 74 71.00 total 86 100 79.13 74.43 66,8 7.718 12.258 8.594 working period 1-5 71 81.5 79.08 73.27 65.94 8.174 12.887 8.851 6-10 10 12.5 78.6 80.5 71.80 5.296 7.502 6.909 11-15 3 3.6 78.67 78 68.33 6.110 1.000 4.041 16-20 2 2.4 84 80 70.00 2.828 8.485 1.414 total 86 100 79.13 74.43 66.8 7.718 12.258 8.594 notes: iwe = islamic work ethics, oj=organizational justice, we=work engagement humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 57 ayu dwi nindyati et.al (the role of organizational justice as mediator in the relationship between…) instruments all instruments in this research used back-translated methods. firstly, the instruments were translated into bahasa indonesia by the researcher. secondly, the items in bahasa were translated back into english by a professional translator (ozolins et al., 2020). the result of back translation confirmed that those have similar meanings according to expert judgment and researchers. work engagement work engagement was measured via the utrecht work engagement scale shortform (uwes-sf), which consists of 17 items. uwes was developed to cover three dimensions of work engagement: vigor, dedication, and absorption. this scale has internal consistency (cronbach's alpha), which ranges between 0.80 and 0.90. in this research, uwes was modified into 19 items by splitting two items (i.e., items number 2,4) into two items each as those used the terminology 'and', which potentially led to bias (azwar, 2012). item number 2: "i find the work that i do full of meaning and purpose", was split into two items: 2a. "i find the work that i do full of meaning" and 2b. "i find the work that i do full of purpose". item number 4: "at my job, "i feel strong and vigorous" was split into two items: 4a. "at my job, i feel strong" and 4b. "at my job, i feel vigorous". in this scale, respondents chose one of five alternative responses namely: "never", "rarely", "sometimes", "often", and "always". the cronbach alpha of 19 items is 0.90, which is the same as the original scale with 17 items. islamic work ethic islamic work ethic was measured through the islamic work ethic scale developed by ali, (1988). this scale covers three key factors: personal ethics, work intention/ethics, and trusteeship. this scale consists of 17 items and has been widely used in some muslim countries, such as saudi arabia, uni emirates arab, and kuwait. the instrument has good internal reliability (α = 0.85). the researcher modified the original scale by splitting five items (i.e., item number 3,4,7,10.12) into two items each as those used the word 'and', which potentially led to bias (azwar, 2012). therefore, the total number of items that were used was 21. this 21-item scale has  = 0.876, which is higher than the cronbach alpha of the original scale. this instrument used five answer choices, namely: "strongly disagree", "no disagree", "neutral", "agree", and "strongly agree". examples of items: "good work benefits both oneself and others", and "justice and generosity in the workplace are necessary conditions for society's welfare". organizational justice organizational justice was measured through organizational justice developed by niehoof & moorman (1993), which consists of 20 items that measure three dimensions of organizational justice: distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice. we modified it by splitting three items into two items each, as those used the word 'and', which potentially led to bias (azwar, 2012), so there were 23 items in total. the scale has a coefficient of cronbach's alpha of 0.85 for the distributive justice dimension, 0.87 for the procedural justice dimension, and 0.90 for the dimension of interactional justice. this instrument has five choice answers, which are: "strongly disagree", "disagree", "neutral", "agree", and "strongly agree". examples of items were: "job decisions are made by the general manager in an unbiased manner "; "i feel that my job responsibilities are fair ". data analysis the statistical analysis technique used in this study was regression analysis. the hypothesis was tested using the mediator testing method formulated by baron & kenny (1986). this method was chosen because it is still used by many researchers. this article was cited 58 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ayu dwi nindyati et.al (the role of organizational justice as mediator in the relationship between…) 31433 times in apa psycnet (psycnet, 2024). in addition, as baron and kenny's method could not facilitate the significance of mediating effect testing, it suggested the usage of the sobel test (widhiarso & retnowati, 2012). according to baron & kenny (1986), variables become mediators if they fulfill four assumptions: first, if the independent variable affects the dependent variables. second, if the independent variable affects the mediator variables; third, if mediator variables affect dependent variables; and fourth, if dependent and mediator variables affect independent variables. data were analyzed through statistical packages for social science (spss) version 17.0 for windows. results hypothesis testing in this study was conducted through four steps, as mentioned by baron & kenny (1986): 1. the influence of islamic work ethics on work engagement 2. the influence of islamic work ethics on organizational justice, which is suspected as a mediator 3. the influence of organizational justice, which is suspected as a mediator on work engagement 4. the influence of islamic work ethics on work engagement through organizational justice according to baron and kenny (1986), a variable is confirmed as a mediator variable if the coefficient of direct influence of independent variables (iv) on dependent variables (dv) is insignificant or smaller than the coefficient of the influence of independent variables (iv) on dependent variables (dv) after the introduction of mediators (m). baron and kenny describe the conceptualization of the mediator model as explained in figure 1. figure 1 the conceptualization of the mediator model source: baron & kenny (1986) table 2 the result of data analysis using simple regression and multiple regression. variable organizational justice work engagement r r2 β r r2 β p islamic work ethic (iv) 0.337**a 0.114**a 0.337**a 0.353**a 0.125**a 0.353**a path a path c organizational justice (m) 0.555**a 0.308**a 0.555**a path b islamic work ethic * organizational justice (iv*m) 0.583**b 0.339**b 0 .187 0 .052 0.492**b 0.000 ** = p < .01; * = p < .05; a = simple regression analysis; b = multi regression analysis based on table 2, it can be seen that the direct effect of islamic work ethic on work engagement (β = 0.353; p<.01) becomes insignificant compared to the effect of islamic work m a b iv dv c humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 59 ayu dwi nindyati et.al (the role of organizational justice as mediator in the relationship between…) ethics on work engagement after the introduction of organizational justice (β=0.187; p>.05), it's mean that organizational justice confirmed as a full mediator for the association between islamic work ethic and work engagement. in the next step, the researcher conducted the sobel test, introduced by sobel (1982). this method was proposed for assessing the significance of indirect effect. in the application of the sobel test, abu-bader and jones (2021) explain that to conduct the sobel test, we should determine a and b as unstandardized regression coefficients and their standard errors (sa and sb). the sobel test is using the z formula (abu-bader & jones, 2021). the unstandardized regression coefficient in this research is described in figure 2. figure 2 the unstandardized regression coefficient furthermore, a sobel test is carried out with the aim of finding out whether the function of this mediator has proven significant by using the sobel test calculator contained in the link https://quantpsy.org/sobel/sobel.htm, or use the formula: z-value = a*b/sqrt (b2*sa 2 + b2*sb 2) the sobel test result confirmed that organizational justice significantly mediates the relationship between islamic work ethic and work engagement (z = 2.778, p < .001). discussion this study examined the mediating role of organizational justice in the relationship between islamic work ethic and work engagement among sharia bank employees. this research showed a significant association between 1) islamic work ethic and work engagement, 2) islamic work ethic and organizational justice, 3) organizational justice and work engagement, and 4) islamic work ethic and organizational justice and work engagement. the result also confirmed that organizational justice mediates the relationship between islamic work ethic and work engagement. the mediating process was fully mediating as the direct effect of islamic work ethic on work engagement became insignificant when organizational justice was involved. this result supports the previous research that found islamic work ethics influence employees’ positive workplace attitudes. a study conducted among accounting found that employees who develop islamic work ethics feel more satisfied with their jobs (amilin et al., 2018). moreover, spector (2021) found that employees with a strong islamic work ethic showed a strong work attitude, commitment, and low intention to leave the company as they believed in the values of being grateful for what they gained, thus further strengthening their bond with the work. this research also demonstrated that employees with strong islamic work ethics have strong work engagement. employees with islamic work ethics put the job as a priority leading to increased dedication, passion, and a willingness to learn from their experiences. this result also showed that islamic work ethic was associated with organizational justice. employees with strong islamic work ethics build the perception of strong organizational justice. this indicates that employees who have gratitude as part of their islamic work ethic, will positively perceive organizational justice and will accept what the m a= .515 b = .345 sa= .157 sb= .066 iv dv 0.378 https://quantpsy.org/sobel/sobel.htm 60 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ayu dwi nindyati et.al (the role of organizational justice as mediator in the relationship between…) organization supports as fair treatment. this finding is relevant to the research result conducted by (amilin et al., 2018) that found that islamic work ethic was associated with perceived organizational justice. moreover, raza et al. (2022) found that employees with islamic work ethics view positive about their organization and intend to show positive behaviors in their workplace. they believe that islam teaches helpful behaviors and would reward them in this world and the hereafter for their good behaviors. we also found support for the role of organizational justice as a mediator in the relationship between islamic work ethic and work engagement. employees with strong islamic work ethics will have a more positive view of organizational justice and the more employees feel that they were treated fairly by the organization, the more they engage with their work. employees with strong islamic work ethics will understand that islam prioritizes justice and mutual prosperity and view work as a tool to develop the meaning of work and self-respect, and organization rewards every contribution they have made. thus, when they perceive being treated fairly, they will improve positive feelings and trust, which in turn, leads to support for the decisions and policies provided by the organization. from this study, it is also understood that the role of organizational justice is a full mediator in the association between islamic work ethics and work engagement, and it explains that the existence of organizational justice strengthens the influence of islamic work ethics on work engagement. this indicates that employees who hold islamic work ethics would have positive feelings about their organizational justice; these positive feelings would lead to strong work engagement. meanwhile, those who perceive a lack of organizational justice while maintaining islamic work standards will still engage in their work. however, the development of work engagement will not be prolonged, and whatever work engagement does arise, may quickly diminish. this research has implications on how management or organizations may enhance employees' work engagement by promoting positive perceptions about organizational justice through fair treatment in their interaction, decision-making procedure, and distribution of resources. management could build justice in their management system including in hiring people, reward systems, conflict management, layoffs, and performance appraisals (cropanzano et al., 2007). this research also has limitations. first, it is related to the limitation of the number of respondents, which limits the generalization of the result. future research needs to increase the number of respondents recruited from many sharia bank companies or advance this research by involving those from conventional banks and non-banking companies. second, it is related to the data analysis technique. future research could advance the research by using more sophisticated methods and data, such as lisrel or amos to test the model. conclusion this study demonstrated that organizational justice mediates the relationship between islamic work ethics and employees' work engagement. this study strengthens existing literature by confirming that a higher islamic work ethic is associated with employees' perceptions of organizational justice, which, in turn, leads to employees' work engagement. this research also provides insights into how organizations might enhance employees' work engagement by managing their interaction, decision making, and distribution of resources which are integrated into their management system to promote a positive perception of organizational justice. acknowledgment the authors thank all participants willing to participate in this data collection. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 61 ayu dwi nindyati et.al (the role of organizational justice as mediator in the relationship between…) declarations author contribution. the first author contributed to designing the study, supervising the study design, consulting data analysis, reviewing manuscripts, and finalizing manuscripts. the second author contributed to collecting data and writing the draft manuscript. funding statement. the authors did not receive funding for research, manuscript writing, and publication of this article. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest references abdulrahman, b. s., qader, k. s., jamil, d. a., sabah, k. k., gardi, b., & anwer, s. a. 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(2023). the effect of work engagement and perceived organizational support on turnover intention among nurses: a meta-analysis based on the price–mueller model. journal of nursing management, 2, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1155/2023/3356620 https://doi.org/10.22610/jebs.v4i11.362 https://doi.org/10.4236/jss.2016.42025 https://doi.org/10.1155/2023/3356620 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 20 (2), august 2023, 159-173 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v20i2.289 student career anxiety during the covid-19 pandemic: a phenomenological exploration anita budi prabawaningrum1, f. a. nurdiyanto2, alyssa berliana putri1, enggar putri harjanti2 1faculty of psychology, satya wacana christian university, indonesia 2faculty of psychology, universitas gadjah mada, indonesia corresponding author: franznur@gmail.com introduction since 2019, the covid-19 outbreak has spread worldwide and infected more than 500 million people globally, with a 1.2% mortality rate of approximately 6 million people (world health organization [who], 2022). the first case in indonesia was reported on march 2, 2020, and since then, it has continued to increase rapidly throughout indonesia's territory. until july 9, 2022, as many as 6.057.660 cases of positive infection have been reported, with 156.624 cases of death (kementerian kesehatan ri, 2022a). indonesia also recorded the delta variant domination until august 2021, which has caused a dreadful wave of infections and fatalities (kementerian kesehatan ri, 2022b). the covid-19 pandemic has caused radical changes and worsened mental health issues, such as pandemic stress, anxiety, emotional instability, and loneliness (nurdiyanto & harjanti, 2022). likewise, the pandemic also increases the suicide risk for women (nurdiyanto et al., 2022). after enacting covid19 as a pandemic, the authorities governed various efforts to suppress transmission through travel restrictions, prohibition of physical contact or social distancing, and even semiarticle info abst ract article history received december 20, 2022 revised february 27, 2023 accepted june 26, 2023 the covid-19 pandemic has created a crisis in students' career development. online learning activities could not have been optimal during the pandemic due to the poor quality of the internet network. meanwhile, more than 1.2 million individuals had their employment terminated, resulting in their job loss. the pandemic contributes to students' career anxiety and mismatches in determining future careers. our study explored the dynamics of student career anxiety that emerged during the covid-19 pandemic through a phenomenological approach. data was collected using semistructured interviews by teleconference zoom meeting. the interviews focused on 1) how the participants experience career anxiety and 2) how it affects their career planning. fifteen students participated through purposive sampling with criteria: 19-25 years old and undergraduate students. interpretative phenomenological analysis (ipa) is applied as an analysis framework. we synthesized phenomenological themes identified as students' career anxiety: doubts about career plans, limited job opportunities due to the pandemic, and social comparison. the analysis also found that engaging in career-relevant communities was relevant to career readiness and deepening knowledge of career paths. this study encourages improving student skills by adjusting educational materials, training, or internships relevant to the student's potential and career needs during this critical time. keywords career anxiety; covid-19 pandemic; higher students; phenomenology. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v20i2.289 mailto:franznur@gmail.com 160 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) prabawaningrum et al. (student career anxiety during the covid-19 pandemic…) lockdown in almost every region (kementerian kesehatan ri, 2020). this mobility restriction policy, the government believed, could suppress the transmission spreading. it is no surprise that mobility restrictions affect indonesia's economy and career sector. tourism and services that rely on people's mobility were experiencing a downturn; this also includes industries such as tourism, hotels, restaurants, transportation, and manufacturing (badan pusat statistik [bps], 2020; kementerian pariwisata ri, 2021). the impact of the pandemic has put pressure on the industry to reduce employees and even make permanent layoffs on a large scale. more than 1.2 million workers in java island have received mass layoffs and lost their jobs (kementerian ketenagakerjaan, 2021). the pandemic has also caused educational disruptions, such as closing schools, reduced academic hours, and temporarily stopping teaching and learning activities. in higher education, virtual learning has reached up to 60% from the previous level during the pandemic (marinoni et al., 2020). online learning was less sweet than one would expect. students with poor internet connection in their area cannot follow online learning smoothly, and the teacher's poor online class management contributes to concerns about the quality of online learning (hagedorn et al., 2022; khalil et al., 2020). the impact is that students' academic performance tends to decline and threatens to lose an educated generation (united nations educational, scientific, and cultural organization [unesco], 2020). the pandemic also impacts students’ career orientation. in tertiary institutions, students are considered to have chosen majors or specializations designed for future work in specific fields. many individuals seek stability in their early careers and strive to improve their financial situation around the age of twenty (chowdhury et al., 2022). pandemic disruption may lead to students' career anxiety, which may influence students' future wellbeing (anticipatory anxiety) and decision-making. career anxiety is a form of fear of failure in the future related to individual career development (vignoli, 2015). excessive career anxiety will impact task adjustments and career challenges (shin & lee, 2019). a study suggests a link between career indecision and experiencing anxiety (miller & rottinghaus, 2014). an unmanaged career anxiety can encourage counterproductive attitudes, such as a lack of confidence which can hamper career decisions in the form of a lack of readiness and motivation (boo & kim, 2020). a study found that career decisions are hampered due to students' lack of readiness (zhu et al., 2021). all the while, when motivation is hampered, it will impact career information gathering and interpretations (storme & celik, 2018). students' career anxiety is related to career decision-making in their professional life after graduating from university. the courses, training, extracurricular activities, and relevant internships are related to career decision-making. students should make career choices that will indeed affect their future life, and the career decisions they choose will show an influence on their current financial condition and self-esteem. based on previous research, a manifestation of career anxiety is students' inability to decide their career choices (tsai et al., 2017). one’s ability to make career decisions is associated with career exploration. low career exploration is related to indecisiveness and dysfunctional career path beliefs, where individuals will have irrational and unrealistic expectations regarding career options (storme & celik, 2018). the emergence of such a pandemic may become a threat to students' plans in the future. this pandemic makes students ought to observe the whole circumstances full of uncertainties, given that career anxiety affects various aspects of student’s life and their future. the covid-19 pandemic drives social risks, encouraging poverty, social isolation, and increasingly unequal distribution of security and resources (haase, 2020). the pandemic pushes students to experience career anxiety and economic instability (belle et al., 2022), unavailability of social support due to mobility restrictions, and limited adaptation during the pandemic (wang et al., 2022). the pandemic still leaves career-related problems, such as economic crisis, unemployment, and limited job vacancies, which may lead to frightening feelings in determining a career (mahmud et al., 2021). moreover, learning disruption and humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 161 prabawaningrum et al. (student career anxiety during the covid-19 pandemic: …) lack of technological knowledge also influence how students negatively perceive their future and poor career aspirations, as they face difficulty deciding their career plan due to their unpreparedness and limited career information (khalil et al., 2020). the presence of such a pandemic has disrupted ideal conditions and steps in achieving a career and future. previous research has brought insight into career anxiety and covid-19 pandemic circumstances as factors propelling career anxiety (mahmud et al., 2021). the research found that students who experience career anxiety will make wrong career decisions. therefore, it is hoped that the benefits of this research will give students an idea of career anxiety and better prepare them for their future careers. the university can also acquire an overview of student career anxiety and provide facilities such as career counseling for students to prepare for their careers. a qualitative method was selected to investigate the deeper meanings of each participant's experience of career anxiety. this study is intended to provide information regarding students' career anxiety during the pandemic. the study proposes research questions, "how is career anxiety perceived?" and "what are the strategies for dealing with career anxiety?". method research design this research implemented a phenomenological qualitative method (smith et al., 2009) to explore the participants' unique experiences related to career anxiety. phenomenology was selected to capture the meaning and participants' perception and in an effort to see through participants' career anxiety experiences. in addition, this research elaborated on the forms and strategies of students dealing with career anxiety. this research has obtained ethical clearance from the research ethics committee of universitas gadjah mada (approval date: november 10, 2021; no: ke/ugm/013/ec/2021). participants fifteen participants participated voluntarily with the criteria: 1) 19-25 years old and 2) undergraduate students. participants recruited from our previous research (nurdiyanto & harjanti, 2022) and reported having fear for their future regarding career disruption through an open-ended survey. with career anxiety reaching disruption on career planning as a parameter, this study exists to further elaborate on the received survey answers. initially, the study recruited 21 students; however, six could not participate in the interview due to their eligibility. eleven of them were female participants. as a whole, the participants had a mean age of 20.6 years. ten participants were domiciled in java, while four were in kalimantan and one in sumatra. after interviewing 15 participants, we reached the point of data saturation in the interviews. procedure considering the mobility limitations and the high number of covid-19 infections, data was collected using a teleconference zoom meeting. we elaborated the open-ended questions responses and mixed them with semi-structured interviews to better understand the participants' career anxiety. the data collection was conducted from february to march 2022. the questions asked to the participants focused on what kind of career anxiety they perceived and the strategies for dealing with such anxiety. for example, "what is your current career plan?", "how does the covid-19 situation worry you about your career plan?", "why does it make you feel worried about your future career plan?" and "what are the strategies you employ to cope/handle those newfound worries?" interviews for each 162 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) prabawaningrum et al. (student career anxiety during the covid-19 pandemic…) participant were done separately and conducted in as many as 1-2 meetings, each ranging from 40 to 70 minutes. participants were asked to fill out an online informed consent before the interviews. it contained the research objective, what participants were asked to do, and the option or chance to withdraw from participating in this research. verbal informed consent was taken before the online interview. all participants agreed to participate, and we received their consent. table 1 shows the demographic of participants in this study. table 1 participants demographics subject age sex major year p1 19 male civil engineering 2nd p2 19 female accounting 2nd p3 19 female english education 2nd p4 20 female public relation 3rd p5 20 female english education 3rd p6 20 male mechanical engineering education 3rd p7 20 female accounting 3rd p8 20 female environmental engineering 3rd p9 21 female law 3rd p10 21 male law 3rd p11 21 female psychology 3rd p12 21 female psychology 3rd p13 22 female agriculture 4th p14 22 male psychology 4th p15 24 female psychology 4th data analysis interpretative phenomenology analysis (smith et al., 2009) was applied as the framework for identifying the dynamics of career anxiety. the analysis was conducted in a panel discussion and involved trained research assistants. they transcribed the interview recordings and rechecked their accuracy in a parallel fashion. in the first step, abp and abp read the transcription repeatedly to discover the familiarization data and make an exploratory comment on every data element. afterward, those comments were paraphrased to emphasize emergent themes. fan and eph checked the entire emergent themes and made notes to refine and clarify the themes. abp and abp built the superordinate themes by categorizing emergent themes with similar patterns and meanings. fan and eph re-audited such themes to ensure the quality and accuracy of superordinate themes. data credibility was achieved by triangulation, confirming our findings to participants, and continuous internal discussions to obtain saturation. data analysis and transcription were conducted using an excel spreadsheet, and participant names were changed to pseudonyms. results this research identifies the themes related to students' career anxiety during the covid-19 pandemic: forms of career anxiety and career adjustment. the themes of career anxiety synthesize doubts about career plans, social comparison, and fear of existing opportunities as career anxiety that arises during a pandemic. meanwhile, career adjustment themes describe participants' strategies, such as benefiting from the internet, beneficial relations, humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 163 prabawaningrum et al. (student career anxiety during the covid-19 pandemic: …) and exposure towards work culture. this article also underlies that although all participants are students, not all can adjust to career development related to technological advancements. the pandemic states and massive technological acceleration create the gap in technological finesse that students comprehend even more apparent. limitation in technological prowess is also perceived as related to student's career anxiety. form of career anxiety career plans doubt participants revealed their doubts about career plans that were increasingly perceived during the pandemic. this finding shows doubt on the selection of career path the participants would choose related to the several career choices available without being accompanied by profound knowledge of the career insight. participants perceived that the covid-19 pandemic made them feel doubt about their growing career plans. the lecture system and limitations that occurred during the pandemic were considered to increase doubt and unpreparedness for entering a more specific career path. this condition occurs from the lack of resources and fieldwork institutions are able to provide students. this finding underlies that the pandemic contributes to sharpening the doubt about career plans experienced by the participants. subject p11, who studied psychology major because she did not pass the department she had initially been interested in since high school, experienced doubt about her career plan. the doubts that p11 was experiencing grew when the learning was conducted online, with her relying on the capabilities of exploration and interactions within the campus grounds. these conditions make her considerations of new career plans limited. subject p11's doubt at the beginning of college and the learning situation she considered completely limited during the pandemic were perceived as worrying about her future career. "certainly, i am worried because i am unsure if i could pursue a psychology career. i doubt whether i can do it or not." p11 underwent college in psychology major over the past year before the pandemic. she perceived that she had insufficient knowledge during college to determine her career. p11 doubted choosing among the career selections available in the psychology major because it is a new issue to imagine, especially if you are a freshman in college. the pandemic was perceived to worsen the doubt about career plans since the online learning system and social restrictions hinder exploration and competency improvement. the pandemic using an online lecturing system and limited exploration at the campus made p11 doubt her career plan. this condition becomes the cause of her fear of failure in the foreseen future regarding the career path she chose. meanwhile, the lecturing situation during the pandemic was perceived to impede the introduction of various choices of career plans as well as mastering competencies that she feels are necessary. "i wonder if being a child psychologist would be easy or difficult, but what challenges lie ahead? i still need to find out. in case i could not be a child psychologist, what would i do? i feel doubtful." while p11 developed a worry about her career path due to the limited campus exploration opportunities, p1 saw online classes as unbeneficial in a different way. when asked if online courses affect his career anxiety, this was her response: "for online, my grades are higher because you can still open your book but really, what is more important is understanding the materials offline. even though the chance of getting a high grade is low, the materials are delivered well because you can understand them. which is a different case with online where you only need to cheat." 164 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) prabawaningrum et al. (student career anxiety during the covid-19 pandemic…) p1, a civil engineering student, values the knowledge that he can attain with classes being held in person. this field consists of constructing buildings that rely on precise counting expertise. p1 sees this as a risk of potentially taking people's lives; hence, he needs the proper knowledge he could not get from online learning. like many other majors, p1 relies on precise knowledge and practice in face-to-face classes. through this experience, educational institutions should better prepare facilities for a pandemic. supported by subject p10's claim of: "of course, i am worried. i am worried that i will never grow because there are many campus activities i want to do. but the pandemic makes that impossible." social comparison the social comparison theme emphasizes the judgment that others are better than themselves. during the covid-19 pandemic, the educational system brought up a social comparison among students, and participants compared their skills with others. the pandemic, accompanied by less intense meetings, tends to lead universities to shut down programs for a certain period, preventing subject p13 and her year from gaining experience despite the campus giving juniors and seniors a chance. it makes participants more focused on their weaknesses while viewing others as better than themselves, including competency issues. this comparison was conveyed by p13, who judged that the junior class's competence was superior to hers. subject p13 appraises that the current academic system during the pandemic is better, as follows: " meanwhile, my junior class seems to have made things easier during this pandemic. it is because the juniors can do research earlier and get more training, such as national-level training, while in our class, we cannot participate in these activities because there is a block system." p13 is a final-year student at a state university in java. she felt that the college system in her class became the source of competence shortages compared to the junior class beneath her. she perceived that her junior students have a better opportunity to participate in various extracurricular activities or productive academics; for instance, they are allowed to do early research. in addition, the participant also viewed that the applied college system makes other batch classes have superior competencies and higher working opportunities. p13 also revealed: "i am just afraid because i feel lacking here and there; competitors are way cooler out there. when others study hard, i hardly do anything to achieve it. so, yes, i am afraid, and i am still stuck here, and it is worrisome. astaghfirullah." during the covid-19 pandemic, she viewed that others had done something to achieve their goals, such as following online courses, research practice, or internships. on the other side, p13 felt that she had not done anything relevant to her career. she thought she was left behind by observing others make a step forward in their careers. another participant experienced social comparison detached from the university programs. subject p3 was not accepted to any major university and desperately wanted to apply to two different universities. she compared herself to others in a better university and major, and they were leading lives with accomplishments she did not have. we highlighted that the pandemic gave her much more downtime, and she spent all her extra time on screen time. "i would see posts of my friends and end up comparing myself to them in a negative way. how can they be at this point? while i am still like this." humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 165 prabawaningrum et al. (student career anxiety during the covid-19 pandemic: …) fear of limited career opportunities this research underlies participants' anxiety related to limited working opportunities during the pandemic because of widespread employee layoffs. the theme of fearing the opportunities to achieve a career in this study is a form of career anxiety experienced by students. participants viewed that the presence of the covid-19 pandemic influenced their chances of achieving their careers. participants realized that all careers in every sector were affected by the covid-19 pandemic, for example, reducing working hours or even employees, which affected the chances of getting a job in the future. the fear of limited working opportunities during the covid-19 pandemic that gets lessened is one of the forms of career anxiety experienced by students, as expressed by p2: "if the pandemic continues, surely the company might not be as free as it used to be in their recruitment. may be seeking for a lesser number of employees. even more, many smarter competitors or have more skillset, so it is much tougher to compete for a job." she viewed that the covid-19 pandemic's outbreak will influence the organization's recruitment of employees. she also added that the company limits the employees they hire. she worried that the accepted candidate was far superior compared to herself and reduced its chance of hiring in the future. p1 also perceives these concerns: "i am afraid i would not get a job. because the competition gets a lot tougher." strategies to deal with career anxiety benefiting from the internet this research also discovers participants' strategies to make a career adjustment by utilizing various media to pursue their planned careers. many seminars can be reached online during the pandemic with affordable student fees. one of our participants, subject p5, participated in an online seminar about the career she wanted. "there are many occasions to participate in activities, and more webinars are held in this pandemic. we also can join in distance learning, and sometimes it is free. so, many opportunities to develop ourselves are less expensive and more affordable than normal occasions, which is what i think." since the covid-19 pandemic, p5 has utilized online education. in addition to spending spare time, her participation was also helpful in coping with her career anxiety. p5 believed that the pandemic did not always negatively affect her career. during the pandemic, she can pursue many different learning opportunities that might be inaccessible in the lecture class. p4 also carried on pursuing her career. she accessed many different courses available on the internet to follow her arranged career plan. p4 said, "just following online courses. even though sometimes it could be better than a regular class, i still enjoy it. i could also do this discipline. so, it has its own unique reward." p4 is a third-year college student majoring in public relations in central java. during the pandemic, she occupied herself by adding new skills and knowledge by following training and online classes. she also participated in online classes that were relevant to college and design. p4's participation in various courses made her realize that her information technology mastery still needs to improve. previously, she underestimated information technology-related tasks by employing services or getting others to help to complete them. p4 stated that she gained more confidence with her new capability by following information technology courses. 166 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) prabawaningrum et al. (student career anxiety during the covid-19 pandemic…) this finding implies that during the pandemic, participants made particular efforts to increase their competence in the career plan they had arranged by following various seminars and online courses. the finding also underlies the participants' requirement to enhance information technology competence due to limitations in accessing the available online workshops and courses. the participants pursued competence to make career adjustments during the pandemic. beneficial relations this theme sums up participants' strategy to choose supportive friendships as one of the ways to deal with career anxiety. participants tried to get closer to social environments that bring positive things and support their career plans. during the pandemic, participants had the discretion to choose the social environments that supported their career plan and eliminate the social circle that was not supportive, as expressed by p4, who joined the group, conforming to her interest. "back in high school, i was associated with particular communities. this community helped the surrounding people. i also participated in church activities, such as social services for church congregations in remote areas. i like this kind of activity, such as health education, which concerns daily life." p4 wanted to become a volunteer or work in the humanities sector someday. when she was a child, she was inspired by her family to be a volunteer and affiliated with communities related to humanity's actions. p4 had done the activities since high school and continued through church activities during college. the community was not only helpful in her career, but she was being facilitated on how to manage herself in every process. subject p7 also has a similar sentiment regarding bringing positive things to her career plans: "if there is a job opening, it would be great to share it with my friends. we were applying together. even though it does add pressure, especially when you know they have better skills than you." to achieve her goal of filling out her cv, she expects to get from her friends to benefit from her in a way that she can get more information about job vacancies. in contrast, she also accounts for friends that might hinder her career and avoids them: "the important thing is for my friend not to be like that. if it is too bad and they saw someone else get an internship, it makes them stressed out on their own." p4 expressed how she often received negative comments regarding her career plans in humanitarian aid. she mainly underestimated limited salaries and vacancies. despite trying to ignore it, the words made her doubt. therefore, p4 has relations with supportive friends with the same values in humanitarianism to further support her career plans. "now it is better not to listen if somebody says something bad about what i want. you just do not listen to other people." exposure to work culture work practice becomes the following one of the strategies in our findings. the participants said that preparation in the working industry, such as work practice or internship, can help them cope with career anxiety. the mentioned work practice or internship is an activity to add working experience or be directly involved in the field of work they are interested in. some participants have carried out this practice to cope with their career anxiety. one way of the practice is to open a business. during the pandemic, the opportunity to do small business is wide open. as expressed by subject p9, who is planning to be an entrepreneur: "i am still determining what my passion is. however, i realized that i like to trade the more i do this. i used to endorse or make content on instagram, and i humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 167 prabawaningrum et al. (student career anxiety during the covid-19 pandemic: …) like these things. i also like to offer my products to my friends. so, i know more and more that i like the business world." p9 is a college student who initially needed to learn her career direction. even though p9 is a law student, she has fun managing her business. at the beginning of college, she also already had business ideas. then, she succeeded in making her business ideas come true. her vast connections and social skills helped her in advancing this business. having fun managing a business makes her career direction more straightforward. p9 experience is one example that students can see clearer when they obtain real experience on the job. opening a business is one of many ways to equip oneself for a student's career plan. an internship in a company is another activity that they can do. students should be encouraged to enroll in internships before entering the real working industry to add experience. subject p7 is one of the participants who have to utilize the opportunity. she said: "it is actually off the track, deviating from my goal. however, how to put it, instead of nothing, it is better to fill something in. so, when i do want to apply, i already have adequate working experience." p7 is an accounting student with more work experience than other participants in this research. she has a high passion for working. at the beginning of her college, p7 looked for and took many opportunities to work and did the work to get extra money and add to her experience. especially after the pandemic, work was moved online, and she looked for jobs that could be done from her home, like becoming a research assistant and lecturer's assistant. although that is the case, p7 is adamant about finding a work-from-office internship rather than from home. she greatly values her social experience from working in the office, even though the job is unrelated to her study. p7 repeatedly mentions having a portfolio related to her work experience during her study. with the high competition due to the pandemic, she wants to be viewed as a candidate who can do several things that later become an investment in experience. figure 1 describes the phenomenological dynamics of career anxiety. figure 1 the phenomenological dynamics of career anxiety and its strategies discussion this research was conducted to explore how students experienced career anxiety during the pandemic. the study identifies two main themes related to career anxiety: forms of career anxiety and its strategies. from both themes, sub-themes explain more dynamic subtleties, such as the participants' experiences related to career anxiety in the context of the pandemic. career pandemic context expectations pursuing career plan career anxiety strategies career plans doubt benefiting from the internet adding competences social comparison beneficial relations fear of limited career opportunities exposure towards work culture gaining confidence employee reductions & permanent layoffs coping strategies for career anxiety educational disruptions: closing schools; reducing academic hours; suspending classes career responses within the pandemic context maintaning positive relationships online learning with poor infrastructure and class management 168 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) prabawaningrum et al. (student career anxiety during the covid-19 pandemic…) the sub-themes were derived from the similar experiences encountered by each participant. this research found that the external context encountered by the participants also contributed to their career anxiety, such as social environment, technological advancement, health crisis, and socio-economic impact generated by the pandemic. deciding on a career is an essential task because it affects self-esteem and one's finances. internal and external circumstances are capable of influencing career selection. the emergence of the covid-19 pandemic has a proven effect on career plans; students tend to be afraid of limited career opportunities, considering many employees' layoffs and reductions during the pandemic. this research underlies several career adjustments students carry out, such as discovering more about the dream career, polishing supporting skills, and establishing supportive social relations with the career plan. this study underlies that the pandemic was perceived as making career plans even more nebulous. participants believed the changed career direction was related to the pandemic, such as limited working opportunities, low salaries, irregular working hours, poor working environments, and career path uncertainties. this study also discovers that students experience extended distress and frustration related to technology implementation, family and social relations issues, emotional stress, and financial problems. students have been having issues planning careers since the covid-19 pandemic; about 5% of students quit college due to the pandemic, and 20% or 500 students plan to discontinue their studies after spring 2020 (hagedorn et al., 2022). the covid-19 pandemic also negatively impacted the learning circumstances that forced them to stay at home because students believed that the environment at home was way beyond conducive (hagedorn et al., 2022). these circumstances hinder students from exploring their careers because the time to focus and be productive becomes limited. the pandemic threatened everyone and was full of movement (nurdiyanto & harjanti, 2022). in the stay-at-home context, people are in a monotonous and boring rhythm of life, and they do not have a variety of activities and spend more time with screen time. not being focused here means that people experience limitations in exploring potential career plans and spend time on monotonous activities at home. the pandemic has created an effect of fear of failure in planning a career, along with changes in the online learning system and restrictions on mobility. this research points out that career anxiety occurred to some participants with poor support systems. the discussion regarding social support and academic disruption was conducted by previous research (boo et al., 2021), that the students may interpret the family expectation as career planning encouragement. students employ external expectations as the main source to validate their career decisions. this research also observed that participants wanted social support to help on their career path. seeking social support is one of the strategies students use to develop their career plans (kang et al., 2020). the positive social response has a lower correlation with anxiety than the absence of appreciation (deer et al., 2018). social comparison becomes the next aspect of students' career anxiety. participants described themselves in a lower position than others. this finding aligns with previous research in the form of self-blaming and maladaptive strategies (lopes & nihei, 2021). regarding the coping anxiety that occurred in this event, it may implement an active strategy by redefining self-potential and various opportunities with social support. a previous study also emphasized the importance of social support for adaptive development (minza et al., 2022). although career anxiety is seen as no more frightening than a viral infection or health crisis, these particular issues need to be anticipated to prevent career delays and focus on developing students' potential along with the pandemic disruption. students encountered career doubts due to covid-19 pandemic conditions. many sectors are considered inactive or dead due to the covid-19 pandemic. the study conducted on hospitality and tourism students conveyed that they became doubtful about their careers in tourism due to the covid-19 pandemic. they hoped everything would return to the way before the pandemic, though not soon (minza et al., 2022). the cause of career anxiety is humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 169 prabawaningrum et al. (student career anxiety during the covid-19 pandemic: …) the lack of information and preparation in determining a career (arbona et al., 2021). moreover, our findings also revealed that the migration to online learning caused career anxiety during the covid-19 pandemic; these circumstances decreased their access to explore further the career. career anxiety has diverse dynamics among students. previous studies have stated that women's career anxiety is often higher (chowdhury et al., 2022). men choose more alternative activities as a diversion when faced with stressors, problems, and negative emotions. it implies that male students have more diverse career choices and higher incomes than female students. the factors that cause student career anxiety during a pandemic are more related to academic problems and their year of study (bai et al., 2021). students over 18 years were also found to have a higher level of career anxiety than those aged 18 and under. final-year students transition from their academic life as students into the workplace, while juniors are concerned with academic adjustment. first-year and later-year students are more similar than different regarding career issues. this finding warrants further investigation to understand better when students are most at risk for career anxiety. careerrelated anxiety is related to existential concerns, such as awareness of responsibilities, choices, and creating authentic lives (pisarik et al., 2017). career anxiety was identified among final-year students during the pandemic, and stress during the pandemic also significantly influenced career anxiety. students who have faculty affiliations have a lower anxiety level than those who do not (daniels et al., 2011). faculty environment factors relate intuitively to students' resolution of career uncertainty. this study reflects on various new opportunities and efforts to develop oneself. a previous study found an indirect correlation between career anxiety and career adaptation through self-reflection (shin & lee, 2019). the effect of self-reflection makes an individual capable of managing career anxiety and career adjustment. parallel to the previous research, the pandemic leads to personal gains, such as unexpected personal growth (august & dapkewicz, 2020). this personal gain helps the student to see the future with various available opportunities and chances. this finding is also supported by other research that views the pandemic as an opportunity for self-growth and development (nunn et al., 2021). one of our participants reflected on the pandemic as the propeller to be more developed in the education discipline. during the pandemic, the issue of the teaching profession became disrupted, leading to many teachers receiving layoffs, indecent salaries, and health risks; however, teachers' careers will always be needed. this research also highlighted that students' adjustment to the pandemic determined their career plans. in this research, participants used these strategies to polish the skills conforming to the discipline they chose, such as foreign language and technology. students follow foreign language courses during online learning (hazaymeh, 2021). interest in technology also developed along with the awareness that the world is highly dependent on technology during the pandemic. the skill in digital and computer skills contributed to decreasing students' career anxiety (tsai et al., 2017). the lack of preparation, information, and self-confidence makes the students unready for the working world (arbona et al., 2021; kang et al., 2020). searching for information regarding career and social support is viewed as a way to cope with career anxiety (boo & kim, 2020). high-confident students tend to have low career anxiety (deer et al., 2018). the study also found that positive responses and support from the environment lead to lower anxiety levels than participants with negative responses. the outcome is related to selfconfidence due to favorable environmental reactions. this self-confidence related to working experience is helpful in re-planning students' careers, eventually decreasing career anxiety (lopes & nihei, 2021). self-confidence is more likely to occur in students with higher exposure to the internship experience (belle et al., 2022). we acknowledge the limitations of this research. data collection carried out through teleconference, which was the best solution during the pandemic, needed to improve in 170 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) prabawaningrum et al. (student career anxiety during the covid-19 pandemic…) establishing personal bonds with participants. teleconference technical problems during the interview also affect the discussion we have. the research was conducted when the pandemic can be controlled, which potentially might be having different career anxiety experience dynamics when the pandemic is not under control. conclusion this research discovers phenomenological themes identified as the forms of students' career anxiety and the myriad of strategies that deal with it. students said anxiety arose from doubt about their career plan, perceived social comparison, and limited working opportunities after the pandemic. adjustment strategy needs to be implemented in students' lives, including pursuing careers, technological literation, industrial jobs, and internships. additionally, involvement in the community with the same interest may encourage more positive career aspirations. following our two findings, career doubt and social comparison, this research was expected to provide a discussion contribution regarding students' career anxiety. this study also suggests an educational and training institution to facilitate students' career training to improve their career readiness. educational and training institutions must facilitate managing students' career anxiety to prepare a more adaptive career plan for pandemic disruption. acknowledgment this research was presented in the covid-19 national seminar at universitas ahmad dahlan on june 18, 2022. we appreciate our research assistants: aurellia amalina, irene miracle, and kezia situmorang. declarations author contribution. fan led and conceptualized the research design. abp and abp carried out the data collection and initial analysis. fan and eph conducted supervision and reviewed the data analysis. all authors wrote and approved the final manuscript version. funding statement. this research received no specific grant from any funding agency. conflict of interest. the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. availability of data and material: unavailable for public sharing in accordance with informed consent. references arbona, c., fan, w., phang, a., olvera, n., & dios, m. 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mercu buana yogyakarta, indonesia corresponding author: martariarizky@mercubuana-yogya.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction in the era of digital expansion, adolescents globally have become the central figures in the information and technology revolution. this period has granted adolescents unrestricted access to information resources, broader social connections, and unprecedented educational opportunities (haddock et al., 2022). digital technology facilitates various forms of communication and social interaction that can be advantageous for adolescent development (urbanova et al., 2023). additionally, the easy availability of information and resources can aid adolescents in their self-development (aschbrenner et al., 2019; benvenuti et al., 2023). based on a survey conducted by the asosiasi penyelenggara jasa internet indonesia (apjii), the number of internet users in indonesia reached 215.63 million people in the period of 2022-2023, which is equivalent to 78.19% of the total population of indonesia (asosiasi penyelenggara jasa internet indonesia, 2023). the highest internet penetration is in the age group of 13-18 years old, with almost all of them (99.16%) connected to the internet (pahlevi, 2022). alongside the technological advancements and advantages, several issues have emerged that demand serious attention. issues such as the excessive use of digital technology article info abstract article history received november 6, 2023 revised january 30, 2024 accepted february 7, 2024 the use of the internet and its impact on adolescents is an increasingly important topic in the current digital era. this study explores the moderating role of gender in the relationship between fear of missing out (fomo) and internet addiction among adolescents in indonesia. data were collected through an online survey involving 169 participants. the scales used were the internet addiction scale and the fomo scale. statistical analysis employed moderation analysis using jamovi. the results showed that fomo significantly influences internet addiction, and there are gender differences in the level of internet addiction. however, the study also found that gender did not significantly moderate the relationship between fomo and internet addiction. this implies that fomo and gender independently contribute to internet addiction, emphasizing their distinctive roles in shaping online behaviors. the study underscores the importance of considering both factors in designing effective prevention and intervention strategies. keywords adolescence; fear of missing out; internet addiction; gender differences. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i1.580 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 2 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) martaria rizky rinaldi (fear of missing out (fomo) and internet addiction among adolescence…) can have adverse effects on the psychological and emotional well-being of adolescents (limone & toto, 2022). the use of digital technology has been associated with negative emotions (dienlin & johannes, 2020) and disruptions in sleep patterns (holly et al., 2023). furthermore, the impact of technology can also lead to internet addiction (prambayu & dewi, 2019; ying ying et al., 2020). internet addiction is a term used to describe problematic and compulsive internet use resulting in significant disruptions in an individual's daily life (cash et al., 2012; gergely, 2022; shaw & black, 2008). research on 2932 adolescents in indonesia indicated a prevalence of internet addiction at 19.3% (siste, hanafi, et al., 2021). the consequences of internet addiction in adolescents can be negative, including decreased academic performance due to reduced focus and attention (dou & shek, 2021; javaeed et al., 2019; kurnia & afifah, 2021; muliani & widjaja, 2022), adverse mental health outcomes such as depression, anxiety, and stress (alavi et al., 2011; devi et al., 2022; kumar & mondal, 2018; kwak et al., 2022; saikia et al., 2019), and physical health issues such as obesity, poor posture, and eye strain (aghasi et al., 2020; mylona et al., 2020; yang et al., 2019; zhang et al., 2023). individuals can become addicted to the internet due to the desire to remain connected or the experience of the fear of missing out (fomo). fear of missing out (fomo) is defined as a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent (przybylski et al., 2013). the internet provides access to various social platforms, apps, and websites that enable individuals to stay connected with friends, family, and their social circle (li et al., 2022). some individuals may feel the need to constantly check messages, notifications, and social media updates to stay connected with what is happening in their world. this need for constant connection can lead individuals to spend a significant amount of time online, even when it interferes with their daily activities or productivity. internet addiction has been extensively researched, particularly in connection with fomo (fear of missing out) (anastasya et al., 2022; metin-orta, 2020). adolescents often utilize the internet as a means to escape from anxiety and insecurity, driven by a desire to constantly stay updated on the latest information and interesting events in their surroundings. internet addiction is viewed as a coping strategy, allowing individuals to temporarily distance themselves from stress, loneliness, or other negative emotions that may arise when disconnected from information, i.e., the internet. internet addiction can be understood as adolescents' attempt to break free from the fear of missing out, seeking comfort, or discovering their identity in the virtual environment. this is because the fear of missing out on events, activities, or information in the online world drives individuals to continuously check their phones or digital devices to stay connected with the virtual world (bickham, 2021). in other words, fomo serves as the primary driver behind the tendency to consistently check digital devices, which, in turn, may contribute to the emergence of internet addiction in adolescents. previous studies (dufour et al., 2016; gul et al., 2022; khan et al., 2017; liu et al., 2023) have consistently found differences in how males and females use the internet. for example, a study suggest that females may be more active on social media platforms, using them for communication, sharing, and connecting with others. in contrast, males might be more engaged in different online activities, such as online gaming or content consumption (naskar et al., 2016). research has also indicated that gender can influence how individuals experience fomo. it's suggested that males and females may have different triggers for fomo. for instance, females may experience fomo more intensely in social contexts, where they fear missing out on social events, while males might experience fomo more strongly in competitive or achievement-oriented contexts (qutishat, 2020). previous research suggests that male and female adolescents may have different experiences when engaged in online activities, and this can influence how fomo predicts internet addiction in both groups. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 3 martaria rizky rinaldi et.al (fear of missing out (fomo) and internet addiction among adolescence…) while previous studies have investigated fomo and internet addiction individually, the current research uniquely explores the moderation effect of gender. this approach allows for a more comprehensive understanding of how gender differences may influence the dynamics of internet addiction in the context of fomo. the research contributes to gender studies by examining how gender influences the relationship between fomo and internet addiction. understanding the role of gender in shaping online behaviors adds a valuable dimension to the broader discourse on gender dynamics in the digital realm. this novel approach is pivotal in enhancing the comprehension of the intricate interplay between fomo and gender in the context of adolescent internet addiction. this research aims to illuminate how fomo contributes to internet addiction in adolescents, taking into consideration the influence of gender differences. this approach offers a comprehensive view of how distinct social and psychological factors in male and female adolescents can shape their experiences related to internet addiction. the objective is to evaluate the moderating role of gender differences in the fomo-internet addiction relationship. this study not only fills a critical gap in the existing literature but also provides practical insights that can inform interventions, educational practices, and policies tailored to the unique needs of male and female adolescents in the digital age. method this research employed a quantitative approach, specifically utilizing a correlational design to investigate the relationships among three key variables: internet addiction (dependent variable), fear of missing out (independent variable), and gender (moderator variable). the study involved the administration of a survey to adolescents in indonesia. the process of gathering data occurred online through the utilization of a google form, which was distributed across various social media platforms like whatsapp, instagram, and twitter. participants were requested to complete the form. individuals who received messages regarding data collection could share the link within their social circles. the google form link contained explicit instructions and details for informed consent. adolescents, being active internet users, are likely to be acquainted with and comfortable using online platforms. google form offers a user-friendly interface that is easily navigable, making it accessible to a diverse range of participants, including those from the digital-native generation. participants who believed they met the criteria voluntarily participated by filling out the form. participation in this study was entirely of their own volition. participants the study involved adolescents who utilize the internet. the determination of the sample size adhered to the rule of thumb recommended by roscoe (sekaran, 2013), suggesting that the sample size for a study should be a minimum of 30 and less than 500. the total number of participants in this research was 169, the majority of partisipant are female, constituting 68% of the sample. the age distribution shows a diverse representation, with the highest percentage of participants falling into the 18-year-old category (44.38%). the educational status of the participants is categorized into three groups: higher education students (37.28%), junior high school students (40.24%), and senior high school students (22.49%). the details of the data are presented in table 1. instruments the measurement tool employed to assess internet addiction is the internet addiction test (iat). developed by young (1998), the iat serves as an evaluative instrument to measure the potential extent of someone experiencing internet addiction. covering crucial aspects of internet addiction, such as salience, excessive use, neglect of work, anticipation, 4 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) martaria rizky rinaldi (fear of missing out (fomo) and internet addiction among adolescence…) lack of control, and withdrawal (faraci et al., 2013). adapted for use in indonesia, the iat demonstrates strong psychometric properties, including high internal consistency (α = 0.913) (siste, suwartono, et al., 2021). table 1 the distribution of study participants fear of missing out (fomo) is evaluated through the fomo scale, a tool designed to assess individuals' apprehension about missing out on experiences. derived from the framework initially proposed by przybylski (2013) and subsequently refined by abel, buff & burr (2016), this scale consists of 10 items that explore two primary dimensions of fomo: fear (e.g., "i worry that my friends have more enjoyable experiences than me") and control (e.g., "it bothers me when i miss the chance to meet up with friends"). adapted for use in indonesia, the fomo scale exhibits solid psychometric properties, with strong internal consistency (α = 0.763) (wibaningrum & aurellya, 2020). data analysis in this study, we conducted a moderation analysis to explore the moderating influence of gender on the association between internet addiction and fear of missing out. for this analysis, we utilized the statistical software jamovi, specifically employing the medmod module. moderation analysis enables us to investigate whether the strength or direction of the relationship between our variables of interest is affected by a third variable, in this case, gender (the jamovi project, 2022). additionally, we performed supplementary analyses using independent sample t-tests to examine gender differences in fear of missing out and internet addiction. results based on the data gathered from a total of 169 participants, comprising 54 males and 115 females, it is noteworthy that there were no missing values in the dataset. among male participants, the average level of internet addiction was calculated to be 53.9, while among their female counterparts, the average stood at 51.2. furthermore, when examining fear of missing out (fomo), males exhibited an average score of 27.2, and females scored slightly lower at 26.9. the standard deviation for internet addiction was 7.54 for males and 6.53 for females, indicating variations in the dataset's spread. likewise, the standard deviation for fomo was 4.20 for males and 4.56 for females, further highlighting the data's dispersion. all this data is comprehensively detailed in table 2. based on the results of the data analysis presented in table 3, it is evident that fear of missing out has a significant effect on internet addiction (p < 0.001). gender also has a significant effect on internet addiction (p < frequency percentage gender male 54 32 female 115 68 age 15 39 23.08 16 26 15.38 17 27 15.98 18 75 44.38 educational status higher education student 63 37.28 senior highschool student 38 22.49 junior highschool student 68 40.24 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 5 martaria rizky rinaldi et.al (fear of missing out (fomo) and internet addiction among adolescence…) 0.05). however, the interaction between fear of missing out and gender does not have a significant effect on internet addiction (p > 0.005). this means that gender does not significantly moderate the relationship between fear of missing out and internet addiction. table 2 descriptives statistic gender addiction fomo n male 54 54 female 115 115 missing male 0 0 female 0 0 mean male 53.9 27.2 female 51.2 26.9 median male 53.0 27.5 female 51 28 standard deviation male 7.54 4.20 female 6.53 4.56 minimum male 38 19 female 36 13 maximum male 72 36 female 72 37 table 3 moderation estimates 95% confidence interval estimate se lower upper z p fear of missing out 0.4436 0.114 0.220 0.667 3.887 < .001 gender -2.4973 1.079 -4.611 -0.383 -2.315 0.021 fear of missing out ✻ gender -0.0894 0.253 -0.584 0.406 -0.354 0.724 additional analysis with independent samples t-test reveals a significant gender difference internet addiction (p < 0.05), while there is no significant gender difference in fear of missing out (p > 0.05). data presented in table 4. table 4 independent samples t-test statistic df p fear of missing out student's t 0.493 0.623 internet addiction student's t 2.357 0.020 6 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) martaria rizky rinaldi (fear of missing out (fomo) and internet addiction among adolescence…) discussion the results of the moderation analysis indicate that fear of missing out (fomo) has a significant effect on internet addiction, consistent with findings from numerous prior studies (alutaybi et al., 2020; gupta & sharma, 2021). fomo is a phenomenon in which individuals continually feel the need to stay connected to the internet and check for the latest information to avoid feeling left out of what's happening in their environment (gupta & sharma, 2021; rozgonjuk et al., 2020). fomo has been linked to excessive internet use and the potential for negative impacts on psychological well-being (elhai et al., 2021; franchina et al., 2018; rozgonjuk et al., 2020). fomo represents an individual's anxiety or discomfort regarding the possibility of missing out on positive experiences occurring elsewhere (huan you et al., 2018; przybylski et al., 2013). this trigger propels individuals to stay continuously connected to the digital world to avoid feelings of being left out. each time an individual checks their phone or engages in online activities, particularly when responding to stimuli that trigger fomo, they may experience positive reinforcement in the form of brief satisfaction or a sense of social connection (parasuraman et al., 2017). consequently, this positive reinforcement can strengthen excessive internet usage behaviors. over time, individuals who consistently use the internet in response to fomo may develop internet addiction as a coping strategy (akbari et al., 2021). this dependency emerges because the internet provides an effective means of addressing anxiety, even if only temporarily. in this study, it was found that gender has a significant impact on internet addiction. additionally, differences in internet addiction were observed between males and females, suggesting distinct tendencies toward internet addiction based on gender. these findings are consistent with the research conducted by mari et al. (2023), which also identified genderrelated distinctions in internet addiction. prior studies have highlighted variations in internet usage patterns between males and females, with some research indicating that females tend to be more active on social media, whereas males may be more immersed in diverse online activities (khan et al., 2017). previous investigations have further indicated that females exhibit higher usage of social media platforms, while males are more prominently involved in online gaming (liu et al., 2023; pantu, 2018; shan et al., 2021). the most interesting finding is that the moderation analysis results show that the interaction between fomo and gender does not have a significant effect on internet addiction. this means that, despite differences in the levels of fomo and internet addiction between males and females, gender does not significantly moderate the relationship between fomo and internet addiction. the findings indicate the non-significance of the interaction between fomo and gender in moderating their combined influence on internet addiction, possibly stemming from the independent nature of the effects of fomo and gender on internet addiction. this suggests that both factors play distinct roles in influencing internet addiction without significantly impacting each other. the limited variability among participants, both in terms of fomo and gender, may contribute to the lack of a significant interaction effect. this is evident in the study's findings, which revealed no significant gender differences in fomo, and the majority of participants identified as female. consequently, the insufficient diversity in participant characteristics may result in a lack of substantial differences, preventing the emergence of a significant moderation effect. additionally, the non-significant interaction might be attributed to the possibility that fomo and gender independently contribute to internet addiction without a synergistic effect. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 7 martaria rizky rinaldi et.al (fear of missing out (fomo) and internet addiction among adolescence…) this means that individuals may experience the impact of fomo and gender separately, and the combined effect does not deviate significantly from the sum of their individual influences. the data indicates that the average internet addiction score in males (53.9) is slightly higher than in females (51.2). this supports previous research findings that have shown differences in the levels of internet addiction between genders (mari et al., 2023). earlier studies have recorded that males tend to have higher levels of internet addiction than females, which is in line with these results (lin et al., 2021; shan et al., 2021). similarly, the average fomo scores for males (27.2) and females (26.9) indicate a relatively small difference between genders. this aligns with prior research that has observed that fomo is not always strongly associated with gender (rozgonjuk et al., 2021). the absence of a significant interaction between fomo and gender in moderating their effects on internet addiction could be explained by the independent influence of fomo and gender, indicating distinct roles for each factor. the limited variability among participants, particularly in gender distribution, may further contribute to the lack of a significant interaction effect, as the study's findings revealed no substantial gender differences in fomo. these insights suggest that future research may benefit from exploring additional factors or employing a more diverse sample to uncover a more nuanced understanding of the complex relationships involved. these results can assist researchers and practitioners in designing more effective prevention and intervention strategies to address internet addiction and fomo issues while taking into account the existing gender differences in addiction tendencies and fomo. this understanding will be beneficial in efforts to enhance well-being and mental health in a society increasingly connected by digital technology. conclusion in conclusion, the study's comprehensive analysis revealed significant effects of fomo and gender on internet addiction. fomo, characterized by the persistent need for online connection to avoid missing out, showed a substantial impact on internet addiction. gender differences in internet addiction were evident, with males exhibiting slightly higher addiction scores than females. the interaction between fomo and gender did not significantly moderate the relationship with internet addiction. this suggests that fomo and gender independently contribute to internet addiction, highlighting their distinct roles in shaping online behaviors. the study emphasizes the need for future research to explore additional factors and employ a more diverse sample for a nuanced understanding of these complex relationships. acknowledgment the author expresses gratitude to the faculty of psychology, universitas mercu buana yogyakarta, for their vital support in the research pursuits. special thanks to the committed participants whose contributions significantly enhanced the quality and success of the studies. declarations author contribution. as the sole author, martaria rizky rinaldi played a pivotal role in every aspect of this research. she conceptualized and designed the study, conducted data collection and analysis, authored the manuscript, and performed the reviewing and editing processes. martaria rizky rinaldi's singular authorship is evident throughout this scholarly work. 8 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) martaria rizky rinaldi (fear of missing out (fomo) and internet addiction among adolescence…) funding statement. this research was conducted without external funding support conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references abel, j. p., buff, c. l., & burr, s. a. 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(2023). association between internet addiction and the risk of upper cross syndrome in chinese college students: a cross sectional study. medicine, 102(30), e34273. https://doi.org/10.1097/md.0000000000034273 https://doi.org/10.15408/jp3i.v9i2.16283 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01959 https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18010168 https://doi.org/10.1097/md.0000000000034273 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 20 (1), february 2023, 69-79 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humantias.v20i1.270 depression, anxiety, stress, and post-traumatic stress disorder among iranian nursing caring for covid-19 patients bamdad mirab zadeh ardekani1, fatemeh ghassem boroujerdi2, shirin esmaili dolabinjad2, mitra safa3, farzaneh haji zadeh1 1massih daneshvari hospital, shahid beheshti university of medical sciences, iran. 2chronic respiratory diseases research center, national research institute of tuberculosis and lung diseases (nritld), shahid beheshti university of medical sciences, iran. 3clinical tuberculosis and epidemiology research center, national research institute of tuberculosis and lung diseases (nritld), shahid beheshti university of medical sciences, tehran, iran. corresponding author: anahita86@yahoo.com introduction the outbreak of covid-19, in fast transmission, has become a global health emergency within just a few months (wang et al., 2020). the sudden outbreak is transforming the psychological status and interpersonal relationships of millions worldwide (asim et al., 2020). as the outbreak escalates, it will raise public health concerns (sun et al., 2021) and cause psychological distress and problems like anxiety, uncertainty, and stigmatization that can be prevented by medical and psychiatric treatment (xiang et al., 2020). wide-ranging, negative, and psychological outcomes, such as anger, confusion, and post-traumatic stress symptoms in the current situation, may be associated with extended quarantine, fear of infection, frustration, a lack of basic supplies, insufficient information, financial problems, and stigma (santos, 2020). moreover, confrontation with the acute situation of the covid-19 pandemic has an inevitable impact on healthcare workers. medical workers worldwide encounter enormous art icle info ab st r act article history received november 24, 2022 revised february 22, 2023 accepted february 24, 2023 covid-19 has put great physical and psychological pressure on medical staff worldwide, including iran. as with any other disaster, it is worth paying attention to the risk of developing depression, anxiety, stress, and post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) among the healthcare team. this study aimed to determine the severity of depression, anxiety, stress, and ptsd status in healthcare staff involved in treating covid-19 patients. 400 nurses and clinical assistants in a hospital occupied in treating covid-19 were included in the study by the incidental sampling. the demographic information questionnaire, dass-21, and mississippi ptsd scales were applied to data collection. the mean score of ptsd in about half of the participants is severe. the mean score of re-experience sub-scale is higher than other sub-scales. depression and stress are significantly higher in those infected with covid-19. there is a significant difference between various age groups regarding the lack of depression. there is a significant difference in re-experience, alexithymia, and ptsd scores between participants with various marital statuses. therefore, the existence of depression, stress, and ptsd among medical staff would be a major concern for the health ministry to protect the mental health of society members. keywords covid-19; depression; hospital nursing staff; stress; post-traumatic stress disorder. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humantias.v20i1.270 mailto:anahita86@yahoo.com 70 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ardekani et al. (depression, anxiety, stress, and post-traumatic stress disorder among iranian…) pressure, including a high risk of infection and inadequate protection from contamination, overwork, frustration, isolation, sad patients, a lack of contact with their families, and exhaustion (kang et al., 2020). paramedics are more disposed to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) symptoms than the general population (kucmin et al., 2018). the development of ptsd, which results in chronic symptoms like intrusive memories, avoidance behaviors, irritability, and emotional numbing, is one of the main psychological consequences of the current pandemic (sun et al., 2021). ptsd is a behavioral expression of neurobehavioral systems’ pathology shaped by individual, environmental, and cultural factors. individuals who suffer from ptsd re-live distressing instances of the traumatic event with vivid emotional proximity and high, imperative intensity. in addition, a high percentage of ptsd symptoms (29.5%) has been found in the italian population during the covid-19 pandemic (forte et al., 2020). a study in wuhan, the first region of china, which has been affected by the covid-19 pandemic, reported 5% of ptsd symptoms (sun et al., 2021). a similar prevalence rate of ptsd also was reported in the italian population (favieri et al., 2020). moreover, depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms were reported as high as 50.7%, 44.7%, and 73.4% among chinese healthcare workers during the covid-19 pandemic (elbay et al., 2020). the current study is important and needed to describe the mental health problems of healthcare workers treating infected patients with covid-19 in iran, especially the data regarding the distress caused by infectious disease outbreaks in the healthcare team. this study aimed to investigate depression, anxiety, stress, and ptsd in the staff of one of the primary hospitals for treating covid-19. the first hypothesis of the current research included the different levels of depression, anxiety, stress, and ptsd in hospital staff with and without a history of being infected by covid-19. the second hypothesis is demographic characteristics impact depression, anxiety, stress, and ptsd among hospital staff. method research design a quantitative method with comparative and correlational designs was applied in this study. the investigation was carried out following the latest version of the declaration of helsinki and was approved by an appropriate ethical committee, with the approval number ir.sbmu.nritld.rec.1399.147. informed consent from the participants was obtained after the procedures were fully explained. the questionnaires used for the current study were sent online to the study population, and those who met the inclusion criteria completed them. data collection was from the middle of march 2020 until the middle of june 2020. participants four hundred nurses and clinical assistants were chosen with incidental sampling participating in this study during the spring and summer of 2020. the inclusion criteria were verbal informed consent and being a nurse or clinical assistant at covid-19 wards. in contrast, the exclusion criteria were reluctance to continue participating in the research or quitting the job in the hospital. according to table 1, most of the sample group were female (68.6%), married (55.2%), did not have children (62.3%), and had an academic education (77.1%) up to ph.d. the mean age was 36.36±7.87 years old. the majority of participants were nurses (69.3%) and were not humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 71 ardekani et al. (depression, anxiety, stress and post-traumatic stress disorder among iranian…) infected by covid-19, and did not show covid-19 symptoms with negative covid-19 test results for themselves or their families (86.7%). table 1 demographic data variable percentage gender male female 31.4 68.6 marital status single married widowed divorced 40.3 55.2 1.5 3.0 number of children 0 1-2 3≤ 62.3 34.4 3.3 educational level high school diploma academic education 22.9 77.1 job title nurse clinical assistant 69.3 30.7 history of being infected self and family member by covid-19 none 13.3 86.7 instruments the demographic information questionnaire, dass-21, and mississippi ptsd scale were used in this study. the demographic questionnaire has been applied to identifying gender, age, marital status, number of children, educational level, occupation, and also a history of being infected by covid-19 in themselves and their immediate family members. the dass-21 is the short form of the dass-42, produced by lovibond and lovibond (1995), as a self-report scale designed to measure the negative emotional states of depression, anxiety, and stress, each with seven questions, over the past week in adults. the answers are in four options: never, sometimes, often, and always. the scoring is between 0 to 3. the sum of scores is calculated and multiplied by two and then interpreted by the following table 2. table 2 categorization based on score of the dass 21 range depression anxiety stress normal 0 – 9 0 – 7 0 – 14 mild 10 – 13 8 – 9 15 – 18 moderate 14 – 20 10 – 14 19 – 25 severe 21 – 27 15 – 19 26 – 33 extremely severe 28+ 20+ 34+ the correlation of the dass with the beck depression inventory (bdi) in a sample with 717 students was high (r = .4) (lovibond & lovibond, 1995). in a sample of 1794, this scale was compared with two others scales about depression and anxiety. the cronbach alpha was .95, .9, .93, and .97 for depression, anxiety, stress, and the total score, respectively (henry & crawford, 2005). the validity and reliability of this scale are confirmed in the iranian sample, with the cronbach alpha reported to be .94, .92, and .82 for depression, anxiety, and stress, respectively (moradi panah, 2005). the mississippi scale for combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder is a 39-item self-report scale. it is scored as likert type, which includes 1-5 scores for each question; some are scored reversely. the total score would be from 0 to 195. scores up to 65, between 72 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ardekani et al. (depression, anxiety, stress, and post-traumatic stress disorder among iranian…) 65 to 130, and above 130 reflect the mild, moderate, and severe symptoms of ptsd, respectively. it includes four sub-scale: re-experience, interpersonal relationship problems, alexithymia, and lack of depression. the test's sensitivity and specificity were .93 and .89, respectively, when it was used to differentiate between a post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) group and two non-ptsd comparison groups (keane et al., 1988). the scale was validated in the iranian sample, with the reliability from internal correlation being .92 and the test-retest coefficient being .91 (goodarzi, 2003). data analysis descriptive analysis, anova, chi-square, and independent t-tests were applied to data analysis. all data were analyzed by spss-22. results table 3 shows the mean score of depression in participants with covid-19 is significantly higher than participants with no history of infection with covid-19 (p < .01). even though the mean score of depression in participants with a history of infection with covid-19 and without it, is in a normal range. however, there is no significant difference in the anxiety score of participants with a history of infection of covid-19 and without it. the score of anxiety in both groups is in the normal range. the mean stress score in participants with covid-19 is significantly higher than that of participants with no history of infection with covid-19, even though the mean score of the stress of both groups is in the normal range. table 3 the t-test of the dass score dass scales history of covid-19 mean ± sd t p depression infecting with covid-19 8.00 ± 4.44 2.852 .014 no history 3.90 ± 4.08 anxiety infecting with covid-19 5.72 ± 3.00 1.861 .081 no history 3.81 ± 3.90 stress infecting with covid-19 10.18 ± 3.54 3.260 .004 no history 6.14 ± 5.02 moreover, table 4 shows the mean score of depression and the mean score of stress are significantly higher in those whose family member had been infected with covid-19 (p < .01). however, there is no significant difference in the anxiety score of participants with a history of infection with covid-19 in themselves or family members and without it. table 4 dass score based on history of covid-19 p f mean ± sd history of covid-19 .013 4.58 7.66 ± 4.36 self depression 8.40 ± 5.02 family member 3.90 ± 4.08 none .266 1.35 6.33 ± 1.96 self anxiety 5.00 ± 4.06 family member 3.81 ± 3.90 none .045 3.25 9.83 ± 3.43 self stress 10.60 ± 4.03 family member 6.14 ± 5.02 none humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 73 ardekani et al. (depression, anxiety, stress and post-traumatic stress disorder among iranian…) according to table 5, about half of the sample group members had severe ptsd symptoms. however, there is no significant difference in the severity of ptsd between participants with and without a history of covid-19 infection. table 5 ptsd severity table 6 shows the independent t-test of ptsd scores in total and each sub-scale. the results indicate no significant difference in ptsd in total and each sub-scale between people with and without a history of being infected by covid-19, in themselves, or their immediate family members. table 6 scores of the ptsd sub-scales based on history of covid-19 sub-scales t p re-experience .592 .562 interpersonal relationship problems .170 .868 alexithymia -1.137 .271 lack of depression .644 .531 ptsd .300 .760 according to table 7, there is a significant difference in anxiety between various age groups (p < .05). even though all participants are in the normal range of anxiety, participants in age groups of 20-30 years old suffered less anxiety than other age groups. also, people in the age group of 51 to 60 years old had higher anxiety compared to others. in one of the ptsd sub-scales, namely lack of depression, there is a significant difference in various age groups, with participants in the age groups of 20-30 and 31-40 having the highest and lowest scores, respectively. table 7 difference of ptsd and dass sub-scales based on age groups sub-scales ages mean ± sd f p depression 20-30 years old 31-40 years old 41-50 years old 51-60 years old 2.90 ± 3.79 4.43 ± 3.56 5.60 ± 5.24 11 2.336 .081 anxiety 20-30 years old 31-40 years old 41-50 years old 51-60 years old 2.36 ± 2.66 4.50 ± 3.55 4.25 ± 4.08 11 3.185 .029 stress 20-30 years old 31-40 years old 41-50 years old 51-60 years old 4.72 ± 4.99 8.00 ± 4.80 6.55 ± 5.12 10 2.002 .122 history of covid-19 the severity of ptsd (%) ꭕ2 p mild moderate severe yes 23.5 16.5 60.0 1.57 .45 no 14.5 31.5 54.0 total 19.0 24.0 57.0 74 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ardekani et al. (depression, anxiety, stress, and post-traumatic stress disorder among iranian…) table 7 continued sub-scales ages mean ± sd f p re-experience 20-30 years old 31-40 years old 41-50 years old 51-60 years old 43.04 ± 4.35 42.13 ± 5.64 43.05 ± 3.80 39.00 ± 1.00 .402 .752 interpersonal relationship problems 20-30 years old 31-40 years old 41-50 years old 51-60 years old 32.36 ± 4.12 30.83 ± 3.71 31.15 ± 2.85 28.00 ± .10 1.075 .365 alexithymia 20-30 years old 31-40 years old 41-50 years old 51-60 years old 40.13 ± 5.02 38.60 ± 4.90 39.30 ± 4.90 36.00 ± .50 .553 .648 lack of depression 20-30 years old 31-40 years old 41-50 years old 51-60 years old 40.13 ± 3.31 37.16 ± 4.84 39.50 ± 3.42 38 ± .20 2.621 .050 ptsd 20-30 years old 31-40 years old 41-50 years old 51-60 years old 155.68 ± 13.32 148.73 ± 15.23 153 ± 12.24 141 ± 1.1 1.311 .278 table 8 shows a significant difference in depression between participants with various marital statuses (p < .01). the mean score of depression is significantly higher in divorced participants than in other ones. a significant difference in ptsd score and the sub-scales score, namely re-experience and alexithymia, is also found based on marital status. married people had the highest score in re-experience, alexithymia, and ptsd scores. however, the findings of this study show no difference in depression, anxiety, stress, and ptsd based on gender, number of children, educational level, and job status table 8 difference between ptsd and dass based on marital status sub-scales marital status mean ± sd f p depression single married widowed divorced 4.11 ± 4.5 3.56 ± 3.46 1 13.5 ± 3.53 4.240 .009 anxiety single married widowed divorced 3.19 ± 3.24 4.05 ± 3.46 1 9.50 ± 7.77 2.340 .081 stress single married widowed divorced 5.85 ± 4.84 5.95 ± 4.74 3.00 ± 2.82 14.00 ± 4.88 1.990 .123 re-experience single married widowed divorced 42.33 ± 3.82 43.75 ± 3.96 40.00 ± 2.30 30.00 ± 13.43 6.517 .001 interpersonal relationship problems single married widow divorced 31.44 ± 4.11 31.48 ± 3.33 32.00 ± 1.20 28.50 ± 2.12 .434 .729 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 75 ardekani et al. (depression, anxiety, stress and post-traumatic stress disorder among iranian…) table 8 continued sub-scales marital status mean ± sd f p alexithymia single married widow divorced 38.77 ± 4.53 40.40 ± 4.03 39.00 ± 3.50 28.00 ± 11.31 5.173 .003 lack of depression single married widow divorced 39.14 ± 4.12 38.08 ± 3.82 42.00 ± 2.40 31.50 ± 7.77 2.588 .061 ptsd single married widow divorced 151.70 ± 13.47 153.72 ± 10.95 153.00 ± 4.50 118.50 ± 34.64 4.833 .004 discussion the findings of the current study show the mean score of ptsd in about half of the members of the sample group is severe. just 19% of them had mild ptsd, and 24% had moderate symptoms of ptsd. no difference in ptsd between hospital staff with and without a history of covid-19; therefore, the first hypothesis is rejected. these findings show the serious development of ptsd in a life-threatening pandemic, whether or not the participants have been infected. because the depth of catastrophic direct encountering with patients with covid-19 would be so unknown and stressful, which seems that affect everyone similarly and especially cause multiple remembering of the unpleasant situations in mind. some studies have shown that medical staff exposed to h7n9 patients and disaster relief medical staff have the highest score in re-experiencing dimension (tang et al., 2017), which is compatible with our findings when considering the psychological status of people when confronted with a large epidemic. other studies reported that the incidence of ptsd in nurses caring for covid-19 patients was 16.83% (y.-x. wang et al., 2020). a study in singapore hospitals between february and march 2020 found many healthcare workers had anxiety (14.5%), depression (8.9%), and ptsd (7.7%) (tan et al., 2020). furthermore, another study among pulmonary patients with and without cancer found ptsd level is influenced by hopeless and ambiguous views about the future of the disease (safa et al., 2014). so, according to the results of the current study about the existence of ptsd symptoms in nursing staff – which are mostly congruent with other research which has been described – it is important to pay attention to ptsd symptoms in the healthcare team of covid-19. the first hypothesis stating the difference among hospital staff based on a history of covid-19 was confirmed in the domain of depression and stress. accordingly, although the mean score of depression in both groups of participants is in the normal range, depression in the participant with a history of covid-19 is significantly higher. moreover, depression was significantly higher in those whose family members had been infected with covid-19. in addition, although stress in all participants is in the normal range, it is significantly higher in the group of participants with a history of covid-19 than in the other group. especially it is also higher in those whose family members have been infected with covid-19. it shows the burden of covid-19 on family members of hospital staff because of the mental pressure they felt in encountering the disease and fearing transferring it to their family members and feeling guilty about it. some studies show that 64.7% of physicians had depressive symptoms, 51.6% had anxiety, and 41.2% had stress during the early covid-19 pandemic in turkey, using 76 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ardekani et al. (depression, anxiety, stress, and post-traumatic stress disorder among iranian…) dass-21. among china healthcare workers, 50.4% reported symptoms of depression, 44.6% anxiety, and 71.5% reported distress during the covid-19 pandemic (elbay et al., 2020). the current study's second hypothesis, including the impact of demographic data on depression, anxiety stress, and ptsd, is confirmed in the domain of age and marital status. in the ptsd sub-scale, persons in their twenties have the lowest score of lack of depression, but in the fourth decade, they have the highest lack of depression. it may result from rising positive emotions at the beginning of adulthood, which would be reduced in the next decade due to more social occupation, especially when encountering a crisis. on the other hand, the highest score of ptsd score and its two sub-scales, namely re-experience and alexithymia in married people, is controversial in the current study. indeed, marriage does not necessarily increase mental health and the quality of relationships, but it would be the better determinative factor. also, the number of children did not correlate with depression, anxiety, stress, and ptsd in the current study. it shows that the pressure of being encountered with a lifethreatening virus would not be reduced or increased by familial support, especially at the beginning of the virus pandemic. some other factors may play a role in this regard. the familial affiliations would exacerbate the anxiety because of worry about the family members. this kind of anxiety would be reduced in single and childless people. on the contrary, a previous study found predictors of ptsd symptoms during infectious diseases prevalence, such as sars and h1n1, including gender, age, degree of exposure to the infectious disease, the experience of being infected, and having family, friends, or acquaintances that have been infected (xu et al., 2011). depression was higher in divorced participants. it reflects the mental burden of divorce even when confronted with a completely different issue, like a disease. a previous study has demonstrated that marriage or having children may improve mental health (association, 2013; sadock et al., 2017). this study found that higher scores of dass-21 existed among single healthcare workers, whereas having a child was associated with lower dass-21 scores. in addition, those living with their spouse and children had lower scale scores than those who lived alone during the covid-19 pandemic. a previous study found being single increased the odds of depression in hospital staff, even three years after the sars outbreak (elbay et al., 2020). in this study, all participants have a medium range of anxiety; younger participants suffered less anxiety than older age groups. on the contrary, people in the age group of 51 to 60 years old had higher anxiety compared to others. it implies that younger participants manage anxiety better than other age groups with the power of youth. other studies have shown that young individuals show higher rates of depression due to isolation during covid19 (renaud-charest et al., 2021). another study found higher scores of dass-21 existed among young healthcare workers (elbay et al., 2020). women and frontline workers in china had a higher risk of developing psychiatric problems during the covid-19 pandemic (elbay et al., 2020). also, the current study shows that males and females are equal in confronting the lifethreatening pandemic in showing ptsd symptoms. these findings do not align with some other studies that females were prone to develop higher levels of ptsd both in covid-19 and h1n1 outbreaks (sun et al., 2021; xu et al., 2011). moreover, as reported by some other studies, females are about twice as likely to develop ptsd symptoms (d. e. a. christiansen, 2012). it would result from the fact that females usually experience higher levels of associated risk factors, like depression, physical anxiety sensitivity, and helplessness (d. m. christiansen & hansen, 2015). the relative equality of females and males in confronting the stressful situation in the current study shows inconsistency with other results in this regard. it humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 77 ardekani et al. (depression, anxiety, stress and post-traumatic stress disorder among iranian…) may describe that iranian women in our society have become more compatible during the past years due to many problems in the country like war, earthquake, and economic crisis. neither education nor job status significantly impacted depression, anxiety, stress, and ptsd. one possible reason might be that the sample group was in a relatively similar situation, which made them less affected by education and job status. but some other studies have shown that nurses exposed to covid-19 with high job satisfaction have lower ptsd scores, necessitating reducing the ptsd level by trying to improve job satisfaction (y.-x. wang et al., 2020). higher scores of depression, anxiety, and stress in healthcare workers of covid-19 existed among those with less work experience or who worked in the frontline (elbay et al., 2020). higher das-21 scores between them were associated with increased working hours, increased number of covid-19 patients cared for, receiving lower support from peers and supervisors, and feelings of incompetence about covid-19 tasks (elbay et al., 2020). the current research involved nurses and clinical assistants from a hospital due to the limited time and access to the sample group. so, it is suggested that future researchers include more variety of hospitals whose staff deal with covid-19 departments directly to obtain more precise results. because of the emergency conditions of the pandemic, data gathering was done online, which would affect the research results. but in some cases where there was a need for a psychiatrist or psychologist in covid-19 treatment wards, they had shown up in the wards to provide sufficient information about the online questionnaires. besides, the probable psychological stress of the respondents to the questionnaires would affect the responses. therefore, it is suggested that future researchers have follow-up research and investigate the role of depression, anxiety, and stress among hospital staff during a pandemic such as covid-19 to provide optimum psychological services for study participants. conclusion the hospital staff who had been occupied with treating patients with covid-19 have symptoms of ptsd, whether having a history of covid-19 or not. moreover, those who had been infected with covid-19, even themselves or family members, had higher depression and stress than those who did not have covid-19 infection. marital status and age are two demographic characteristics that have a significant impact. being married is a determinant factor of a higher ptsd score and its two sub-scales, namely re-experience and alexithymia. on the other hand, being divorced predicts a higher depression. young people have the lowest anxiety, whereas older people have the highest anxiety. acknowledgment the authors appreciate all co-workers in massih daneshvari hospital who participated in this study. declarations author contribution. all authors contribute evenly to the study and writing the article. funding statement. this research received no specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. conflict of interest. none declared additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. 78 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ardekani et al. 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this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction quarter-life crisis is a fairly popular term used to describe the period of developmental crisis in early adulthood. according to the central bureau of statistics (2022), indonesia's population, which is categorized into the early adult age group (20-29 years), reaches 44.9 million people. at that age, it is assumed that the adult population is prepared to become productive and superior individuals to face the demographic bonus in 2045 so that they can contribute to the country's development. however, according to data based on a survey conducted by gumtree.com, as many as 86% of the 1,1000 young people experienced a quarter-life crisis because they felt pressure about their career, finances, and commitment to marry before turning 30 (hill, 2011). another survey conducted by linkedin (2017) found that as many as 75% of the 6,014 young people said they experienced a quarter-life crisis triggered by confusion about what to achieve in the future, not making money, and pressure to get married and have children. this quarter-life crisis has also become popular because the majority of the millennial generation has experienced stress triggered by various things, including pressure to get married, start a family, and finance (miles, 2022). the term quarter-life crisis was first introduced by robbins & wilner (2001) as an identity crisis experienced by individuals who are in transition from childhood to adulthood article info abstract article history received july 20, 2023 revised december 20, 2023 accepted january 5, 2024 a quarter-life crisis during emerging adulthood is triggered by various worries in the future regarding careers, romantic, and social relationships. this study aims to test the role of anchor personality dimensions in predicting a quarter-life crisis in emerging adulthood. the participants of this study were 279 people in the 18-25 year age group. this study was conducted with the quantitative approach using a survey method through social media. the instruments used were the quarter life crisis scale and anchor personality inventory. the results of the analysis using the multiple linear regression method showed that anchor virtues have a significant negative relationship in predicting quarter-life crises. however, anchor materials and others show a significant positive relationship in predicting the quarter-life crisis. the implications of this research empirically show the importance of emerging adulthood to be oriented towards virtues to prevent quarter-life crisis and achieve optimal psychological functioning. keywords anchor personality; emerging adulthood; quarter-life crisis. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i1.485 mailto:bagus@ugm.ac.id; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 14 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) nur rohmah itsnaini et.al (the role of personality orientation in predicting quarter life crisis in…) (pinggolio, 2015). this refers to a person's condition in response to extraordinary instability followed by many choices and changes continuously, giving rise to feelings of helplessness and anxiety. looking back at the history of development, the occurrence of a quarter-life crisis includes feelings of worry and anxiety about the uncertainties of future life around work, love, and social life (arnett, 2015; nash & murray, 2010). at first, the term quarter life crisis began to appear in the younger generation in america when entering the 20th century (atwood & scholtz, 2008; robbins & wilner, 2001). the emergence of this period is believed to be the result of several factors, such as social, economic, and historical factors, that occurred after the second world war (atwood & scholtz, 2008). the phenomenon of adolescence is relatively modern, shaped by factors such as industrialization and the expansion of the education system. this is evident as young individuals are now compelled to attend school and undergo skills training for an extended period compared to earlier times. during this phase, there is a transition from childhood to adulthood, marked by the presence of norms, beliefs, ambivalence, and confusion. these factors represent a distinctive period of change (atwood & scholtz, 2008). initially, before this differentiation of developmental stages occurred, children began to enter the labour force at a young age, and there were no stages that represented a waiting period, so the waiting period was seen as a separate life stage, namely adolescence. atwood & scholtz (2008) revealed that at this time, an individual does not want to be considered a child, but on the other hand, they also feel unable to explore life like adults. the norms in childhood also cannot be applied to them, but the norms in adulthood also cannot be applied as a whole (atwood & scholtz, 2008). it is also believed that in the absence of behavioral norms to guide individuals towards the expected behavior, adolescence becomes a very confusing period and is synonymous with stressful developmental stages. the problems that arise during the quarter-life crisis are related to dreams and hopes, academic and career challenges, as well as religion and spirituality (nash & murray, 2010). the post-university transition is more than just a challenge in finding a job; it includes changes in identity, relationships, lifestyle and finances (robinson, 2019). robbins (2004) mentions several general characteristics that are likely to occur in individuals who are experiencing a quarter-life crisis, including the following: (1) ignorance and indecision regarding life goals; (2) dissatisfaction with what has been achieved; (3) fear of failure; (4) are reluctant to leave childhood and realize that adolescence is over; (5) fear of not being able to make the right choice; and (6) having a negative self-assessment because of comparing one's own achievements with others. hassler (2009) mentions that there are seven aspects of a quarter-life crisis, including (1) indecision in making decisions, (2) desperation, (3) negative self-assessment, (4) being stuck in a difficult situation, (5) anxious; (6) depressed; and (7) worry about interpersonal relationships that are being and will be built. previous studies found several factors for the occurrence of a quarter-life crisis, both internal and external factors. internal factors that contribute to quarter-life crises, for example, motivation, affection, cognition, religiosity and spirituality, self-esteem, emotional intelligence, resilience, and personality (balzarie & nawangsih, 2019; baumert et al., 2017; fatchurrahmi & urbayatun, 2022; huwaina & khoironi, 2021; mikula et al., 2018; olenikshemesh et al., 2018; robinson & wright, 2013) external factors, such as social relationships, problems with partners, family support, academic and career challenges, economic status, transitional periods, and parenting (arnett, 2000; haase et al., 2012; huwaina & khoironi, 2021; kins et al., 2009; praharso et al., 2017; robinson & wright, 2013; walshe, 2018). pervin et al. (2005) emphasize the diverse factors shaping individuals' responses to different situations, especially during crisis stages. syafar et al. (2022) explain that individuals grappling with difficulties during the quarter-life crisis often attribute their challenges to their unique personality traits. a more in-depth examination reveals that personality holds a fundamental role in influencing quarter-life crises, serving as a humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 15 nur rohmah itsnaini et.al (the role of personality orientation in predicting quarter life crisis in...) predisposing factor or distinctive inclination in how individuals react and respond to crisis situations (kurniasari, 2017). previous studies have stated that personality is an important factor in studying a quarter life crisis phenomenon. however, previous research has mostly focused on the big-five personality theory. the personality theory put forward by costa & mccrae (1988) places more emphasis on five separate personality dimensions (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) in which each dimension has traits and characteristics that arise as a result of the dynamics within the individual (lotfi et al., 2016). however, the big-five personality theory is not sufficient to comprehensively define a personality because it does not include aspects of religiosity and spirituality. najm (2019) states that religiosity and spirituality are one of the pillars in interpreting individual personality. those two pillars hold a prominent position among personality traits, serving as a source of moral values and offering a refuge for individuals facing adversity, promoting patience, and easing tensions (najm, 2019). therefore, there is an alternative anchor personality theory put forward by riyono (2012), which includes the aspects of religiosity and spirituality in individuals. the anchor personality theory is a unique theory from a perspective that is relevant in the context of psychology in indonesia (riyono, 2020a). anchor theory is also based on the view that personality results from repetitive behavioral dynamics (riyono, 2020a). riyono (riyono, 2020a) defines an anchor as something that is used as a handle or mainstay for individuals in solving problems in their lives. the four dimensions of anchor personality theory include materials, self, others, and virtues. anchor in a person will be perceived differently, along with the level of understanding of the individual (riyono, 2020b). theoretically, the process of anchor development that occurs in humans starts from anchor others in childhood. then, along with their development, an individual will be more independent, and the individual will add another anchor: the self. this is called self-reliance. anchor, as a source of human psychological stability, consists of several layers of abstraction that are interrelated and form a structure in the form of levels of layers from something concrete to abstract (riyono, 2020a). based on the level of abstraction, anchors can be categorized into several layers, including the following. (1) god as the most abstract ultimate anchor; (2) virtues, namely principles based on virtuous values; (3) self, namely all selfqualities that are used as a guide for individuals; (4) others, namely something outside a person that is used as a guide for an individual; and (5) materials, defined as all kinds of valuable materials and objects that are used as a mainstay for individuals (riyono, 2020a). the anchor layer can be interpreted as an ideal priority level that humans can apply in their lives to be able to achieve mental health (riyono, 2020b). figure 1 shows the personality structure of anchors (riyono, 2020a, 2020b). figure 1 anchor structure 16 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) nur rohmah itsnaini et.al (the role of personality orientation in predicting quarter life crisis in…) the link between the dimensions in the anchor personality theory and the quarter-life crisis can be explained through the mainstays that are prioritized by the individual. this is in accordance with riyono's statement (riyono, 2020a) that individuals who are oriented towards principles based on virtues will experience a sense of psychological comfort and peace. this is because individuals who have virtues will also feel close to god, which cannot be achieved except through the manifestation of divine principles (akhtar & firmanto, 2021). therefore, the ideal priority that individuals apply to achieve optimal psychological conditions is anchor virtues that are able to provide meaning for individuals and have a positive impact on wellbeing. this study examined its relevance to groups of individuals who are in the developmental stage of emerging adulthood. arnett (2004) states that at this time, individuals will explore identity, self-focus instability, feeling in-between, and possibilities/optimism (arnett, 2004). thus, there is a paradox between instability and a period full of optimism; generally, individuals will make themselves (self) as a mainstay. this is consistent with arnett's statement (2015) that there is no stage of a period in life that is more self-focused (self-focused) except for the period of emerging adulthood. thus, individuals will rely on self-reliance (self-reliance). however, along with human intellectual development, the anchor will shift to virtues. individuals in the emerging adulthood phase feel a strong urge to find the right or reliable anchor for themselves to achieve stability in life. based on a theoretical review regarding the relationship between anchor dimensions and quarter-life crises in emerging adulthood, this study aimed to determine the extent to which personality orientation plays a role according to anchor personality theory in quarterlife crises in emerging adulthood. there are several hypotheses in this study. first, anchor materials are positively related to a quarter-life crisis. second, the anchor self is positively related to a quarter-life crisis. third, anchor others is positively related to a quarter-life crisis. fourth, anchor virtues are negatively related to a quarter-life crisis. method participants the criteria for participants in this study were 279 indonesian citizens (wni), male and female, and aged 18-25 years. the reason for selecting the age group in this study was that individuals are experiencing a transition from adolescence to adulthood, or what is commonly referred to as the developmental stage of emerging adulthood (arnett, 2004). see table 1 for participants' information. table 1 participant demographic data demographics category frequency percentage gender male 78 27.96% female 201 72.04% age 18 3 1.08% 19 4 1.43% 20 22 7.89% 21 72 25.80% 22 87 31.19% 23 45 16.13% 24 23 8.24% 25 23 8.24% tertiary education high school/equivalent 138 49.47% humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 17 nur rohmah itsnaini et.al (the role of personality orientation in predicting quarter life crisis in...) table 1 (continued) procedures this research was conducted using a non-experimental quantitative approach to the survey method. data collection was carried out online via google form, which was distributed via social media. this questionnaire has also been equipped with an informed consent sheet and demographic data attached at the beginning of the form. this research has received ethical approval from the ethics commission of the faculty of psychology, gadjah mada university, with number 7511/un1/fpsi.1.3/sd/pt.01.04/2022 on september 28 2022. instruments quarter life crisis scale. a quarter-life crisis was measured using the quarter life crisis scale, developed by hassler (2009) and adapted into indonesian by agustin (2012). this scale consists of 25 items arranged based on seven aspects, including: (1) indecision in making decisions; (2) desperate; (3) negative self-assessment; (4) stuck in a difficult situation; (5) anxious; (6) depressed; and (7) worry about interpersonal relationships that are being and will be built. the scale uses a likert scale with five answer choices, namely 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neutral, 4 = agree, and 5 = strongly agree. several studies using this scale showed a good reliability coefficient using cronbach's alpha of 0.967 overall (korah, 2022). nash & murray (2010) used a similar scale and reported a cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient of 0.924. in this study, the quarter life crisis scale has a cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient of 0.953. anchor personality inventory (api). anchor personality inventory–short form developed by riyono (2020a) was used to measure the personality of anchors. this scale consists of 20 items based on the four dimensions of anchor personality: materials, self, others, and virtues. riyono (2020b) explains that each dimension consists of five aspects, including (1) the mainstay for choosing and deciding, (2) the attribution of success, (3) the attribution of happiness, (4) the mainstay for pinning hopes, and (5 ) a mainstay for interpreting phenomena. the scale uses a likert scale with five answer choices, namely 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neutral, 4 = agree, and 5 = strongly agree. the higher score on each anchor dimension indicates the dominant anchor of the individual's personality orientation, which serves as the mainstay of his life. the anchor personality inventory has been used in various previous studies in various contexts and shows a good reliability coefficient using cronbach's alpha. nugrahany (2017) conducted research on a group of tertiary education staff and reported cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient as follows: 0.905 for anchor virtue; 0.876 for anchor others; 0.919 for anchor self; and 0.838 for anchor materials. furthermore, dwatra (2016), in his research among employees, has also reported a cronbach's alpha reliability coeficient as follows: 0.821 for anchor virtue; 0.737 for anchor others; 0.803 for anchor self; and 0.852 for anchors self. construct validity on this scale was measured using confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) conducted by istiqomah & riyono (2022), showing that this scale shows a good fit model demographics category frequency percentage diploma 24 8.60% undergraduate 115 41.22% postgraduate 2 0.71% work not yet working 6 2.15% student 178 63.80% profesional 6 2.15% civil servants 24 8.60% private sector employee 52 18.64% others 13 4.66% 18 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) nur rohmah itsnaini et.al (the role of personality orientation in predicting quarter life crisis in…) which was selected based on the five items with the highest factor loading on each aspect in the api. the results of testing the validity of previous studies can be seen in table 2. table 2 cfa api results in this study, validity testing was also carried out for the api measuring instrument with the following results. table 3 cfa api testing results the result of construct validity testing of the anchor personality inventory instrument showed a good and consistent fit model. see table 3. data analysis multiple linear regression analysis was used to determine the relationships between the four dimensions of anchor personality (i.e., materials, self, others, and virtues) and quarter-life crisis. statistical analysis was performed using jasp software version 16.2.0. an assumption test (i.e., homoscedasticity, linearity, and normality) and a correlation test were carried out as conditions for the regression model that must be met before testing the hypotheses. results table 4 multiple linear regression analysis model r r² adjusted r² f p 1 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 2 0.433 0.188 0.185 63.959 < .001 3 0.495 0.245 0.239 44.734 < .001 4 0.513 0.263 0.255 32.670 < .001 variable item tli cfi rmsea srmr materials 2,3,5,8,10 0.942 0.971 0.068 0.038 self 2,5,7,8,10 0.977 0.989 0.031 0.034 others 1,2,4,5,6 0.853 0.926 0.083 0.050 virtues 2,4,6,7,10 1.050 1.000 0.000 0.022 variable item tli cfi rmsea srmr materials 2,3,5,8,10 0.928 0.964 0.082 0.033 self 2,5,7,8,10 0.951 0.976 0.052 0.028 others 1,2,4,5,6 0.890 0.945 0.090 0.039 virtues 2,4,6,7,10 0.992 0.996 0.029 0.020 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 19 nur rohmah itsnaini et.al (the role of personality orientation in predicting quarter life crisis in...) table 5 anova table 6 stepwise multiple linear regression based on the results of multiple regression analysis using the stepwise method, it shows that increasing the anchor others and materials will significantly increase the quarter life crisis (see table 6). conversely, an increase in anchor virtues will significantly reduce the quarterlife crisis. this can be seen in the increase in r2 (see table 4 and 5). thus, it can be concluded that the 1st, 3rd, and 4th hypotheses are accepted, while the 2nd hypothesis is rejected. discussion this study aims to investigate the role of anchor personality orientation (i.e., materials, self, others, and virtues) in predicting a quarter-life crisis in a group of emerging adults. the results model sum of squares df mean square f p 2 regression 39.817 1 39.817 63.959 < .001 residual 172.441 277 0.623 total 212.258 278 3 regression 51.962 2 25.981 44.734 < .001 residual 160.296 276 0.581 total 212.258 278 4 regression 55.772 3 18.591 32.670 < .001 residual 156.486 275 0.569 total 212.258 278 note. the intercept model is omitted, as no meaningful information can be shown. model unstandardized (b) standard error (se) standardized (β) t p 1 (intercept) 2.908 0.052 55.597 < .001 2 (intercept) 1.276 0.209 6.094 < .001 others 0.507 0.063 0.433 7.997 < .001 3 (intercept) 2.748 0.380 7.229 < .001 others 0.508 0.061 0.434 8.302 < .001 virtues -0.342 0.075 -0.239 -4.573 < .001 4 (intercept) 2.341 0.408 5.739 < .001 others 0.445 0.065 0.380 6.796 < .001 virtues -0.344 0.074 -0.241 -4.647 < .001 materials 0.168 0.065 0.145 2.588 0.010 note. the following covariate was considered but not included: self. 20 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) nur rohmah itsnaini et.al (the role of personality orientation in predicting quarter life crisis in…) indicate that anchor materials and others play a role in increasing quarter-life crisis. on the other hand, anchor virtues significantly contribute to preventing a quarter-life crisis. thus, the three hypotheses (i.e., materials, others, and virtues) of this study are accepted, and one is rejected. the research found that anchor materials were associated with a quarter-life crisis. this aligns with anchor theory, which states that individuals who are oriented toward anchor materials tend to emphasize material things, such as wealth, social status, and wellbeing, as measured by something concrete and easily lost (aisyahrani et al., 2020). individuals who make materials as their anchor tend to feel satisfied or dissatisfied concerning the achievement of material things, such as property acquisition, financial success, increased status and social status (aisyahrani et al., 2020). these individuals also tend to believe that life goals might be achieved through materialism (aisyahrani et al., 2020; burroughs & rindfleisch, 2002). individuals who make material things as priority in their lives will have the risk of feeling unsatisfied and unhappy. even if you feel happy, the happiness is only momentary. therefore, individuals who prioritize anchor materials have a high probability of experiencing a quarter-life crisis. this is because individuals have feelings of never being satisfied and easily disappointed when something material is lost. moreover, individuals who hold on to anchor materials also have a strong tendency to have a self-oriented anchor and also an others-oriented anchor. thus, individuals who experience quarter-life crises who hold on to anchor materials will feel continuous dissatisfaction and always worry about whether or not they can get material things. this explains how the anchor material positively predicts the quarter-life crisis. the next link is between the anchor self and quarter-life crisis, which can be explained according to the theory put forward by arnett (2015); the period of emerging adulthood is synonymous with a more self-focused period. this is also synonymous with the individual's ability to do self-reflection to better understand one's desires in life and begin to build a foundation for adult life. the purpose of self-focusing can also be said to be a time for individuals to be able to learn to stand alone as independent individuals and as a necessary step before committing to long-term relationships with others, both in terms of love and work. self-focusing during the quarter-life crisis is often associated with the level of self-esteem in individuals (chung et al., 2014). however, this study found that the anchor self does not directly predict quarter-life crisis, though it has a strong correlation with the anchor materials which predict the quarter-life crisis. this indicates that the material orientation potentially mediates the relationship between self-oriented anchor and quarter-life crisis. more research is needed to examine the mediator role of anchor materials in the association between the self-oriented anchor and a quarter-life crisis. we also found that anchor others predicted the quarter-life crisis. theoretically, the anchor development process that occurs in humans starts from anchor others in childhood, because individuals tend to rely on others. the need to depend on other people is a consequence of human existence as social beings (riyono, 2020b). however, based on previous literature, which states that there is a period of extension from childhood to adulthood, this period is full of stress and uncertainty. the consequence of this extended childhood makes the individual continually rely on others in their life. in addition, the existence of external factors that influence the occurrence of quarter-life crisis, such as social relationships and the challenges of facing a more mature life, becomes a frightening thing for individuals who experience this extended childhood. furthermore, previous research found that in the emerging adulthood period, individuals tend to emphasize relationships with family, friends, and partners (murphy, 2011). erikson (1950) explained that during emerging adulthood, individuals are faced with a developmental task known as intimacy vs isolation. these developmental tasks are manifested in the behavior of forming friendships and intimate relationships with others (santrock, 2017). unfulfilled consequences of these developmental tasks make individuals humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 21 nur rohmah itsnaini et.al (the role of personality orientation in predicting quarter life crisis in...) feel isolated. individuals at this time will tend to emphasize interpersonal relationships to be able to achieve intimacy so that during this period, individuals tend to hold on to anchor others. align with anchor theory, the research found that anchor virtues were related to the quarter-life crisis. according to anchor theory individuals who rely on virtues which are manifestations of faith in god will create meaning and provide a sense of security and peace psychologically (akhtar & firmanto, 2021). peterson and seligman (2004) define virtue as a psychological element that forms a character strength based on virtue values. virtue is also fundamental for individuals to achieve positive psychological conditions, such as achieving prosperity and life satisfaction (prasetyo & ratnaningsih, 2019). belief in the virtues that originate from this faith will give you a sense of security, prosperity, and being able to deal with problems in life. therefore, it is important for individuals to make anchor virtues a guide in life in the emerging adulthood period so that they are able to understand the meaning of life and prevent quarter-life crisis from occurring. this research has implications for the development of personality concepts and theories that are directed at individual benefits, especially to become a mainstay at the developmental stage of emerging adulthood. professionals and practitioners can employ the anchor personality theory as a tool to enhance their comprehension and awareness of personality orientation focused on virtues. this utilization aims to proactively address and prevent a quarter-life crisis, ultimately contributing to the attainment of optimal psychological functioning. this study has several limitations, including the demographic data of participants who are less diverse, both in terms of age, marital status, occupation, and domicile. therefore, suggestions for future researchers are expected to be able to enrich similar research with a background of demographic data on groups of individuals in more diverse stages of development of emerging adulthood so that consistency will be found in research results in a more comprehensive manner. moreover, the data in this study also shows a contradiction between the high scores of high materials and high virtues. this can happen because there is a possibility for participants to do social desirability because the items in the virtues dimension contain universal virtue values. the likelihood of social desirability influencing the virtues dimension in the anchor personality inventory has been foreseen through composite variables and variations within the item context (ayuningtyas & riyono, 2023). by creating a composite variable that involves adjusting the virtues anchor score with materials, self, and other anchors, the virtues obtained have undergone a process of purification, eliminating the influence of these three dimensions. it is suggested that further research will be able to identify and anticipate the possibility of social desirability in participants. furthermore, research related to the concept of quarter-life crisis involves a more serious future life transition. therefore, future researchers are expected to relate it to factors that are often associated with crises, such as educational background, socioeconomic status, and culture (duara et al., 2021; robinson, 2019). studies that examine a transition in the stages of development cannot escape the influence of socio-culture. this can be explained through the developmental stages of emerging adulthood which cannot be separated from the context of western culture. at this stage of development it can be said that the individual feels that he has pressure followed by the freedom and new responsibilities that accompany it. the existence of cultural demands so that individuals are able to explore life in a more individualistic manner makes this transition period often interpreted as a very challenging stage of life. this can be a consideration for future researchers to discuss phenomena that are a crisis at the stage of development and its relation to cultural aspects. 22 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) nur rohmah itsnaini et.al (the role of personality orientation in predicting quarter life crisis in…) conclusion this study aims to determine the extent of the role of anchor personality orientation (i.e., materials, self, others, and virtues) towards quarter-life crises in emerging adult groups of individuals. we found that materials, others, and virtues predict quarter-life crises in emerging adults, while the anchor self did not. these findings advance the existing literature by confirming the role of anchor personality orientation in understanding the quarter-life crises among emerging adults. they also provide insights into how practitioners might find better ways to assist young people in dealing with this crisis. declarations author contribution. first author contributed to designing the study, collecting data, and writing the manuscript draft. second author contributed to supervising design study, consulting data analysis, reviewing the manuscript, and finalizing the manuscript. funding statement. the authors did not receive funding for research, manuscript writing, and publication of this article. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest which can influence this study. references agustin, i. 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(2018). the quarter-life crisis: investigating emotional intelligence, self-esteem, and maximization as predictors of coping self-efficacy. dublin business school. https://doi.org/10.24123/aipj.v35i2.2907 https://doi.org/10.1177/2167696818764144 https://doi.org/10.1177/0165025413492464 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 21 (2), august 2024, 157-171 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas http://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i2.652 psychological well-being among broken home young adults: the role of social anxiety disorder and hardiness helen natalie1, jessica christina widhigdo1* 1school of psychology, ciputra university, surabaya, indonesia corresponding author: jessica.christina@ciputra.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction a functional family brings positive impacts on a child's development, including the cultivation of good habits (honesty, perseverance, lifestyle patterns, etc), internalization of norms and values, and the development of good social interaction skills within society (leenders et al., 2017; mo et al., 2021). this influence extends into adulthood. conversely, parents who do not practice assertive communication, fail to provide material and emotional support, and lack appreciation for family members can lead to family dysfunction and various conflicts, resulting in divorce (oktariani, 2021). central bureau of statistic of indonesia (2023) reported that divorce cases in indonesia reached 448,126 in 2023, with continuous conflict being the most common reason for divorce (63.4%). divorce results in children becoming broken homes. based on previous research (ardilla & cholid, 2021; ariyanto, 2023; muttaqin & sulistyo, 2019) broken home is characterized by the incomplete structure of a family or parents no longer residing together due to either divorce or death. the repercussions of a broken home can pose a threat to an article info abst ract article history received january 30, 2024 revised july 1, 2024 accepted july 7, 2024 in indonesia, 448.126 divorce cases were reported in 2023. losing parent(s) as a consequence of parental divorce or death results in children becoming broken-home. in the absence of a parent figure, children experience harmful psychological effects, including ongoing social anxiety until they become young adults. this may disrupt young adults’ developmental task to form intimacy hence leading to poor psychological well-being. young adults from broken home families must possess hardiness to cope with daily stress and traumatic experiences. therefore, this study aimed to investigate the role of social anxiety disorder and hardiness in psychological well-being among broken-home young adults. participants of this study were 200 young adults with broken-home family. the scales used were the indonesian version of the psychological well-being scale, the social phobia inventory (spin), and the drs-15 dispositional resilience scale. data was analyzed using the multiple regression model. the results showed that there was a significant contribution of social anxiety disorder and hardiness on psychological well-being, with a total contribution of 53.8 percent. it is recommended for future interventions to detect social anxiety disorder potency, as well as to include hardiness variable in optimizing psychological well-being quality, especially in brokenhome young adults. keywords broken home adults hardiness psychological well-being social anxiety disorder mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas http://doi.org/%20%20%20%2010.26555/humanitas.v21i2.652 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 158 natalie et al. (psychological well-being among broken home young adults: the role of social anxiety disorder and hardiness) individual's psychological well-being (pwb). pwb refers to the state in which individuals have life goals and continuously evolve, enabling them to realize their potential and achieve happiness (bradburn, 1969; huppert, 2009; ryff, 1989; waterman, 1993). pwb consists of six dimensions: autonomy, self-acceptance, positive relations with others, personal growth, environmental mastery, and purpose in life. individuals with high pwb are characterized by elevated levels of happiness, mental health, and the maximization of their potential. elevated pwb can be indicated by the achievement of developmental tasks, including the establishment of intimate relationships with friends and partners during early adulthood, typically between the ages of 20-39 (erikson, 1968). sharing experiences, mutual support, understanding, and care with a partner can enhance life goals and self-acceptance (czyzowska et al., 2020; petegem et al., 2018). conversely, failure in these developmental tasks can jeopardize an individual's personality, giving rise to aggressive behaviors, reluctance to build interpersonal relationships, and even deep-seated isolation (erikson, 1968; santrock, 2011). ramadhani et al. (2016) found that as many as 52% of vocational high school students with divorced parents exhibited low levels of psychological well-being. in line with belung (2022), 73.5% of adolescents from broken homes still fall within the moderate to low categories of psychological well-being. during the transition to early adulthood, individuals from brokenhome families experience unstable emotions and psychological trauma (budiman & widyastuti, 2022). the alteration in family structure can lead to a child manifesting symptoms of depression such as anxiety and inferiority, struggling with trust and forgiveness, and experiencing a loss of purpose in life until early adulthood (czyzowska et al., 2020; faisal et al., 2020; harefa & savira, 2021; lie et al., 2019; purwanto & hendriyani, 2020; sha & desai, 2022). this is attributed to limited communication within the family post-divorce, and societal stigma can cause a child to develop low self-esteem and avoid social interactions (mistiani, 2018). the impacts of parental divorce, presenting challenges to the daily lives of children, can be felt for at least ten years into the future trauma (liana & suryadi, 2018). the condition of a broken home can also affect psychological well-being (pwb) in early adulthood. limited communication within the family post-divorce and societal stigma can lead children to develop low self-esteem and avoid social interactions (mistiani, 2018). gul and nadeemullah (2017) also found that 72.4% of children and adolescents experience feelings of low self-esteem and an inferiority complex due to their broken home backgrounds. these various conditions can impact an individual's psychological well-being, relating to their sense of autonomy, low self-acceptance due to tendencies of feeling inferior, restricted social relationships, and a general sense of helplessness. previous studies (fu et al., 2017; prusky, 2019) have found that parental absence or negative experiences in childhood indicate higher levels of social anxiety disorder. social anxiety disorder (sad) is an anxiety disorder characterized by excessive fear and apprehension due to the perceived judgment of others during specific social activities (mattick & clarke, 1998; morrison & heimberg, 2013; nevid et al., 2018). those with higher social anxiety disorder experience fear or anxiety in social situations, fearing negative evaluation and often avoiding them. these fears persist over six months, causing significant distress or impairment. individuals with social anxiety show poor self-control abilities after social interactions, leading to diminished quality of interpersonal relationships and worsening symptoms of social anxiety (blackhart et al., 2015). sad is also associated with a decline in the quality of life in environmental, social, physical, and psychological domains, where individuals struggle to recognise their abilities, cope with daily stress, and work productively (alsaraireh et al., 2023; wersebe et al., 2018). file:///d:/layout/huminitas%20uad/artikel%20belum%20dilayout/helen_natalie__artikel_5_1.docx%23mistiani humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 159 natalie et al. (psychological well-being among broken home young adults: the role of social anxiety disorder and hardiness) purwaningsih et al. (2023) found that anxiety contributes to psychological well-being (pwb) by 17.05%. consistent with a study by morales-rodríguez et al. (2020) in spain, state anxiety showed a significant negative correlation with four dimensions of pwb, namely self-acceptance, environmental mastery, personal growth, and purpose-in-life. several studies conducted in india and pakistan (nagaraj, 2017; shahbaz et al., 2021; sushma et al., 2016) have revealed that anxiety, including social interaction anxiety was negatively correlated with well-being, as children feel unworthy and incompetent. children from broken homes may experience social anxiety disorder (sad) which is characterized by difficulty in self-expression, fear of social situations, and low self-confidence (murad, 2020). moreover, other situations such as engaging in conversations, meeting strangers, being observed, and performing in front of others create pressure on these children. they tend to suppress their feelings and may choose to end relationships to resolve conflicts (octavian & cahyanti, 2023). several factors that can positively influence pwb include resilience, self-knowledge, hardiness, and mindfulness (anjum, 2022; fagbenro & olasupo, 2019; feldman et al., 2021; harding et al., 2019). in their daily lives, children from broken homes with low pwb need to adopt an optimistic mindset, be goal-oriented, possess internal motivation, and exhibit good social skills to enhance their enthusiasm for life (anjum, 2022). these children not only require resilience during traumatic experiences but also need a consistent character even when facing normal stress. this is because individuals tend to exhibit behavior consistent with their personality (yeung & hemsley, 1997). therefore, one of the essential personality traits that promote pwb among broken homes children is hardiness. kobasa (1979) defines hardiness as a personality that enables an individual to remain healthy or unthreatened when under pressure. several previous studies (ausie et al., 2017; hamida & izzati, 2022; nurjan et al., 2023) have found that hardiness has a significant positive correlation with pwb. in the context of a broken home, a hardy personality enables individuals to manage stress levels, be optimistic about the future, view life positively, feel grateful, not avoid problems, and refrain from engaging in harmful behaviors (agustini, 2019; anggraeni & jannah, 2014). the research also discovered that the divorce of one's parents motivates individuals to become independent and use their parents' experiences as learning opportunities. there has been no specific research examining the influence of hardiness and social anxiety disorder on the psychological well-being of broken-home young adults, particularly in the context of indonesia. investigating both factors concurrently facilitates an understanding of their interaction and potential for mutual counterbalancing. while social anxiety may adversely affect pwb, a hardiness personality can confer the resilience necessary to manage these challenges. grasping this dynamic is essential for the development of targeted interventions designed to enhance hardiness traits, thereby mitigating the adverse effects of social anxiety. by examining sad and hardiness personality traits in tandem, the research aims to offer a more comprehensive insight into the pwb of young adults from broken-home families. this dual focus ensures a holistic understanding, recognizing both the vulnerabilities and strengths inherent in this population. previous studies that investigated pwb in individuals with social anxiety disorder (wersebe et al., 2018), the relationship between state anxiety and pwb (morales-rodríguez et al., 2020), and social interaction anxiety and pwb (shahbaz et al., 2021) focused on populations in spain, pakistan, germany, switzerland, and india, without limiting the conditions to the divorced status of parents. additionally, there is a discrepancy in research findings, as aslan and bilgin (2020) found no significant relationship between well-being and sad in adolescents. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 160 natalie et al. (psychological well-being among broken home young adults: the role of social anxiety disorder and hardiness) on the other hand, previous research investigating the relationship between hardiness and pwb (ausie et al., 2017; hamida & izzati, 2022; nurjan et al., 2023) has focused on working participants, such as prospective military officers, indonesian migrant workers, and port security officers, due to high job demands and strict, constantly changing government regulations. additionally, there were studies examining the impact of hardiness on pwb (anjum, 2022; pambudi & rusmawati, 2022) involving high school students and college students as the population. the novelty of this study lies in its focus on young adults from broken-home backgrounds. this demographic is significant because these individuals not only navigate high demands in their daily lives but also experience increased stress due to changes in family structure, low self-esteem, social anxiety disorder, and other related factors. furthermore, previous studies have been conducted in countries such as pakistan, germany, switzerland, and india, without specifically considering the divorced status of parents. based on the exposition and importance outlined above, this research will concentrate on examining the impact of social anxiety disorder and hardiness personality on the psychological well-being of early adults from broken homes. the hypothesis of this study posits that there are effects of social anxiety disorder and hardiness personality on psychological well-being. method research design the research design applied in this study is a quantitative method with a correlational prediction design. correlational prediction is a non-experimental research conducted to explore causal relationships and to assess the extent to which predictors influence the dependent variable (mekonnen, 2020). participants the research participants in this study were 200 young adults aged 20-37 from a brokenhome family background. the status of a broken home was indicated by the individual's parents being divorced, either through a parental divorce or death. the sampling technique used in this research was non-probability sampling, specifically convenience sampling. convenience sampling is a technique where participants are selected based on ease of access or availability while still meeting the criteria adjusted to the research context (zickar & keith, 2022). data collection was conducted through various channels of social media (twitter, whatsapp, line, instagram, telegram) and broken-home communities. all participants were given informed consent as an expression of their willingness to participate in the study. as a gesture of appreciation, five lucky participants were offered incentives in the form of e-money. the demographic data of participants are shown in table 1. based on the available demographic data, the majority of respondents in this study are female, with most of them being between the ages of 20 and 25. the majority of respondents are college students from divorced families, with the divorces having occurred within the last 1 to 5 years. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 161 natalie et al. (psychological well-being among broken home young adults: the role of social anxiety disorder and hardiness) table 1 demographic data of participants instruments psychological well-being (pwb) was measured using the psychological well-being scale created by ryff et al. (2021). this instrument comprises 6 dimensions, further broken down into 42 items that measure purpose in life (e.g., “i have a sense of direction and purpose in life.”), self-acceptance (e.g., “in general, i feel confident and positive about myself.”, positive relations with others (e.g., “most people see me as loving and affectionate.”), environmental mastery (e.g., “i am quite good at managing the many responsibilities of my daily life.”), personal growth (e.g., “for me, life has been a continuous process of learning, changing, and growth.”), and autonomy (e,g., “i am not afraid to voice my opinions, even when they are in opposition to the opinions of most people.”). the scale employs a likert scale with scores ranging from 1 to 7 for each item, where 1 = strongly agree, 2 = agree, 3 = somewhat agree, 4 = neutral, 5 = somewhat disagree, 6 = disagree, 7 = strongly disagree. the level of an individual's pwb is considered high when the obtained total scale score is high, and low when the obtained total scale score is low. the measurement instrument for social anxiety disorder (sad) employed in this study was the social phobia inventory (spin) created by connor et al. (2000). this instrument comprises 3 dimensions, further broken down into 17 items that measure social avoidance, fear, and physiological discomfort in various social contexts (e.g., “i avoid doing things or speaking to people for fear of embarrassment”). the scale utilizes a likert scale with scores ranging from 0 to 4 for each item, where 0 = not at all, 1 = a little bit, 2 = category frequency percentage gender male female 28 172 14% 86% age 20-22 years old 23-25 years old 26-28 years old 32-34 years old 35-37 years old 79 66 36 20 25 6 39.6% 32.9% 11.4% 6.3% 7.9% 1.9% occupation college student 122 61.3% staff/employee 47 23.6% freelancer 8 4% self-employed 8 4% others (housewife, state apparatus) 10 5% relationship status not in a relationship 142 71.4% in a dating relationship 48 24.1% married 9 4.5% parental divorce status by divorce 111 55.5% by death 89 45.5% parental divorce duration < 1 year 13 6.5% 1-5 years 91 45.7% 6-10 years 38 19.1% 11-15 years 24 12.1% >15 years 33 16.6% residence status living alone 49 24.6% living with one parent 126 63.3% living with sibling(s) 8 4% living with spouse 3 1.5% living with other family members (grandparents, cousins) 13 6.5% humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 162 natalie et al. (psychological well-being among broken home young adults: the role of social anxiety disorder and hardiness) moderately, 3 = very, and 4 = extremely. the level of an individual's sad is considered high when the obtained total scale score is high, and low when the obtained total scale score is low the personality hardiness measurement instrument used was the dispositional resilience scale (drs-15) developed by bartone (2007). despite its name, the dispositional resilience scale (drs-15) focuses on measuring hardiness, emphasizing dimensions like commitment, control, and challenge appraisal. while it draws from the framework of (kobasa, 1979), its broader assessment of resilience highlights its versatility in examining adaptive coping strategies. this instrument consists of 3 dimensions, further broken down into 15 items that measure an individual’s commitment, control, and challenge when facing stress (e.g., “my choices make a real difference in how things turn out in the end”). the scale employs a likert scale with scores ranging from 0 to 3 for each item, where 0 = not true at all, 1 = slightly true, 2 = moderately true, and 3 = very true. the level of an individual's hardiness personality is considered high when the obtained total scale score is high, and low when the obtained total scale score is low all three scales have been translated into indonesian. furthermore, a content validity test is conducted through a language test, expert judgment, and statistical testing. the language test was carried out by determining the participants' understanding of the use of words or sentences in the translated instrument. in this study, the researcher conducted a language test with 5 participants outside the research sample with similar criteria. after the language test, several items underwent minor revisions, such as changes to difficult terms, simplification of sentences, and restructuring of sentence structures. expert judgment involves constructive assessments from experts who conduct research or publish scientific journals related to the research (roebianto et al., 2023). in this study, the researcher conducted expert judgment with two experts. after expert judgment, several items underwent minor revisions, such as sentence simplification and changes in word choices. the researcher assessed the reliability of each measurement instrument using the unidimensional reliability feature in the jasp software. according to janssens et al. (2008), a cronbach's alpha value between 0.6-0.8 is considered acceptable or sufficiently good, while reliability in the range of 0.8-0.95 is deemed excellent and does not require item elimination. the researcher conducted a construct validity test by exploring the correlation between the total score of variables and variable items. an item was considered valid if the p-value was < 0.05 (sugiyono, 2014). the results of the reliability and construct validity test are shown in table 2. table 2 alpha cronbach, total score and item significance assumption checks before hypothesis testing, four assumption tests were conducted: residual normality, linearity, multicollinearity, and heteroscedasticity. the residual normality test showed a normal distribution with a centered histogram curve and aligned q-q plot points. linearity was confirmed using partial regression plots, which indicated a significant relationship scale cronbach’s α total score and item significance the psychological well-being scale 0.92 all items < 0.05 the social phobia inventory (spin) 0.94 all items < 0.05 the dispositional resilience scale (drs-15) 0.66 all items < 0.05 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 163 natalie et al. (psychological well-being among broken home young adults: the role of social anxiety disorder and hardiness) between the independent variables (sad and hardiness) and the dependent variable without curvatures. multicollinearity was assessed through tolerance (0.74) and vif (1.34) values, as shown in table 5. the heteroscedasticity test, using a residual vs. predicted values plot, showed no curve formation, indicating uniform variance across populations. data analysis multiple linear regression analysis aims to determine the influence of independent variables on the dependent variable (budiastuti & bandur, 2018). if the regression analysis results show a p-value > 0.05, the independent variable has a significant impact on the dependent variable, while adjusted r² indicates the percentage of contribution (goss-sampson, 2018). results to examine the relationships between the variables, pearson correlation coefficients were calculated. table 3 presents the bivariate correlations among the dependent variable and the independent variables. table 3 bivariate analysis pwb sad sad pearson -0.590 p value <.001 hardiness pearson 0.709 -0.457 p value <0.001 <0.001 following the bivariate analysis, a multiple regression was conducted to predict pwb based on social anxiety disorder and hardiness personality. the regression model was statistically significant, f(2, 197) = 117.045, p < .001, and explained 54.3% of the variance in pwb (r² = .543, adjusted r² = .538). table 4 multiple regression analysis results r r² adjusted r² sum of squares df mean square f p value regression 0.737 0.543 0.538 119507.576 2 59753.788 117.045 < 0.001 residual 100572.299 197 510.519 total 220079.875 199 table 5 provides the unstandardized regression coefficients (b), standardized regression coefficients (β), and significance levels (p-values) for each predictor. sad was a significant predictor of pwb (b = -0.728, se = 0.117, β = -0.347, p < .001). hardiness was also a significant predictor of pwb (b = 2.905, se = 0.326, β = 0.498, p < .001). the multiple linear regression equation used is y = b1.x1 + b2.x2 + c, where y represents the dependent variable (psychological well-being), x1 represents the first independent variable (social anxiety disorder), x2 represents the second independent variable (hardiness personality), b1 represents the unstandardized regression coefficient for x1, b2 represents the unstandardized regression coefficient for x2, and c represents the unstandardized intercept. from this equation, the resulting multiple linear regression model is: psychological wellbeing = -0.685 (social anxiety disorder) + 3.526 (hardiness personality) + 95.536. between file:///d:/layout/huminitas%20uad/artikel%20belum%20dilayout/helen_natalie__artikel_5_1.docx%23_table_4 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 164 natalie et al. (psychological well-being among broken home young adults: the role of social anxiety disorder and hardiness) the two independent variables in this study, the hardiness personality variable has a stronger contribution of influence compared to the social anxiety disorder variable. table 5 influence of independent variables collinearity statistics unstandardized standard error standardized (β) t p tolerance vif (intercept) 103.785 13.076 7.937 <.001 sad -0.728 0.117 -0.347 -6.211 <.001 0.743 1.345 hardiness 2.905 0.326 0.498 8.91 <.001 0.743 1.345 discussion the research findings indicate that social anxiety disorder (sad) and hardiness personality collectively influence psychological well-being (pwb). these results indicate that each change in one unit of sad and hardiness personality leads to a corresponding change in pwb. this discovery contributes to the research on pwb in the context of broken homes, as there has been no prior study examining these three variables simultaneously. in correlational research, shahbaz et al. (2021) found a significant negative correlation between social interaction anxiety and pwb. similarly, wersebe et al. (2018) reported that individuals with social phobia exhibit significantly lower levels of pwb compared to those without social phobia. generally, individuals from broken homes experience fear and anxiety when facing challenges, difficulty in openness, sensitivity to their surroundings, and a potential risk of sad (munandar et al., 2020). based on the study's findings, 83% of respondents exhibited moderate (64%) to high (19%) levels of sad. regarding its influence on the self-acceptance dimension of pwb, individuals with sad tend to negatively evaluate themselves, struggle to accept mistakes or adopt perfectionist attitudes, and believe they will fail and receive negative evaluations from others (brijwani, 2022). in terms of environmental mastery, young adults with moderate levels of sad tend to avoid public speaking or group discussions, while those with high levels may experience panic attacks in social situations (alomari et al., 2022). this suggests that individuals struggle to adapt and tend to avoid situations or activities that could promote personal growth. in terms of autonomy, individuals with sad tend to rely on others' opinions to avoid mistakes or negative judgments (sushma et al., 2016). regarding purpose in life, sad can hinder individuals' ability to form romantic relationships, friendships, and even maintain optimal performance (dryman et al., 2016). consequently, individuals with sad often feel dissatisfied with various aspects of their lives and struggle to find meaning in positive or negative experiences. in the personal growth dimension, individuals with sad are sensitive to change and threats to their safety (meng et al., 2021). this attitude contradicts individuals' desire to realize their potential through various challenges and self-exploration, especially in social situations. hur et al. (2020) explained that emotional experiences can reduce stress levels in intimate relationships with friends, family, or partners. however, individuals with higher levels of sad spend less time with close individuals. not only that, but various forms of emotional distress such as stress, anxiety, loneliness, and discomfort in social situations are also found in individuals with sad (russell & topham, 2012). as a result, individuals struggle to form meaningful relationships and face obstacles in their daily lives, such as declining social relationship quality, mental health, and physical health (alsaraireh et al., 2023). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 165 natalie et al. (psychological well-being among broken home young adults: the role of social anxiety disorder and hardiness) hardiness personality is described as a commitment to oneself, work, and the world despite pressure (bartone, 2007; kobasa, 1979). research findings reveal that 10% of respondents have low hardiness levels, 69% moderate, and 21% high levels. other studies (hamida & izzati, 2022; pambudi & rusmawati, 2022; paramita & huwae, 2023) also demonstrate the significant influence of hardiness personality on pwb, with respective impacts of 64.3%, 36.4%, and 51.3%. correlational studies (anjum, 2022; ausie et al., 2017; nurjan et al., 2023) have found a positive relationship between hardiness personality and pwb. in terms of environmental mastery, individuals with high hardiness can leverage societal knowledge, social skills, and motivation to realize their potential and develop constructive strategies (albakova et al., 2020). similarly, in the autonomy dimension, individuals recognize their abilities and actively confront challenges (hamida & izzati, 2022). moreover, individuals can control or overcome unexpected problems (maeshade et al., 2023). thus, socializing with new or close contacts, regulating emotions, and continuous self-development remain under individual control. in the purpose in life dimension, hardy individuals strive for personal development, future hope, and decision-making based on those aspirations (kinanthi & jannah, 2016). this indicates their ability to attribute meaning to actions, decisions, and life experiences, orienting toward life goals. in terms of personal growth, hardiness enables individuals to view daily challenges as opportunities for development (shabrina & hartini, 2021). individuals with high hardiness scores adopt positive coping strategies, remaining open to activities or experiences fostering self-growth. in the self-acceptance dimension, hardiness prevents self-blame and fosters appreciation for all experiences (paramita & huwae, 2023). lastly, individuals with high hardiness maintain quality interpersonal relationships and are motivated to confront daily challenges, thus enhancing their psychological well-being (ausie et al., 2017; paramita & huwae, 2023). several limitations were identified in this study, namely, the social media platforms used for data collection were not sufficiently diversified, thus potentially introducing subjectivity and hindering the representation of the entire population. additionally, limited comparisons could be made with previous research findings due to the scarcity of literature addressing psychological well-being, social anxiety disorder, and hardiness personality simultaneously. consequently, the researcher offers recommendations for future researchers and the research subjects. future researchers are encouraged to concentrate on young adults with divorced parents who are still alive compared to those with divorced parents who are deceased as they have lower psychological well-being levels while utilizing a random sampling technique. moreover, future researchers could explore the integration of the personality hardiness variable to enhance the psychological well-being levels among individuals from broken homes. for early adults with a broken-home status, fostering hardiness personality traits could be achieved through training or coaching initiatives. seeking professional assistance to detect potential social anxiety disorders is also advisable. conclusion this research demonstrates that the variables of social anxiety disorder and personality hardiness significantly influence psychological well-being. additionally, possessing a hardy personality is crucial for individuals from broken homes to navigate through both traumatic experiences and daily pressures successfully. therefore, early detection of the potential emergence of social anxiety disorder and the enhancement of personality hardiness in individuals from broken homes is essential. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 166 natalie et al. (psychological well-being among broken home young adults: the role of social anxiety disorder and hardiness) acknowledgment the authors would like to thank all of the participants and experts who participated in this study. declarations author contribution. hn established the research topic, designed the study, collected and analyzed data, and wrote the manuscript. jcw supervised the whole study process, reviewed research data, and gave constructive feedback on the manuscript. funding statement. this study received no support from any funding agency conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper references agustini, n. i. 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(2022). annual review of organizational psychology and organizational behavior innovations in sampling: improving the appropriateness and quality of samples in organizational research. annual review of organizational psychology and organizational behavior, 10, 315–337. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-12092 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0022-3514.64.4.678 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijchp.2017.09.002 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0191-8869(96)00158-4 https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-12092 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 20 (2), august 2023, 102-116 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v20i2.288 reducing parenting stress among muslim mothers during the covid-19 pandemic through spiritual mindfulness training wisnu sri hertinjung, citra tyas laksmadita, lisnawati ruhaena, santi sulandari, dwi arsinta kusumawati faculty of psychology, universitas muhammadiyah surakarta, indonesia corresponding author: wh171@ums.ac.id introduction the covid-19 pandemic has tremendously influenced numerous spheres of life in the past two years. parents' psychological well-being decreases with growing life crises, such as job loss, lower income, caregiving stress, and sickness during a pandemic (gassman-pines et al., 2020; prime et al., 2020). the pandemic's impact on parental health, security, and finances causes physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion (brown et al., 2020; cluver et al., 2020; fegert et al., 2020). the more pressures parents face, the more likely they are to develop stress, anxiety, and depression (beckerman et al., 2017). parents with children in elementary, middle, and high school were also shown to be more likely to face mental health issues during the pandemic (liu et al., 2020; spinelli & pellino, 2020; wu et al., 2020). according to previous studies, parents reported mental problems, tension, anxiety, and depression, as well as trouble sleeping during the pandemic (brown et al., 2020; elbay et al., 2020; thorell et al., 2022; zhao et al., 2020). during the outbreak, parents in indonesia encountered several parenting issues, particularly in aiding their children's online learning. numerous challenges have been confronted by students, teachers, and parents in online teaching and learning activities, including a lack of article info abst ract article history received dec 19.2022 revised may 25, 2023 accepted june 15, 2023 an imbalance between nurturing expectations and available resources during the covid-19 pandemic increases the risk of parental stress. this study aimed to reduce parental stress through spiritual mindfulness training among indonesian muslim mothers. this study applied the embedded experimental model, one part of the mixed method design, where qualitative data is used to clarify the results of the experimental data. the experimental design used was the pretestposttest control group design. twenty individuals were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. the parental stress scale was used to assess parental stress. the wilcoxon and mannwhitney u tests were used to compare parental stress levels before and after spiritual mindfulness training. the hypothesis test results show that spiritual mindfulness training effectively reduces parenting stress for indonesian muslim mothers. observation data during the training process and analysis of the assignment sheet found that the two individuals actively participating in the training process and frequently filling out the assignment sheets reduced parental stress levels more than their more passive counterparts. spiritual mindfulness training successfully decreases the parental stress of muslim mothers, and it is strongly suggested that mothers practice training regularly to considerably control their stress. keywords covid-19; muslim mothers; parenting stress; spiritual mindfulness. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v20i2.288 mailto:wh171@ums.ac.id humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 103 hertinjung et al. (reducing parental stress among muslim mothers…) technological mastery, the addition of internet quota fees, the existence of additional work for parents in accompanying children to learn, reduced communication and socialization between students, teachers, and parents, as well as unlimited working hours for teachers as they are required to communicate and coordinate with parents and colleagues (purwanto et al., 2020). at least 75.34% of the parents experienced moderate stress, 10.31% severe stress, and the rest had mild stress after three weeks of implementing online learning in indonesia (susilowati & azzasyofia, 2020). based on the survey results, it was concluded that the majority (97.7%) of parents experienced an imbalance between the demands of education and child care and the available resources, thus triggering parenting stress, which had an impact on the emotional condition of parents and decreased children's enthusiasm towards learning and achievement. marital satisfaction, social support, parenting styles, changes in working conditions, personal characteristics, and a history of mental illness are among the variables that contribute to the mental health issues suffered by parents during the pandemic (cusinato et al., 2020; wu et al., 2020). psychological difficulties in parents impede their ability to accept responsibility for their children and meet their needs. it also increases the likelihood of violence toward children. the increasing parenting obligations and limited resources cause physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion, which adds to stress (griffith, 2022). when addressed incorrectly, such a circumstance can severely impact children's development and parents' well-being. various psychological therapies, including the stepping stone treatment program (sttp), behavior parenting therapy, cognitive behavior therapy, psychoeducation, and mindfulness, can be used to relieve stress, anxiety, and depression in parents (rafifah et al., 2021; sohmaran & shorey, 2019). moreover, mindfulness techniques are relatively more effective for longer periods than other methods (bazzano et al., 2015; behbahani et al., 2018; corthorn, 2018; neece, 2014). mindfulness is also beneficial in lowering stress, promoting psychological well-being, and minimizing recurring depressive symptoms (cachia et al., 2016). mindfulness was initially borrowed from buddhist teachings (williams & kabat-zinn, 2011). however, it was later refined and objectively tested to ensure it was not restricted to specific religious doctrines. based on the findings of many investigations, mindfulness has evolved into a conceptual and more general therapeutic model (ong et al., 2012). mindfulness is being aware of what is happening at present, from moment to moment, without passing judgment (kabat-zinn, 2003). mindfulness is a meditation method that aims to alleviate pressure caused by perceived stress. mindfulness practices can help soothe the mind, improve awareness of one's mind and surroundings, and enable people to experience alpha and theta brain waves (behan, 2020). people achieve alpha and theta brain waves, which maintain a serene state when they perform meditation (tang et al., 2019). spiritual mindfulness is an applicable mindfulness technique that may be employed in daily life. individuals' therapeutic benefits are thought and shown to be strengthened by the spiritual approach in psychological psychotherapy (hapsari et al., 2021; purwanto et al., 2022; taufik & ibrahim, 2019). it is known that mindfulness and spirituality have a favorable relationship (lazaridou & pentaris, 2016). in islam, the spiritual notion of mindfulness tries to integrate mindfulness methods with islamic teachings. spiritual mindfulness focuses on increasing self-awareness that the issues an individual currently confronts are god's scenario, and god is the greatest who can solve them (munif et al., 2019). a previous study has shown that spiritual awareness can promote optimism and serenity of the mind (fahmi, 2018). muslim psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and social workers pioneered islamic spiritual mindfulness techniques by incorporating classical sufi teachings into intervention techniques such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (mbsr), mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (mbct), dialectical behavior therapy (dbt), acceptance and commitment therapy (act), as well as mindfulness-based relapse prevention (mbrp) (isgandarova, 2019). islamic 104 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) hertinjung et al. (reducing parental stress among muslims mothers…) psychotherapy is a method combining islamic in addition to western psychological techniques to examine and treat cognitive, behavioral, emotional, as well as spiritual disorders. those who practiced islamic psychotherapy began with the qur'an and the prophetic tradition as the cornerstone of their work. in the islamic notion, mindfulness is known as muraqaba, which derives from the word raqeeb, meaning to supervise or pay attention (isgandarova, 2019). muraqaba is known as meditation in islam, and it has long been performed by past generations, such as the prophet and his followers, in the form of praying, worshipping, and remembering god to develop the spiritual element (parrot, 2017). there are five main stages of muraqaba, i.e., intention: mushahada, tasawwur, tafakkur, tadabbur, and muhasabah (isgandarova, 2019). the value of muraqaba is further explained in al-quran surah ar-ra'd verse 28: (particularly) those who have believed and whose hearts are assured by the remembrance of allah. unquestionably, by the remembrance of allah hearts are assured. islamic mindfulness will blend cognitive, emotive, and bodily qualities with appreciating god’s attributes, most great, all-seeing, all-hearing, and all-knowing (fahmi, 2018). a lot of study has been done on the function of spiritual awareness in lowering psychological symptoms during a pandemic. mindfulness meditation combined with a spiritual approach was useful in lowering people's anxiety during a pandemic (hasina et al., 2021). islamic spiritual mindfulness substantially influences depression reduction in nursing students during a pandemic (dwidiyanti et al., 2021). while spirituality significantly affects the link between fear and mental health during a pandemic (rathakrishnan et al., 2022). based on the results of previous studies, it is possible to infer that the spiritual parts of mindfulness training substantially impact the mental health of people and society, particularly during a pandemic. thus, spiritual mindfulness was utilized as an intervention in this study. individuals who practice spiritual mindfulness will be able to conduct their lives more collectedly, experience every circumstance they confront, avoid fear and anxiety over things that have not yet occurred, and be better prepared to handle failure as part of god's plan. therefore, parents who were initially easily stuck in difficult parenting situations and lost their parenting purpose became more focused on seeking god's pleasure by adopting mindfulness based on islamic theology. parenting stress may be minimized by modifying perceptions of stressors and improving internal resources with spiritual mindfulness, allowing them to pick coping mechanisms more successfully. this study aimed to fill the knowledge gap on reducing parenting stress during the covid-19 pandemic among muslim mothers by conducting spiritual mindfulness training. method research design this study uses an embedded experimental model, a part of the mixed methods design, where qualitative data is used to clarify the experimental data results. the priority of these models is determined by quantitative, experimental methodologies, and qualitative data sets subject to those methodologies (creswell & clark, 2017). the experimental design used was the pretest-posttest control group experimental design (hastjarjo, 2014). this study embedded qualitative data during the intervention phase as supporting data. measurements were taken before and after the intervention. the pretest was given on the first day of training, while the posttest was given on the last day. data from observation and worksheets carried out during the intervention process is used as supporting data. table 1 shows the experimental design used in the study. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 105 hertinjung et al. (reducing parental stress among muslim mothers…) table 1 the pretest-posttest control group design random assignment groups pretest treatment posttest r the experimental group (eg) 01 (x) 02 r the control group (cg) 01 (–) 02 note: r: random assignment; (x): treatment; (–): no treatment participants the study included 20 mothers who met the following criteria: (1) having school-age children (pre-school to high school); (2) being muslim; (3) experiencing moderate to severe parenting stress; (4) living in the same house as children; and (5) willing to participate in a comprehensive series of spiritual mindfulness training as stated in the informed consent. the sample was divided into two groups of ten participants. ten participants were in the experimental group, and ten were in the control group. since this study was conducted during the covid-19 pandemic's peak, recruiting a significant number of participants was challenging due to health concerns and worries about getting the virus. many researchers conducted experimental studies with tiny sample sizes ranging from 5 to 20 people before and during the covid-19 outbreak (bachry & annatagia, 2019; ksiksou et al., 2022; nasruddin & hariyanto, 2022; rodiyah & adenia, 2022; santoso & rinaldi, 2022; wahyuni et al., 2018). the spiritual mindfulness training module the spiritual mindfulness training module adapted phases of spiritual mindfulness treatment (isgandarova, 2019) by replacing the terminology provided at each level with language more recognizable to indonesian muslims. before being employed in this study, this adaption procedure was evaluated by experts, and a module trial was performed. the module validation procedure began with two instructors from the faculty of islamic religion validating mindfulness principles and spiritual phases. after completing the verification procedure, a discussion was held to revise the modules. furthermore, the prepared modules were tested on three persons to provide feedback on the technical execution of the course. the trial findings were utilized to revise the module until ready for use in research. due to the restriction in conducting direct meetings during the ongoing covid-19 pandemic, spiritual mindfulness training was conducted online. the training lasted five days, each lasting around two hours. multiple evidence bases defined this intervention's length. a previous study has demonstrated that the duration of the intervention, the time of daily practice, and the delivery method may all vary while still having a favorable influence on participant performance. for example, when low-dose mindfulness training was implemented, it was discovered that the amount of training time ranged from half a day in the form of workshops (slutsky et al., 2019) to six weeks accompanied by 20 minutes of daily practice (klatt et al., 2013). another study used a two-week self-taught mindfulness training intervention in which participants were required to complete a three-minute breathing meditation twice daily in addition to more extended exercises (hülsheger et al., 2013). while a study used a four-week online mindfulness intervention in which participants were required to complete 20-30 minutes of daily practice (querstret et al., 2018). based on the results of a literature review regarding the implementation of online mindfulness, treatments lasting between one hour and one year were developed (bégin et al., 2022). the most prevalent intervention durations were one month (26.4%), six weeks (15.1%), and eight weeks (13.2%). the exercise duration ranges from 30 seconds to 30 minutes or more. then, 64.7% of the publications that determine exercise duration record workouts lasting 1-10 minutes. 106 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) hertinjung et al. (reducing parental stress among muslims mothers…) table 2 stages in spiritual mindfulness training module stages of sm goals preparation and opening a. building rapport and cultivating a friendly atmosphere between participants and facilitators so that commitment and expectations for the training emerge. b. knowing the complaints and concerns felt by participants during the distance learning process c. participants have an understanding and knowledge of spiritual mindfulness. 1. straighten intentions a. participants and facilitators commit to being actively and fully involved in the training process, finding a way out of the problem, and getting allah swt's blessing. b. participants felt relaxed during the training process. 2. tafakkur a. participants can understand and practice meditation techniques b. participants can live and realize the greatness of allah swt so that they believe that nothing will happen without his permission. c. participants were able to be more grateful for all the provisions given by allah swt. 3. muhasabah a. participants can understand and practice muhasabah techniques b. participants were able to do self-introspection on all their behavior as parents 4. taubat a. participants understand the agenda of activities to be carried out. b. participants can understand and practice repentance techniques c. participants can realize and truly commit to repenting and correcting their mistakes. d. participants can design a plan to correct their mistakes and implement the plan. 5. tawakkal a. participants can remember and realize the value of their children's existence so that they appreciate their situation more. b. participants can achieve sincerity and ridho of all the provisions of allah swt. closing and evaluation participants get positive benefits from the training that has been done and can practice it in everyday life. table 2 explains the objectives of each stage of the training. the researchers adopted an intervention model that included half-day online mindfulness training for up to six weeks, which was compacted into a five-day program with two hours of face-to-face and daily assignments. the number of face-to-face sessions and daily practice in this study followed the evidence base and the participants' desire to devote time to this training. participants were given homework in the form of practicing the skills that they had learned and also completed worksheets to track their progress. two hours of tasks, including group discussion activities via the whatsapp group, worksheet completion, and independent mindfulness practice, spread out over three days, with participants may share their problems and receive solutions. independent practice was carried out regularly according to the free time available to each participant, making it ideal for women with hectic parental responsibilities. figure 1 stages in mindfulness spiritual training module 1.straighten intentions commitment between participants and facilitators to be fully present commit to engaging in activities fully 2.tafakkur appreciate and open participants’ awareness of the greatness of god participants are invited to visualize and think deeply about the greatness of god 3. muhasabah doing introspection regarding all behaviors, both words and deeds that have been carried out during the pandemic related to the role of parents 4. taubat recognizing and admitting and regretting mistakes that have been made, commit not to do it again 5. tawakkal submit all matters to allah after making the maximum effort or endeavor that can be done ikhlas and ridlo humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 107 hertinjung et al. (reducing parental stress among muslim mothers…) the stages of spiritual mindfulness training and its explanation are presented in figure 1. each stage has different goals. the first stage focused on building participants' commitment. while the following stages were spiritual mindfulness training. instrument the parental stress scale consists of 18 items divided into four categories: parental appreciation, parental stresses, loss of control, and parental satisfaction, which has been converted into indonesian culture and language (berry & jones, 1995). the parental stress scale scores were classified as follows: very low, ranging from 18-32.4; low, ranging from 32.4-46.8; medium, ranging from 46.8-61.2; high, ranging from 61.2-75.6; and very high, ranging from 75.6-90. all the questions on this scale are favorable, with five answer options ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. the validity test employs aiken's with six ratings, yielding a validity coefficient value of .833. cronbach's alpha reliability values yield a reliability coefficient of .788, indicating that the scale is reliable. data analysis hypothesis testing was performed in both groups by analyzing the difference between pretest and posttest scores. the wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to analyze score changes at each measurement stage. mann-whitney u test assessed differences in parental stress levels between the experimental and control groups. all data analysis was conducted using spss for ms office version 23.0. data analysis was also done qualitatively, utilizing the findings of observations made during training and data from the assignment and assessment sheets. results this study aimed to reduce parental stress through spiritual mindfulness training during the covid-19 epidemic. data on parenting stress was collected in two stages: before and after administering spiritual mindfulness training. table 3 displays the results of the difference between each group's pretest and posttest scores. the wilcoxon test revealed no significant difference (p = .260) between the pretest and posttest scores in the control group (cg). on the contrary, there is a significant difference in parental stress levels between the pretest and posttest in the experimental group (eg) (p = .012). these results indicate a lower level of parental stress among participants in the experiment group after participating in spiritual mindfulness training. table 3 wilcoxon non-parametric statistical test group stage z p cg pretest posttest -1.126b .260 eg pretest posttest -2.499b .012* note: a. grouping variable: treatment group b. not corrected for ties c. *** p < .001; ** p < .01; * p < .05 table 4 shows the differences in test results between eg and cg. the mann-whitney u test shows no difference in pretest scores between cg and eg (p = .253). however, the difference in posttest scores between cg and eg was significant (p = .002). these results indicate that mothers in the experimental group experienced a significantly greater reduction in parenting stress scores than those in the control group. 108 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) hertinjung et al. (reducing parental stress among muslims mothers…) table 4 mann-whitney u test pretest posttest mann-whitney u 35.000 9.000 wilcoxon w 90.000 64.000 z -1.144 -3.107 asymp. sig. (2-tailed) .253 .002** exact sig. [2*(1-tailed sig.)] .280b .001**b note: a. grouping variable: treatment group b. not corrected for ties. c. *** p < .001; ** p < .01; * p < .05 table 5 shows all participants in the control group remain in the same category, which is moderate, even though there were changes in the score between the pretest and posttest. in comparison, most participants in the experiment group were in a low category after training. table 5 the score all respondents group name (initial) pretest category posttest category control hf 57 moderate 52 moderate kip 50 moderate 49 moderate mc 49 moderate 58 moderate plb 48 moderate 47 moderate lr 50 moderate 46 moderate nka 51 moderate 52 moderate y 61 moderate 63 moderate a 50 moderate 47 moderate nyg 48 moderate 46 moderate rw 51 moderate 48 moderate mean 51,5 mean 50,8 experiment d 50 moderate 36 low bu 51 moderate 33 low eds 52 moderate 46 low am 47 moderate 36 low fkd 46 moderate 42 low ac 61 moderate 39 low aw 46 moderate 34 low ew 48 moderate 44 low s 49 moderate 41 low es 49 moderate 54 moderate mean 49,9 mean 40,5 discussion the results of this study show spiritual mindfulness training reduces parenting stress experienced by muslim mothers during the covid-19 pandemic. this study strengthens the results of previous studies that have developed spiritual mindfulness interventions to overcome various psychological problems and have been proven to be effective in medication adherence in schizophrenia patients (ardinata et al., 2021; dwidiyanti et al., 2020), cases of depression (asiah et al., 2019; dwidiyanti et al., 2021), optimism and equanimity (fahmi, 2018), anxiety (gul & jahangir, 2019) and emotion regulation (anggraeni, 2021). furthermore, this study reinforces the effectiveness of previous applications of spiritual mindfulness in dealing with stress in a variety of contexts, including pregnant women (aslami et al., 2017), stress among prison residents (fahmi et al., 2019), stress due to burnout among nursing students (munif et al., 2019), and stress on family members of schizophrenic patients humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 109 hertinjung et al. (reducing parental stress among muslim mothers…) (dwidiyanti et al., 2020). other elements, such as individual spirituality (rathakrishnan et al., 2022) and compassion as a requirement for having a healthy attitude (weber, 2021), modify the significance of spiritual awareness on mental health. outside of the spiritual mindfulness component, additional factors such as the mother's personality, behavioral difficulties in children, and husband and family support are extremely likely to impact the reduction in parenting stress (fang et al., 2022). this study's results show spiritual mindfulness training has been shown to reduce parenting stress. these findings are consistent with previous study findings indicating the effects of mindfulness sessions on parents might endure for up to two weeks following the intervention (romadhani & hadjam, 2019). furthermore, islamic spiritual mindfulness training can promote peace of mind for up to two weeks following the intervention (fahmi, 2018). peace of mind is another sign directly tied to a person's degree of stress. individuals with a calm mind and a stress-free body will be better equipped to handle stress regularly. through mindfulness practices, the mother's role in parenting is getting better. non-judgmental, moment-to-moment awareness can help parents be more mindful in interactions with their children regarding both (non-verbal) communication and emotional availability (boekhorst et al., 2021). participants in the meditation (tafakkur) session were encouraged to ponder more about the indications of god's magnificence to increase and practice thankfulness for all the gifts received. the appreciation exercise makes people aware of their various blessings and gifts (romadhani & hadjam, 2019; taufik & ibrahim, 2019). practicing thankfulness can reduce negative impact, improve good emotional effects, boost life satisfaction, decrease anxiety, and promote positive life actions (wood et al., 2010). tafakkur sessions help people become more appreciative of god's decrees to lessen anxiety about things that have not happened, such as while raising children. participants in the training indicated that the tafakkur session helped them become more aware of and appreciative of previously overlooked joys such as having a healthy and active child, being able to gather with family, and breathing freely. during the muhasabah session, participants were encouraged to reflect on all of life's ups and downs and the challenges they had faced. participants received encouragement for their achievement in overcoming adversity at this stage. god's support in every obstacle cannot be separated from the achievement of conquering these problems. similarly, god's assistance is always available during this pandemic. a self-reflection session allows people to perceive their experiences more clearly, making them more conscious of the stress that affects them. this finding is in line with the results of research which explain that after doing meditation or self-reflection, participants feel more worthwhile and deserve to be happy, more aware of themselves and what they had done until this time, could see and recognize their self-image they knew and understand themselves very much, realized their selfimperfections, realized their strengths and weaknesses, and realized their condition right then (primasari & yuniarti, 2021). in the muraqaba process, the presence of hope in god can generate a sense of tranquility, focus attention, and face challenging situations with good thoughts and feelings (parrot, 2017). repentance (taubat) is the subjects' most unforgettable and moving training session. most participants in this session could express and channel their emotions by sharing traumatic life experiences. participants also discussed how they had forgiven themselves and those who had mistreated them. the repentance session makes the person more conscious of all the faults they have committed, both by himself and by others, as part of god's decree; therefore, they must be honest and seek forgiveness from him. participants felt more tranquil and sincere with god's offerings after forgiving and asking for forgiveness from him. individuals who can forgive themselves and others experience less stress than those who cannot (kemper et al., 2015; taufik et al., 2022). participants were asked to surrender to god as a last level in spiritual mindfulness training, enhancing the succession of phases. the primary goal of this session was to aid the 110 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) hertinjung et al. (reducing parental stress among muslims mothers…) subject in creating a sincere attitude and experiencing joy in all of god's offerings as they feel it is the right option. parents are frequently caught in severe sorrow because they believe they have failed to raise their children, causing them to overreact to their children and even reprimand or conduct violence. the tawakkal approach teaches them that everything that happens has become god's power and that humans have no control over his destiny, including their children's future. parents are encouraged to be more resigned to themselves and accept god's providence after doing their best. the tawakkal method also trains parents to be more aware of their constraints in providing child care so that they do not demand more than they can afford. through tawakkal, parents learn to be kind to themselves by not blaming themselves or their surroundings for their issues and believing that this is god's mandate that must be followed (kemper et al., 2015). kindness to oneself is vital for establishing emotional resilience and psychological well-being. acceptance allows a person to be objective and adaptable by allowing him to defend himself or reject the facts (germer et al., 2005). in general, spiritual awareness serves as an activity that engages god as god almighty in every process (remembering god) to assist persons in consciously understanding the conditions or situations they are confronted with as occurrences created by god (asiah et al., 2019). the overall objectives of the spiritual mindfulness training have been met, according to the findings of the evaluations provided by the participants. participants stated that after practicing all of the spiritual mindfulness training approaches, they felt calmer, relaxed, and patient in dealing with challenges and better able to regulate their emotions since they surrendered to god. in terms of parenting, when their child's behavior does not meet their expectations, parents find it easier to suppress their emotions, especially when participating in online learning during the pandemic. this study has some limitations. first, the research was conducted during the covid19 pandemic's peak, making it challenging to recruit consenting individuals. second, observing participant behavior during the training process is challenging because the training was conducted online. difficulties in observing participants also happened when one of the participants suffered signal interference, making it impossible to switch on the video in some sessions. moreover, participants unfamiliar with the zoom meeting media became less participated. third, several factors of parenting stress were not controlled by the researchers and may have biased the results of this study, including internal factors of the mother, such as personality and level of depression experienced, child factors, such as whether there are child behavior problems, both external and internal behavior, and external factors, such as support from husband or support from family. conclusion based on the study's findings, spiritual mindfulness training reduces parental stress among muslim mothers during the covid-19 epidemic. this study's results also imply that spiritual awareness may be employed as an alternate coping approach for parents to reduce parental stress, especially during the covid-19 pandemic. the spiritual advantages of mindfulness might persist longer if practiced consistently as part of one's daily routine. by practicing the phases of spiritual mindfulness training regularly, the mother becomes aware of the challenging conditions she experiences in parenting, accepts the situation, and moves through it gently. therefore, spiritual mindfulness training must be practiced daily to reduce parental stress. acknowledgment this research was carried out with research funds from the universitas muhammadiyah surakarta. thank you to the experts: dr. darojat, m.ag, and nur silaturahmah, l.c., who discussed and modified the spiritual mindfulness module referring to isgandarova with humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 111 hertinjung et al. (reducing parental stress among muslim mothers…) terms that are more familiar to muslims in indonesia. thank you to all participants from various regions in indonesia who have participated fully and actively in this training so that the research went smoothly. declarations author contribution. each author makes an optimal contribution in the form of 1) determining the main research concept (wsh & ctl); 2) literature review and training evidence base (lr & ss); 3) implementation of training and data collection (dak). funding statement. universitas muhammadiyah surakarta through the tridharma integration grant (hit), with contract number 89.1/a.6-ii/ps/1/2021. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references anggraeni, f. l. 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(2020). the effects of online homeschooling on children, parents, and teachers of grades 1–9 during the covid-19 pandemic. medical science monitor, 26(e925591), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.12659/msm.925591 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-021-00945-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-021-00945-6 https://doi.org/10.1080/14639947.2011.564811 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2010.03.005 https://doi.org/10.1136/gpsych-2020-100250 https://doi.org/10.12659/msm.925591 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 21 (2), august 2024, 172-187 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https;//doi.org/ 10.26555/humanitas.v21i2.699 emotional intelligence as a moderator of the relationship between stress, depressive symptoms, and job performance nor aini mat nasir1, nurul ‘ain hidayah abas1* 1faculty of human development, sultan idris education university, tanjung malim, perak corresponding author: std@staff.ubaya.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction teachers' job performance is crucial for determining educational quality and student success, making it a key focus in education. this performance encompasses multiple aspects, such as instructional delivery, classroom management, and the ability to engage and motivate students. effective job performance by teachers is influenced by various factors, such as professional development, access to resources, support from the administration, and personal well-being (yueqin & mohammed, 2024; lee & jo, 2023; ertürk, 2021; dreer, 2024) well-supported and motivated teachers can create engaging and effective learning environments, significantly enhancing student understanding and performance. however, when teachers face dissatisfaction and inadequate support, their performance declines, adversely affecting student outcomes (baluyos et al., 2019). kumari and kumar (2023) highlights the importance of teacher motivation in fostering positive learning environments and improving student achievement. demotivated and dissatisfied teachers tend to perform poorly, negatively impacting student success. article info abst ract article history received: february 13, 2024 revised: august 8, 2024 accepted: august 15, 2024 this study aims to examine the relationships between stress and depressive symptoms on job performance. the role of emotional intelligence (ei) was used to determine whether it has a moderating effect on relationships. stratified sampling was utilized to select 282 secondary school teachers in kelantan. stress, depressive symptoms, ei, and job performance were measured using the job stress scale, the major depression inventory, the usm emotional quotient inventory, and the individual work performance questionnaire 1.0, and all of these were translated back-to-back. pearson correlation and multiple regression analysis methods were used to analized the data. the results indicated that there was a significant positive relationship between stress and job performance r = .169, while there was a significant negative relationship between depressive symptoms and job performance r = .-174. in addition, it found that there was no significant effect of ei on the relationships between stress and job performance (β =.08, p>0.05), as well as on the relationship between depressive symptoms and job performance (β =.03, p>.05). this study highlights the importance of reducing depressive symptoms among school teachers to maintain their performance and it suggests the school’s management to take proactive measures to support teachers’ mental well-being. keywords depressive symptoms emotional intelligence job performance stress mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas file:///c:/users/dell/downloads/huminitas%20(1)/https;/doi.org/%2010.26555/humanitas.v21i2.699 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 173 nasir et al. (emotional intelligence as a moderator of the relationship between stress, depressive symptoms, and job performance) greenberg et al. (2016) pointed out that high stress levels among teachers negatively impact teachers' performance and student achievement. high stress levels can lead to burnout, reduced job satisfaction, and ultimately lower performance in the classroom. factors contributing to teacher stress include heavy workload, lack of administrative support, and challenging student behaviour (katsantonis, 2020; pang, 2011; waweru & ndambuki, 2021). teachers often report that excessive workload, including administrative tasks and extracurricular duties, contributes significantly to their stress levels (collie et al., 2012). managing diverse and often large classrooms can be a significant source of stress, particularly when dealing with behavioural issues and varying student needs (jennings & greenberg, 2009). inadequate support from school administration and a lack of professional development opportunities are also critical stressors for teachers (suttles, 2024). herman et al. (2018) stated that depressive symptoms among teachers are a growing concern. the study found that depressive symptoms significantly impair teachers' cognitive functions, decision-making abilities, and overall classroom effectiveness. according to skaalvik and skaalvik (2018) teachers experiencing depressive symptoms often exhibit absenteeism, lower energy levels, and diminished enthusiasm, directly impacting their teaching performance and student outcomes. emotional intelligence (ei) is a crucial factor that influences teachers' ability to manage stress and depressive symptoms, ultimately impacting their job performance. ei involves the ability to recognize, understand, and manage one's own emotions, as well as the ability to recognize, understand, and influence the emotions of others. brackett et al. (2010) found that teachers with higher ei reported lower levels of stress and burnout. they were more effective in managing classroom behaviours and fostering positive student-teacher relationships. mérida-lópez and extremera (2017) indicated that ei can buffer the negative effects of stress and depressive symptoms on job performance. teachers with higher ei were more resilient and maintained higher performance levels despite adverse conditions. collie et al. (2012) also emphasized the role of ei in promoting well-being among teachers. it highlighted that teachers with higher ei experienced lower stress and higher job satisfaction, leading to better performance. rashid et al. (2022) stated that workloads and role overload contribute to teacher stress. therefore, it emphasized the need for effective stress management programs to improve teacher well-being and performance. herman et al. (2018) focused on the effects of depressive symptoms on teachers' instructional effectiveness and student engagement. it highlighted the importance of early identification and intervention for mental health issues among teachers. mérida-lópez and extremera (2017) review underscored the role of ei in mitigating teacher burnout. it suggested that developing ei can be an effective strategy for enhancing teacher resilience and job performance. the study has emphasized the necessity of investigating teacher job performance due to its pivotal role in shaping educational outcomes. high-quality teaching is fundamental to student learning and achievement, making it imperative to understand the factors influencing teacher performance. by identifying the drivers of effective teaching, the study can develop targeted interventions and policies aimed at improving teaching quality and enhancing educational outcomes. additionally, as educational systems evolve to meet the needs of diverse learners and technological advancements, research on teacher job performance becomes essential for informing pedagogical practices that align with modern educational standards. while previous studies have separately examined the impacts of stress, depressive symptoms, and emotional intelligence (ei) on teacher performance, the current research uniquely integrates these elements to explore how ei moderates the effects of stress and humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 174 nasir et al. (emotional intelligence as a moderator of the relationship between stress, depressive symptoms, and job performance) depressive symptoms. this comprehensive approach provides a deeper understanding of the interplay between these factors and offers more targeted intervention strategies. transactional theory of stress and coping (lazarus & folkman, 1984), explains that stress arises from perceiving a discrepancy between environmental demands and the individual’s coping resources. it emphasizes cognitive appraisal in stress responses and the importance of coping strategies. this theory helps understand how teachers perceive and manage stressors like workload, student behaviour, and administrative demands. teachers who perceive high stress levels due to workload and role conflict exhibit lower job performance and higher burnout rates (danish et al., 2019). effective coping strategies are essential for maintaining high job performance in stressful teaching environments. beck's cognitive theory of depression (beck, 1967), depressive symptoms result from negative automatic thoughts, dysfunctional beliefs, and cognitive distortions. it focuses on the role of cognitive patterns in the onset and maintenance of depressive symptoms. understanding teachers' cognitive patterns provides insights into how depressive symptoms develop and persist, impacting job performance. herman et al. (2018) reveal that depressive symptoms in teachers lead to reduced instructional effectiveness and poorer student outcomes. addressing cognitive distortions and negative thought patterns is crucial for improving teachers' mental health and job performance. depressive symptoms have longterm detrimental effects on teacher absenteeism and presenteeism (jonston et al., 2019). the model of emotional intelligence (ei), as proposed by goleman (1998), is structured around four key components: self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness, and relationship management. this framework was further developed by yusoff et al. (2010), who identified seven dimensions of ei: emotional control, maturity, conscientiousness, awareness, commitment, fortitude, and expression. high ei is crucial for teachers to manage stress and depressive symptoms, build positive relationships, and create a supportive classroom environment. mérida-lópez and extremera (2017) found that high ei helps teachers manage stress and reduces burnout, supporting yusoff et al. (2010) conceptualization of ei's critical role in professional effectiveness. developing ei through professional development can enhance teachers' resilience and job performance. according to the individual differences theory (motowildo et al., 1997), job performance is influenced by individual differences in abilities, personality traits, and other personal characteristics. understanding individual differences can help identify which traits and abilities contribute most significantly to effective teaching. liu et al. (2010) explored how individual differences in teachers' stress responses and emotional regulation abilities affect their job performance. this theoretical framework will show how stress and depressive symptoms impact teacher job performance and how ei can moderate these effects (see figure 1). figure 1 shows a theoretical framework about stress, depressive symptoms, emotional intelligence (ei), and job performance. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 175 nasir et al. (emotional intelligence as a moderator of the relationship between stress, depressive symptoms, and job performance) the hypotheses aimed to investigate the following variables: h1: stress and job performance are significantly related among secondary school teachers. h2: depressive symptoms and job performance are significantly related among secondary school teachers. h3: emotional intelligence moderates the relationship between stress and job performance among secondary school teachers. h4: emotional intelligence moderates the relationship between depressive symptoms and job performance among secondary school teachers. in conclusion, the study conducted has provided significant insights into the complex interplay between stress, depressive symptoms, ei, and teacher job performance. these studies have validated and expanded existing theoretical models, such as the transactional theory of stress and coping, beck's cognitive theory of depression, the model of emotional intelligence, and the individual differences theory. despite these advancements, there remain important gaps, particularly in understanding context-specific influences and effective methods for developing ei among teachers. method participants the study selected a sample of 282 secondary school teachers from kelantan. the appropriate sample size was determined and estimated using g*power. respondents were chosen through a stratified random sampling technique. the gender distribution of the sample was predominantly females (74.5%), with males making up 25.5% of the participants. the average age of respondents ranged between 26 to 60 years old. most respondents were malay, making up 96.6% of the total sample. the respondents had a wide range of work experience, with the majority having 21 to 25 years of experience, accounting for 20.0% of the sample (see table 1). table 1 frequency of respondent based on demographic information frequency percentage gender males 72 25.5 females 210 74.5 age 26 – 30 years 18 6.4 31 – 35 years 14 5.0 36 40 years 42 14.9 41 45 years 53 18.8 46 50 years 67 23.8 51 55 years 56 19.9 56 60 years 32 11.3 race malay 273 96.9 chinese 7 2.5 indian 1 0.4 others 1 0.4 work experience less than one year 4 1.4 1 – 5 years 15 5.3 6 – 10 years 23 8.2 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 176 nasir et al. (emotional intelligence as a moderator of the relationship between stress, depressive symptoms, and job performance) table 1 (continue) frequency percentage 11 – 15 years 45 16.0 16 – 20 years 54 19.1 21 – 25 years 59 20.0 26 – 30 years 53 18.8 more than 30 years 29 10.3 measurement the instruments were divided into five sections: demographic information, job stress scale, major depression inventory (mdi), usm emotional quotient inventory (usmeq-i), and individual work performance questionnaire (iwpq) 1.0. job stress scale the 6-item job stress scale developed by crank et al. (1995) is utilized to measure stress. the questionnaire used a 5-point likert scale, which ranges from 1= strongly agree, 2 = mildly agree, 3 = neutral, 4 = mildly disagree and 5 = strongly disagree. the example items that are used to measure stress consist of (1) i am usually anxious when i’m working, (2) i am usually unpleasant when i’m working, and (3) a lot of time my job makes me very frustrated or angry. the malay version questionnaire is as follows: (1) saya sering berasa runsing sewaktu bekerja, (2) saya sering berasa rimas sewaktu bekerja, and (3) pekerjaan saya sering membuatkan saya rasa kecewa atau marah. the job stress scale reported a good reliability score for cronbach’s alpha which is α = .93. major depression inventory (mdi) depressive symptoms is assessed using the 12-item major depression inventory (mdi) developed by bech et al. (2001) and translated by abas et al. (2021) to measure depressive symptoms. the 12 items address depressive symptoms on a scale ranging from 1 = at no time, 2 = some of the time, 3 = slightly less than half the time, 4 = slightly more than half the time, 5 = most of the time, and 6 = all the time. the example of original items that are used to measure depressive symptoms consist of (1) have you felt low in spirit or sad? (2) have you felt subdued? and (3) have you lost interest in your daily activities?. the questionnaires were back translated by abas et al. (2021) where the original set in english language was back translated into malay language. the example of original items that are used to measure depressive symptoms consist of (1) berasa tidak bersemangat atau sedih, (2) berasa pasif, and (3) kehilangan minat dalam aktiviti-aktiviti harian anda. the major depression inventory reported a good reliability score for cronbach’s alpha which is α = .89. usm emotional quotient inventory (usmeq-i) the usm emotional quotient inventory (usmeq-i), developed by yusoff et al. (2010) measures emotional intelligence (ei). this inventory comprises 46 items that span seven domains: emotional control, emotional maturity, emotional conscientiousness, emotional awareness, emotional commitment, emotional fortitude, and emotional expression, including a faking index. the rating scales ranged from (1) = not like me, (2) = a bit like me, (3) = quite like me, (4) = a lot like me, and (5) = totally like me. examples of questions included humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 177 nasir et al. (emotional intelligence as a moderator of the relationship between stress, depressive symptoms, and job performance) in the survey are: (1) i give advice to my friends and myself regularly, (2) when i successes i pray to god, and (3) i apologize for mistakes i make. the malay version questionnaire is as follows: (1) saya sering nasihat-menasihati di antara satu sama lain, (2) apabila mendapat kejayaan saya bersyukur, and (3) saya mudah mengakui kesalahan saya sekiranya saya memang bersalah. the usm emotional quotient inventory reported a good reliability score for cronbach’s alpha which is α = .96. individual work performance questionnaire (iwpq) 1.0. the individual work performance questionnaire (iwpq) 1.0, developed by koopmans et al. (2014) was used to assess job performance. the 17-item questionnaire included three scales: task performance, contextual performance, and counterproductive work behaviour. the individual work performance questionnaire utilizes a five-point likert scale that ranges from (1) = seldom, (2) sometimes, (3) regularly, (4) often and (5) always. examples of questions included in the survey are: (1) i managed to plan my work to make sure it could be done on time, (2) i kept my job skills up-to-date, and (3) i kept in mind the results that i had to achieve in my work. (1) saya merancang kerja saya supaya kerja tersebut dilakukan tepat pada masa, (2) saya selalu memastikan kemahiran kerja saya sentiasa terkini, and (3) saya sentiasa mengingati matlamat yang saya perlu capai dalam pekerjaan saya. the individual work performance questionnaire reported a good reliability score for cronbach’s alpha which is α = .90 data analysis the data was analyzed using the statistical package for social sciences (spss) version 20.0 for windows. two types of analysis were employed in this study: pearson’s correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis. before conducting a regression analysis, it is possible to check the violation of assumptions. the assumptions to be evaluated are as follows: (1) sample size, (2) outlier, (3) normality, and (4) linearity. results this part presents the descriptive analysis of stress, depressive symptoms, emotional intelligence (ei), and job performance. all variables are measured using the m value and sd. based on the scale of 1 to 5, the mean scores can be explained as a mean score less than 2 is scored as low, a mean score of 2 to 4 is scored as moderate, and a mean score of more than 4 is scored as high (pallant, 2016). table 2 mean and standard deviation of stress, depressive symptoms, ei and job performance table 2 reveals that the average stress score among the sample is 2.85, reflecting the typical stress level within the group. this central tendency measure suggests a moderate level of stress. the standard deviation of 0.784 demonstrates the variability of stress scores around the mean. a smaller standard deviation indicates that most stress scores are close to m sd stress 2.85 0.784 depressive symptoms 2.15 0.610 ei 3.64 0.495 job performance 2.93 0.593 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 178 nasir et al. (emotional intelligence as a moderator of the relationship between stress, depressive symptoms, and job performance) the mean, reflecting consistent stress levels among individuals. the mean depressive symptoms score is 2.15, reflecting the central tendency of depressive symptoms levels in the sample. this score indicates a moderate level of depressive symptoms among the participants. the standard deviation of 0.610 shows the spread of depressive symptoms scores around the mean. lower variability suggests that the depressive symptoms scores are more tightly clustered around the mean. the mean score for ei is 3.64, indicating the individuals' average level of ei. this relatively high score suggests a generally good capacity for emotional regulation and social interaction within the group. with a standard deviation of 0.495, the ei scores show relatively low variability, meaning most individuals' scores are close to the average. the average job performance score is 2.93, serving as the central point around which job performance levels are distributed. this mean score suggests a moderate level of job performance in the sample. the standard deviation of 0.593 indicates the dispersion in job performance scores. this moderate standard deviation level suggests that while there is some variability, many individuals have scores near the mean. table 3 correlation analysis between variables variable 1 2 3 1. stress 2. depressive symptoms -0.372** 3. job performance 0.169** -0.174** table 3 shows the correlation analysis between stress, depressive symptoms and job performance among the 282 secondary school teachers. the first correlation analysis was explained about positive relationship between stress and job performance among secondary school teachers, with, r = .169, n = 282, p = .002. thus, h1 is supported. in addition, the second correlation analysis showed the negative relationship between depressive symptoms and job performance among secondary school teachers, with r = -.174, n = 282, p = .003. h2 is supported. table 4 model summary of stress, ei and job performance model 1 model 2 variables b β se b β se constants 58.29* .41* 58.18* .42* stress .64 .08 .42 .6 .08 .42 ei 3.90* .49* .42* 3.81* .48* .42* stress x ei .59 .08 .40 r2 .26* .27 δr2 .26* .01 f 48.86* 33.43* δf 48.86* 2.17 table 4, in model 1, the r2 value of .26 revealed that stress and emotional intelligence (ei) explained 26% variance in job performance with f (2,279) =48.86, p<.05. the findings revealed that stress (β =.08, p>.05) not predicted job performance and ei (β =.49, p<.05) predicted job performance. in model 2, the r2 value of .27 revealed that stress, ei and stress x ei explained 27% variance in the job performance with f (3,278) =33.43, p<.05. the findings revealed that stress (β =.08, p>.05), ei (β =.48, p<.05) and stress x ei not predicted job performance (β =.08, p>0.05). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 179 nasir et al. (emotional intelligence as a moderator of the relationship between stress, depressive symptoms, and job performance) the δr2 value of .01 revealed 1% change in the variance of model 1 with δf (2,279) =48.86, p<.05, and model 2 with δf (1,278) =2.17, p>0.05. the results indicate that there is no significant effect of ei on the relationship between stress and job performance among secondary school teachers. thus, h3 was not supported. table 5 model summary of depressive symptoms, ei and job performance model 1 model 2 variables b β se b β se constants 58.29* .41* 58.27* .41* ds -.35 -.04 .41 -.34 -.04 .42 ei 3.99* .50* .41* 3.95* .50* .42* ds x ei -.29 .03 .44 r2 .26* .26 δr2 .26* .001 f 47.75* 31.91* δf 47.75* .42 table 5, in model 1, the r2 value of 0.26 revealed that depressive symptoms and emotional intelligence (ei) explained 26% variance in the job performance with f (2,279) = 47.75, p<0.05. the findings revealed that depressive symptoms (β =-.04, p>.05) did not predict job performance and ei (β = .50, p<.05) predicted job performance. in model 2, the r2 value of 0.27 revealed that the depressive symptoms and ei explained 27% variance in job performance with f (3,278) =31.91, p<.05. the findings revealed that depressive symptoms (β =-.04, p>.05), ei (β =.50, p>.05) and depressive symptoms x ei did not predict job performance (β =.03, p>.05). the δr2 value of .001 revealed 0.1% change in the variance of model 1 with δf (1,278) =.47.75, p<0.05, and model 2 with δf (1,278) =.42, p>.05. the results indicate that there is no significant effect of ei on the relationship between depressive symptoms and job performance among secondary school teachers. thus, h4 was not supported. discussion gender role theory, as posited by eagly and wood (2012), suggests that societal expectations shape behaviours and stress differently for males and females. given the predominance of female teachers in the sample (74.5%), gender dynamics likely play a crucial role in these findings. female teachers often face higher stress levels due to the dual burden of professional and family responsibilities, which can affect their mental health and job performance (pogere et al., 2019). khabri et al. (2023) support this, showing that while moderate stress can enhance performance through increased motivation, excessive stress leading to depressive symptoms can significantly hinder job effectiveness. moreover, beilock et al. (2010) found that female teachers' stress is often exacerbated by societal pressures and expectations, further impacting their job performance negatively when depressive symptoms arise. these findings suggest that while stress in manageable amounts (eustress) can be beneficial, a moderate level of stress leads to a moderate level of job performance, with gender-specific factors playing a significant role. according to super's life cycle theory of career development (super, 1990), individuals' career stages profoundly influence their experiences and responses to job stress. these career stages are often linked with heightened stress levels due to increased professional responsibilities and concerns about approaching retirement. ellovido and humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 180 nasir et al. (emotional intelligence as a moderator of the relationship between stress, depressive symptoms, and job performance) quirap (2024) suggest that more experienced teachers may have developed effective coping mechanisms to manage stress. therefore, moderate stress can boost job performance by enhancing motivation and engagement, excessive stress can lead to low job performance and significantly impair job effectiveness. according to the job demands-resources model (demerouti et al., 2001), job demands can lead to stress, while job resources can mitigate these effects. teachers with extensive experience often face high job demands but possess significant job resources, such as expertise, social support, and well-developed coping mechanisms, which can buffer the negative impacts of stress and enhance job performance. conversely, less experienced teachers may lack these resources, making them more susceptible to stress and its detrimental effects on job performance (jain, 2021). bakker and de vries (2021) found that job resources such as professional development opportunities and supportive leadership can enhance teachers' ability to manage stress effectively, thereby improving job performance. similarly, skaalvik and skaalvik (2017) highlight that experienced teachers' accumulated resources enable them to convert job demands into positive stress (eustress), which can enhance performance. however, stress can lead to decreased job performance without adequate resources, especially among less experienced teachers. this study indicated a significant positive relationship between stress and job performance, potentially due to the higher representation of female participants. high stress levels can enhance job performance, possibly because women generally exhibit a higher ability to channel stress into motivation for improved job performance. sex role theory (ray, 2019; arcand et al., 2023) suggests that women might possess certain societal influences or inherent abilities that enable them to utilize stress more effectively compared to men. this theory posits that women are often socialized to manage multiple roles and responsibilities, which can translate into an increased capacity to use stress constructively. supporting this view, a study by bryan et al. (2024) found that women tend to convert stress into productive energy by leveraging strong social networks and problem-solving skills. additionally, research by archer et al. (2024) indicates that women often have higher levels of resilience and adaptability in stressful situations, which can lead to enhanced job performance. the study indicated a significant positive relationship between stress and job performance among secondary school teachers. this counterintuitive finding can be understood through the grand theory of stress, developed by selye (1973), which differentiates between eustress (positive stress) and distress (negative stress). eustress, a form of stress perceived as beneficial, can enhance motivation, focus, and performance, potentially explaining why stressed teachers may perform better. according to anjum et al. (2023), eustress experienced in a job environment can lead to increased motivation and job performance. fahmi et al. (2022) further elaborate that challenges and pressures, although potentially detrimental, can also enhance a teacher's motivation and discipline when perceived positively. this aligns with selye's theory, where an optimal level of stress (eustress) enhances performance, while excessive stress (distress) has the opposite effect, leading to negative outcomes such as anxiety and reduced job performance. the study's findings are consistent with previous research by shoukat et al. (2019), which identified a significant relationship between stress and job performance, highlighting the dual potential of stress to either motivate or hinder, depending on its level and perception. this study also indicated a significant negative relationship between depressive symptoms and job performance, suggesting that higher levels of depressive symptoms in school teachers correlate with lower job performance. this finding is supported by recent research which shows that depressive symptoms can severely impair cognitive functions humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 181 nasir et al. (emotional intelligence as a moderator of the relationship between stress, depressive symptoms, and job performance) such as concentration, decision-making, and memory, all of which are crucial for effective job performance (fukuzaki & takeda, 2022). depressive symptoms can also lead to increased absenteeism and reduced motivation, further diminishing job performance (johnston et al., 2019; grahek et al., 2019; lerner et al., 2010). furthermore, a study by mclean and connor (2015) found that teachers experiencing depressive symptoms often struggle with maintaining classroom engagement and managing student behaviour, leading to a decline in overall teaching effectiveness. in the current study, teachers with high depressive symptoms have more than 10 years of working experience, placing them at an optimal or moderate level of experience. at this stage, teachers may already be saturated with depressive symptoms, making it increasingly difficult to resist their impact on job performance. this suggests that the accumulation of negative emotions and experiences over time can have detrimental effects on job performance. affective events theory (ohly & venz, 2021) supports this view by positing that the accumulation of negative events or experiences in the workplace can significantly impact an individual's emotional state, thereby reducing job performance. skaalvik and skaalvik (2017) found that teachers experiencing prolonged depressive symptoms report lower levels of job satisfaction and higher levels of job-related stress, leading to decreased effectiveness in their teaching roles. the top management of a school has the authority to create policies or guidelines specifically addressing the needs of school teachers in identifying depressive symptoms. by acknowledging the potential impact of depressive symptoms on teacher job performance, the top management of a school can take proactive measures to support their teachers' mental well-being. creating policies or guidelines that address depressive symptoms allows for early identification and intervention, helping teachers seek appropriate support and treatment. this study also produced interesting findings, revealing that emotional intelligence (ei) does not significantly influence the relationship between stress and job performance. this implies that ei does not affect the relationship between teachers' stress levels and job performance, regardless of whether these levels are high or low. this can also be seen with the study population, found that most of them are female respondents. previous studies have highlighted the impact of gender on the connection between stress and job performance. faizan and haque (2019) discovered gender differences in working productivity under eustress (good stress), with females experiencing more eustress than males. given that females constitute the majority of respondents in this study, ei may not have any significant impact on the relationship between stress and job performance. this also implies that ei does not play a crucial role in moderating the impact of stress on job performance, at least in the context of the study. additionally, the statement implies that even if individuals possess ei, it does not have a substantial influence on the outcome of the study. the study indicated that emotional intelligence (ei) does not significantly affect the relationship between depressive symptoms and job performance. although ei is often praised as a key factor in enhancing job performance, this study suggests that its influence might have limitations, especially concerning mental health conditions like depressive symptoms. these findings are consistent with recent research by suleman et al. (2020), which suggests that while ei is important for job satisfaction, it may not directly influence the relationship between depressive symptoms and job performance. the study's limitations are attributed to factors such as generalization of result and technique of analysis. these limitations resulted in the study being conducted focusing only on 282 secondary school teachers in kelantan. this focused sample may limit the generalizability of the findings to a larger population. the suggestion for future research is humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 182 nasir et al. (emotional intelligence as a moderator of the relationship between stress, depressive symptoms, and job performance) to expand the scope of the study to include all secondary schools in kelantan. by doing so, the data collected will be more comprehensive and representative of the entire population of secondary schools in the region. this will provide a more accurate understanding of the factors influencing the job performance of secondary school students in kelantan. this will contribute to the existing body of knowledge in the field and provide valuable insights for teachers, policymakers, and study working in of secondary education. the suggestions put forth in the research study include expanding the scope of the research to include samples from private schools, specifically teachers from private secondary schools. by including this additional group, the study aims to explore any potential similarities or differences in the results between public and private school teachers. this expansion would provide a comparative analysis between teachers in different educational settings, shedding light on any unique challenges or factors that may exist within private schools. in terms of technique of analysis, correlation, and regression can provide valuable insights into the strength and direction of associations between variables, as well as the ability to predict one variable based on another. however, they have certain limitations. one limitation of correlation and regression analysis is that they only assess the direct relationships between variables. they do not consider the potential indirect or mediating effects of other variables. this means that important relationships between variables may be missed or not fully understood. structural equation modelling (sem), on the other hand, is suggested, as a more comprehensive statistical technique that allows for the examination of both direct and indirect relationships among variables. it enables the study to assess complex relationships and test theoretical models that include multiple variables and pathways. conclusion in conclusion, the study highlights the significant positive relationship between stress and job performance, and the significant negative relationship between depressive symptoms and job performance, while revealing that emotional intelligence (ei) does not mediate these relationships. this suggests that while stress and depressive symptoms directly impact job performance, ei does not act as a moderator in this relationship. this underscores the critical need to address stress and depressive symptoms directly to improve job performance among teachers, rather than solely focusing on enhancing ei. acknowledgment the author expresses gratitude to the department of psychology, faculty of human development, sultan idris education university (upsi) which provided support in completing this research. special gratitude is extended to the dedicated participants, whose invaluable contributions enriched the depth of our studies and ensured the success and quality of our findings. declarations author contribution. nam was responsible for the idea implementation and study design conducted the data collection and analysis, validated the results, provided necessary resources, and authored the manuscript. nah contributed by generating ideas, providing guidance on method and research design, monitoring research progress, verifying data results, and suggesting research implications to be summarised and reported in the paper. funding statement. this research was carried out independently, without any external funding support. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 183 nasir et al. 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(2010). the usm emotional quotient inventory (usmeq-i) manual. universiti sains malaysia. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10671-011-9109-6 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118929803.ewac0458 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00240 https://doi.org/10.33015/dominican.edu/2024.edu.03 http://dx.doi.org/10.18415/ijmmu.v8i7.2954 https://doi.org/10.61707/cxa24m02 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 20 (2), august 2023, 136-148 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v20i2.341 university students' barriers to managing mental health during the covid-19 pandemic: a qualitative exploration f. a. nurdiyanto1, irene miracle philian goszal2, enggar putri harjanti1 1faculty of psychology, universitas gadjah mada, indonesia 2faculty of psychology, satya wacana christian university, indonesia corresponding author: franznur@gmail.com introduction covid-19 was first confirmed in wuhan, china, on 31 december 2019. sars-cov-2 virus propagation causes respiratory problems resulting in pneumonia, acute respiratory syndrome, kidney failure, and death (kementerian kesehatan ri, 2020). in indonesia, 4,256,409 cases of covid-19 were confirmed by 30 november 2021, with death counts up to 143,830 (world health organization [who], 2022). the increased number of covid-19 cases drove the government to implement mobility restrictions to suppress covid-19 transmission (kementerian kesehatan ri, 2020). this policy caused changes in people's activities and mobility, such as engaging more online, learning from home, working from home, and abstaining from social gatherings. communities are also instructed to implement health protocols, such as washing hands, wearing masks, maintaining distance, staying away from crowds, and mobility restrictions. this restriction on mobility during the covid-19 pandemic led the world to problems such as socioeconomic threats (kramer & kramer, 2020) and mental health issues (lim et al., 2022). article info abst ract article history received january 17, 2023 revised april 9, 2023 accepted june 10, 2023 the covid-19 pandemic and its mitigation efforts are associated with increased student mental health problems such as anxiety, stress, isolation, and lack of motivation. when left untreated, these conditions could affect students' well-being, academic achievement, social relations, and quality of life. this study aimed to explore university students' barriers to managing mental health during the covid-19 pandemic using an explorative qualitative approach. a total of 310 students from various regions in indonesia were recruited by purposive sampling. data was collected by distributing qualitative questionnaires through a google form containing informed consent, demographic data, and open-ended questions. thematic analysis was applied to identify the patterns of the meaning of students' barriers. the barriers experienced by students in managing mental health during the pandemic are a lack of support from their closest people, restricted mobility, stigmatization, and individual characteristics. the results show support from family and closest friends is essential for managing students' mental health, especially when there is limited access to mobility and social interaction. additionally, adaptability and disclosure are also seen to be crucial for students in managing their mental health. this study suggests a campaign for mental health literacy and providing accessible mental health services for students in crisis. keywords covid-19 pandemic; explorative qualitative; mental health barriers; university students. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v20i2.341 mailto:franznur@gmail.com humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 137 nurdiyanto et al. (university students’ barriers to managing mental health during…) various mental health problems have been reported during the covid-19 pandemic. a survey estimated around 55% of the population in indonesia suffered from an anxiety disorder, and 58% underwent depressive disorder during the pandemic (suriastiani et al., 2020). at the time, anxiety was a form of distress related to health threats; it changed sleeping and eating habits, caused difficulty concentrating, and deteriorated health status (kaligis et al., 2020). anxiety and depression during the pandemic have also increased by 25%, related to distress arising from social isolation (ren et al., 2020). the qualitative survey also identified that the pandemic has led to psychological problems such as depression, emotional anxiety, and pandemic stress (nurdiyanto & harjanti, 2022). throughout the pandemic, women are more likely to experience mental health problems and lean more toward the suicidal trend (nurdiyanto et al., 2022). mobility restrictions and isolation also brought psychological impacts, particularly in young adults (carpio-arias et al., 2022). mental health problems often emerge during the most vulnerable developmental period of life (e.g., at 18-25 years old), typically college students (mclafferty et al., 2021). those entering a transitional period, be it psychologically, socially, or in terms of taking responsibility instead (jurewicz, 2015), are sustaining pandemic stress, placing them into a state of crisis. college students can be psychologically and socially stressed in terms of taking responsibility, which already puts them in a distressed situation before the pandemic. meanwhile, during the pandemic, students feel more complex grievances with increased anxiety, stress, isolation, and lack of motivation. a study revealed that 50% of the student population sustained anxiety and depression equally significant to the stress due to restrictions during the pandemic, which led to decreased exercise, deteriorating personal relationships, social activity restrictions, and financial problems (chen & lucock, 2022). learning migration into online classes is strongly suspected of causing student distress by disrupting social interaction and adaptation to learning techniques (chaturvedi et al., 2021); online courses are also considered to limit students in obtaining potential supporting resources. drastic changes in the learning system cause students to have difficulties adapting to new learning models as they are unprepared to deal with such changes. students felt bored after the second week of online learning and endured anxiety as well as mood swings due to limited social interaction and a learning process perceived as ineffective (irawan et al., 2020). academic burdens, boredom, monotonous activities, independent isolation, covid-19 infection, and disruption in their daily activities magnified students’ mental health struggles (wiguna et al., 2020). in distressed circumstances, the student's mental health management is also influenced by negative thoughts about oneself and others, thus requiring specific treatment during the covid-19 pandemic (roca et al., 2021). unfortunately, the pandemic gave students increasingly limited mental health services access. mobility restriction has directly prevented students toward service demand from accessing assistance, especially in isolation or areas with limited service (badrfam et al., 2020). quarantine and isolation are the oldest and most effective ways to prevent disease transmission and suppress the propagation of the pandemic. it separates, limits, and prevents infected people from traveling to or health people from infected areas (badrfam et al., 2020). thus, quarantine challenges those with enduring mental health problems and crises in a pandemic, particularly during tightening regulations, closing public services, limiting mobility, and prohibiting gatherings. isolation has become a constraint in finding mental health help (ganesan et al., 2021). isolation turns out to have negative implications, especially for people with psychological problems, such as anxiety, stress, fear, reactive behavior, 138 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) nurdiyanto et al. (university students’ barriers to managing mental health during…) boredom, sadness, worry, helplessness, loneliness, and depression (ganesan et al., 2021; loades et al., 2020). by definition, barriers to health are anything that makes it difficult for individuals to access, use, or benefit from health services (scheppers et al., 2006). impartial views on the importance of mental health, social stigma, self-closure, the desire to solve their problems, and ignorance regarding information in accessing psychological assistance are common barriers to managing mental health (topkaya, 2015). in addition, students' attitudes toward mental health assistance and their perceptions of finding help have greatly influenced how students manage their mental health (yakunina & weigold, 2011). during the pandemic, mental health service is not perceptive to the need for services conforming to a crisis (feijt et al., 2020) and have become even more inaccessible in remote areas with inadequate infrastructure. the low levels of mental health literacy add to the barriers shown by the high stigmatization of mental health (maya, 2021) and the perception of mental health issues as tertiary issues. mental health access and availability in indonesia remain limited, and mental health workers are not evenly distributed throughout indonesia (sari et al., 2020). during the pandemic, the implementation of mental health policy is increasingly facing challenges and limitations on service access and coverage problems (ridlo, 2020). a person is considered mentally healthy if they can realize their ability, cope with various stresses in life, work productively and helpfully, and contribute to the people surrounding them (world health organization [who], 2004). mental health can be achieved through satisfying social relationships (bailey et al., 2018). nevertheless, students who cannot manage their mental health are at risk of severe emotional tensions, impairing their well-being (nasrullah & sulaiman, 2021). this research is intended to explore the barriers students encounter in managing their mental health, particularly during the covid-19 pandemic. identifying the students' barriers is crucial to determining the correct treatment strategy to overcome those obstacles. knowing what causes student failure to manage mental health problems will make determining the proper intervention strategy easier. method research design this research employed an open-ended qualitative questionnaire and focused on what hindered students' aspects in managing their mental health during the covid-19 pandemic. as with qualitative health studies using questionnaires (barcham & stephens, 1980; zhao et al., 1997), this approach allowed us to understand the participants' views about mental health barriers during the covid-19 pandemic. this specific design has the advantage of involving diverse participants, especially considering the pandemic's mobility restrictions. an openended questionnaire gave participants a free space to describe their experiences using written answers. participants participants were recruited using the purposive sampling method with these criteria: 1) aged 19-25 years, 2) undergraduate or diploma program students, and 3) during the covid-19 pandemic living in indonesia. this report was a sequel to our previous study (nurdiyanto & harjanti, 2022) related to psychological distress during the covid-19 pandemic. at first, we recruited 728 participants. however, only 310 participants (mage = 20.6; sdage = 2.16) could be further analyzed due to the ineligibility of participants, such as those under and over age, humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 139 nurdiyanto et al. (university students’ barriers to managing mental health during…) not university students, or not reporting any mental health issues in participants’ self-report. table 1 shows the demographic of the participants. table 1 participant demographic (n=310) characteristics n f (%) characteristics n f (%) sex religion female 207 66.77 buddhist 2 .64 male 99 31.93 hindus 3 .96 n/a 4 1.29 muslim 73 23.54 age catholic 39 12.58 19 – 21 255 82.25 christian 182 58.70 22 – 25 55 17.74 n/a 11 3.54 procedure data was collected by distributing qualitative questionnaires through the google form containing 1) research informed consent, 2) participant information, and 3) open-ended questions. the survey was conducted between 15-30 november 2021 by sharing the links via whatsapp, twitter, and facebook. at the beginning of the questionnaire, we briefly described the research, the research objective, the commitment to data privacy and confidentiality, and how the data will be used. this research was reviewed and approved by the research ethics committee, universitas gadjah mada (number: ke/ugm/013/ec/2021). the questionnaire covered three open questions that explored psychological burdens, how participants manage their psychological burdens, and perceived obstacles in managing mental health. there was no word limitation in answering the question, and it allowed participants to elaborate as much as needed. the questions mentioned in the open-ended questionnaire are as follows: 1. what are the psychological burdens you feel during the covid-19 pandemic? 2. how do you manage psychological burdens during the covid-19 pandemic? 3. what are the constraints in maintaining psychological health? data analysis the thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2019) was applied to identify, analyze, and report meaningful patterns in data. in conducting the analysis, the transcript was re-read to familiarize with the data. the answer sheet was read repeatedly to generate initial codes. the second and third authors built the potential themes and continuously reviewed them by the first author until they were refined towards saturation. all authors provided definitions and labeled the themes through panel discussions. results based on the data analysis of the open-ended questions, five themes were obtained related to constraints encountered by students in managing mental health during the covid-19 pandemic. the themes of barriers faced by students in managing mental health are 1) lack of social support, 2) mobility restriction, 3) information overload, 4) overburdened by assignments, and 5) lack of desire to disclose personal issues. 140 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) nurdiyanto et al. (university students’ barriers to managing mental health during…) lack of social support the covid-19 pandemic required every student to spend their days in their residence (house, boarding, and dormitory). this circumstance is also followed by increasingly frequent interactions between family members within the household. during the interaction, participants and their families faced pandemic adaptation issues in their family environment. therefore, participants still complain about their families' lack of support. compounding the problems, participants were also faced with their personal pandemic adaptation issues in their family environment. as expressed by one of the female students when asked about the barriers to maintaining psychological health, " family and parents. they did not understand or perhaps did not care about their children's mental health. sometimes parents are also one of the reasons i have a psychological burden." (resp-203, 20 years, female) participants expect emotional support from their families, particularly during the pandemic adaptation to online learning with its burdens and challenges. unfortunately, the participants perceived that their parents, on the contrary, were the reason they had a psychological burden during the covid-19 pandemic. participants even felt that their parents did not care about their children's mental health, including new activities carried out at home during stay-at-home instructions. besides support from family, participants expect support from friends during the pandemic. participants need support from their friends, who are considered the closest person to help them overcome lecture problems such as academic assignments, campus activities, or other time-consuming activities. however, limited interaction and adaptation to each individual at the start of the pandemic meant that the need for peer support was impossible. another participant stated that she did not get enough aid from her social environment. she says, "my social circles, such as my college friends and playmates, were not supportive (to solve problems)." (resp-01, 19 years, female) mobility restrictions restrictions on mobility during the covid-19 pandemic have made access difficult for travel and social interaction. restrictions prevented participants from carrying out activities freely as they used to before the pandemic. every access to travel, carry out activities, and meet colleagues is limited, as stated by a female participant, "there are not many obstacles, but what is most striking is not being able to meet other people for an uncertain time, which in my opinion is long enough." (resp220, 19 years, female) participants perceive the problem as a result of no unity or interaction with other people in the long term. participants also found it challenging to limit the specified mobility because it caused them to be unable to get out of boredom, fatigue, or just for refreshment, as written by a student, "my obstacle is that i still cannot cope with stress well. because i usually cope with stress by having a picnic on the beach or going to the mall. therefore, even though i do my hobbies at home, the reality is that it does not guarantee that i can overcome my psychological problems." (resp-302, 19 years, female) mobility restriction also affected participants' barriers to dealing with stress because, for some people, going out is a strategy they always do in coping with distress. the impact of this mobility restriction then influences student strategies in managing their mental health. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 141 nurdiyanto et al. (university students’ barriers to managing mental health during…) information overload the excess of information was related to a large amount of covid-19 news from various sources rolling fast in society. meanwhile, the information spread among the public did not entirely come from reliable sources. as said by the participant, "i cannot filter the news about covid-19. moreover, the people around me always keep up with it and talk about it." (resp-99, 19 years, female) excessive information about covid-19 forms negative thoughts and generates fear and anxiety, impacting an individual's mental health. furthermore, the surrounding environment and the media contributed to the participants overthinking about the pandemic. as stated by a student, "the influence of mass media coverage is always exaggerated." (resp-507, 21 years, female) the news about the number of death cases that are continuously reported and misinformation related to the covid-19 pandemic caused participants to have negative perceptions about covid-19, resulting in fear of being infected by the virus. this information overload of covid-19 also affected how individuals deal with mental health. fear of excessive information led participants to limit meetings with health workers, including seeking treatment at health services. they are more focused on handling emergency diseases. in the context of a pandemic, mental health problems tend to be considered tertiary to get treatment from professionals. overburdened by assignments the covid-19 pandemic has brought many changes in activities, so adapting to the current situation is necessary. however, we found that fast changes, unaccompanied by the development of the academic system, create learning activities considered to be unoptimized for students. consequently, learning activities are full of assignments instead of class discussions. therefore, the most frequent perceived changes were related to the lecture challenges faced by the participants. as stated by a student, " lecture assignment. it is not easy to interact directly, but assignments keep coming. i cannot manage my psychological issues. i just played games. it feels like during this pandemic; there are more lecture assignments now than before." (resp-162, 21 years, male) participants felt burdened by changing lectures, which were initially held offline and now changed to online during the pandemic. participants admitted they needed help dividing their time; consequently, activities and assignments were neglected. difficulties in adapting can also be seen from the lack of time management that students have during the pandemic, as expressed by students, "i cannot manage time management. plenty of homework and campus activities." (resp-141, 21 years, female) lack of desire to disclose personal issues a lack of desire for self-disclosure can hinder seeking mental health assistance. this finding also revealed that the tendency to shut oneself down when encountering problems could hinder handling mental health during a pandemic. one participant said that he could not share personal issues with other people, "i am not open to sharing problems with others. i prefer to keep everything to myself" (resp-250, 19 years, male) 142 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) nurdiyanto et al. (university students’ barriers to managing mental health during…) participants feel that hiding problems is better than telling others, including family. parents and the closest people are considered unable to become an outlet to share problems with during this pandemic. besides, other participants chose to keep their problems to themselves, as stated by the following student, "there are some internal pressures that we cannot tell others, so we keep it to ourselves." (resp-229, 19 years, female) participants feel pressure from within themselves that cannot be shared with other people, including friends; hence, they feel better about keeping their problems hidden. this character tends to prevent students from seeking help to solve their mental health problems. discussion this study explored obstacles to managing mental health during the covid-19 pandemic. university students encountered constraints related to changing patterns during a pandemic, including a lack of social support from those closest to them, mobility restrictions, information overload, overburdened assignments, and a lack of desire to self-disclosure. notably, adolescents with limited social support have little access to mental health assistance (jose et al., 2012), placing them in more complex psychological problems. in this context, the social connection can lead to seeking mental health assistance. a previous study highlighted that limited interaction and mobility lead to overwhelming emotional impact (loneliness, boredom, and anxiety) and loneliness issues in student life (nurdiyanto & harjanti, 2022). strong social support is one of the buffers for mental health when a person undergoes a life crisis (dalgard et al., 1995). social support from family and friends predicts student quality of life (alsubaie et al., 2019). it reduces mental health deterioration when adverse life events occur, especially those related to conditions that individuals feel they are unable to control (jose & lim, 2014). social relationships with quality peers positively contribute to adolescents' mental health (santini et al., 2021). unfortunately, social support is one of many that students complain about in maintaining their mental health during the pandemic, especially with domestic problems and violence, which surprisingly increased during the lockdown period (olding et al., 2021). the financial crisis during the pandemic also led to tensions between family members (westrupp et al., 2023). the experience of a pandemic with mobility restrictions could be considered an adverse life event. research during the early pandemic confirmed various adverse effects, especially for the marginalized, such as those at risk of unemployment, food insufficiency, cancellation of offline classes, and mental health problems (chakrabarti et al., 2021). mobility restrictions are associated with declining mental health, marked by unhealthy eating behaviors and worsening sleep quality, with groups of young people and women being more at risk (carpioarias et al., 2022). however, the impact of lockdown on mental health varies; with high mortality rates, lockdown no longer causes mental health to worsen but has an influence on high anxiety and depression alongside high mortality rates (costa-font et al., 2023). during the restrictions, students cannot carry out activities they usually do as coping strategies when facing problems. our study underlines that mobility restrictions are also a barrier to seeking help besides being viewed as a source of distress. restrictions on mobility are also perceived as an obstacle by students, considering the limited access and social interaction with peers or those closest to them. credible covid-19 information plays a role in reducing the crisis impact. accurate information has a beneficial effect on avoiding transmission and mitigating the virus spread (patwary et al., 2021). conversely, fake news and rumors can have negative impacts, such as humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 143 nurdiyanto et al. (university students’ barriers to managing mental health during…) anti-vaccine provocations and patient or health worker rejection, causing fear, terror, stress, and mental health problems (abdullah, 2020). covid-19 misinformation reports have become an unstoppable snowball news in comments and posts on social media or in sharing and forwarding online news. the reporting of increasing covid-19 cases has driven social uncertainty and helplessness. these aspects have relevance to mental health issues. longitudinal studies have found that media exposure related to the 9/11 attacks correlates with the emergence of re-trauma about the horror event (silver et al., 2013). although the 9/11 incident is clearly different from the global pandemic crisis, it drives the idea that media information and social media opinion can harm mental health. a literature review has identified that widespread pandemic information negatively affects the mental health of adults, the elderly, and women (delgado et al., 2021); it confirms that young adults are a group that is vulnerable to infodemic influences. the change in learning from face-to-face to online changes student activities drastically, especially without any mitigation efforts against it. assignments are perceived to be given in an even more enormous amount with little to no support from teachers (chaturvedi et al., 2021). participants perceived the assignments as academic stress. students with adaptive pandemic strategies have healthier behaviors and can find sources of assistance and academic achievement (babicka-wirkus et al., 2021). parallel to previous findings, people who tend to lack disclosure have difficulty in managing their mental health, as they cannot find any appropriate person to trust and rely on. keeping problems from others is preferred by people who have trust issues and disappointment with trust, and the problem is taboo and too humiliating for others to know (seamark & gabriel, 2018). they rely more on themselves, and telling problems to others is believed to not solve problems. furthermore, the lack of access to mental health care has increased reluctance to access available assistance. despite telemental health efforts that have been attempted (ramalho et al., 2020), various service limitations during the isolation period related to the shortcomings in national strategies and regulations still need to be more helpful. the covid-19 pandemic is a crisis that may take another form. however, problems regarding the causes and forms of student psychological problems have occurred even outside of the pandemic. the pandemic crisis has worsened mental health problems. the awareness to care for each other needs to be strengthened in hopes of averting young people from being dragged into deeper psychological problems. it is worth noting that loneliness can reduce psychological well-being, even with lower distress (nurdiyanto et al., 2022). there are some limitations of this study. first, this study is limited in exploring what students perceived as barriers to handling mental health and did not limit the scope of such obstacles in a specific condition. future research has opportunities to apply studies to limited barriers, for example, depression or marginalized issues. secondly, data collection was conducted in a brief qualitative survey, and we did not collect data in the traditional qualitative framework by observation and interviews. thus, we do not have intimate interactions with our participants. data was collected through online social media, where women were dominant among our respondents. further research needs to involve a more balanced gender participant. conclusion this study described the pandemic's consequences on students' barriers to managing mental health during a pandemic to contribute to a discussion on adolescents' mental health, the significance of pandemic disruption, and how the barriers they perceive. during the covid19 pandemic, students encountered obstacles in managing mental health related to the lack of 144 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) nurdiyanto et al. (university students’ barriers to managing mental health during…) social support, mobility restrictions, pandemic information overload, and the lack of selfdisclosure regarding personal issues. social interaction is proven crucial in supporting or hindering students in managing mental health. in addition, information overload can hinder students from addressing mental health as well as the tendency to neglect healthy living behaviors. mental health promotion must integrate information on accessing mental health assistance (e.g., formal, semi-formal, and informal) and adopt adaptive coping strategies in crises. it is critical for higher education institutions to provide mental health services that are more accessible to all students. acknowledgment this article was presented in the national seminar at universitas ahmad dahlan on 18 june 2022. we thank our research assistants: ignatius yudhistira, elsa yolen, and gitareja maega. declarations author contribution. fan developed the research design and initial draft. fan, impg, and eph conducted data collection and analysis. all authors contributed and accepted the manuscript's final version. funding statement. none conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references abdullah, i. 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interfaith friendship; tolerance; stigma consciousness. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v20i2.374 mailto:darmawan.muttaqin@staff.ubaya.ac.id 118 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) fonda & muttaqin (interfaith friendship among emerging adulthood in surabaya: the role…) minimal conflict (parker & asher, 1993), and feelings of security and closeness during time spent together (bukowski et al., 1994). friendship relations are a unique and complex phenomenon. researchers have not found a definitive explanation for their formation (bunnell, 2017; parker & asher, 1993; policarpo, 2015; wicaksono & adiyanti, 2019). friendship may arise from a single point of similarity, even if the individuals involved have yet to derive any tangible benefits from the relationship. this phenomenon is possible because individuals interact with others to obtain something, whether it be tangible or intangible, such as a sense of mutual trust (lambe et al., 2001; lioukas & reuer, 2015). from the outset, factors such as geography, hobbies, interests, and even favorite foods significantly formed friendship relations in daily life. however, when individuals enter adolescence, they begin to have abstract and idealistic thoughts, and certain criteria are considered when choosing friends (baharun et al., 2016; kazi & galanaki, 2020). these criteria are the accumulation of experiences and socialization from the environment, which shape new standards of similarity in choosing friends. religion can be a determining factor in forming friendship relations, and society generally prefers to interact and be friends with individuals with relatively similar backgrounds (rubin et al., 2008). this phenomenon is often illustrated as a "fishbowl" to describe how individuals are born, grow, spend time, and interact with others who are relatively similar to themselves (van der walt, 2014). this illustration reinforces the importance of similarity as a key factor in forming relationships (myers & twenge, 2019). religious similarity may be a factor to consider in forming friendship relationships. however, interactions between individuals of different religions in urban settings cannot be avoided, whether through education or proximity (yulianto & tohari, 2019). thus, it is possible for individuals to form friendships across religions. through a community psychology approach, interfaith friendships can bridge religious differences through meaningful interpersonal relationships (mccormack, 2013). these types of friendships are important in creating an inclusive society and can offer insights that deepen individual religious beliefs (pschaida, 2018). despite the significant benefits of interfaith friendships, individual involvement in such relationships still tends to be low (yahya & boag, 2014). this situation may be due to concerns when befriending individuals of different religions or a lack of opportunities to interact with them (lioukas & reuer, 2015). furthermore, conflicts between religions in society can lead to misunderstandings of religious differences. consequently, people may feel uncomfortable and keep their distance, challenging establishing interfaith friendships (burhani, 2011). despite the challenges in establishing interfaith friendships, the enthusiasm to create a more inclusive indonesian society remains strong. various groups, such as educators, community leaders, and the government, continuously promote tolerance through different approaches (agung, 2017; masamah & zamhari, 2016; setiawan, 2017). from the time individuals receive a formal education, they are equipped with an understanding of and character education related to tolerance (setiadi, 2016). these efforts encourage individuals to accept and appreciate differences among individuals and groups in daily life (maemunah, 2018; meiza, 2018). the objective is for tolerant individuals to display behaviors oriented towards kindness and to provide warmth regardless of personal and group backgrounds (budiman et al., 2021). however, tolerance related attitudes and behaviors are difficult to internalize if individuals lack a tolerance character. furthermore, tolerant individuals can exhibit tolerant personality traits and show respect towards social and ethnic differences (sztejnberg & jasiński, 2018). individuals’ tolerance can guide attitudes and behaviors of mutual respect and appreciation in interfaith friendships. however, it is undeniable that individuals consider humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 119 fonda & muttaqin (interfaith friendship among emerging adulthood in surabaya: the role…) other factors when establishing such friendships, one of which is stigma consciousness. this consciousness enables individuals to evaluate themselves and potential friends subjectively before establishing interfaith friendships (major & o’brien, 2005). the concept of stigma consciousness is related to the mechanism of thinking in meta-prejudice, which allows individuals to avoid members of other groups when they think that those members do not like them or when they think that members of their group do not like members of other groups (gordijn, 2014; putra, 2016; putra & sukabdi, 2020). furthermore, stigma consciousness can be defined as an individual's judgment that arises from ignorance and a mistaken understanding of other groups (syafriani & fitriani, 2020). this consciousness can arise from norms that are believed and categorized within the structure of society (usraleli et al., 2020). individuals who internalize certain stigmas tend to reject and discriminate against other groups (lubis et al., 2016; usraleli et al., 2020). the stigma consciousness regarding interfaith friendships that develop in society can cause individuals to worry about problems that may arise before and during the establishment of such friendships. for example, individuals may believe their religious group dislikes or have negative views toward other religious groups, and vice versa. as a result, individuals may choose not to establish interfaith friendships. based on the explanation above, interfaith friendships have a unique dynamic compared to friendships in general. however, the dynamics of interfaith friendships have yet to be thoroughly explained, particularly regarding the factors determining friendship quality. nonetheless, high-quality interfaith friendships can be an asset in fostering a peaceful and harmonious society regardless of religious background. therefore, this study aimed to contribute to the understanding of the quality of interfaith friendships in terms of attitudes of tolerance and stigma consciousness. this study focuses on interfaith friendships between individuals who practice islam and those who practice non-islamic religions in surabaya. method research design this study was conducted using a quantitative survey method with a cross-sectional design. this study has obtained ethical clearance approval from the universitas surabaya research ethics committee with the number 84/ke/vi/2022. participants the study participants were 400 emerging adults in surabaya aged 18-25 (m = 20.56, sd = 1.308), consisting of 200 muslims and 200 non-muslims. the participant criteria used in this study were male and female aged 18-25 years old, currently studying in surabaya, muslim with at least one non-muslim friend, or non-muslim with at least one muslim friend. data were collected from july to september 2022 using the quota sampling technique, which determined an equal number of muslim and non-muslim participants, and convenience sampling, which spread the research information through social media. if the participants agreed to participate in the study, they would be asked to fill in informed consent and online questionnaires. the questionnaire-filling process on google forms used the "required" feature in each statement to ensure that the participant's response was fully completed. based on the study, it was found that there were 253 female participants (63.25%) and 147 male participants (36.75%). the duration of the participants' friendship ranged from 1-180 months (m = 26.42, sd = 25.800), with the majority of friendship relationships (77.25%) established due to meeting in educational institutions. 120 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) fonda & muttaqin (interfaith friendship among emerging adulthood in surabaya: the role…) instruments the mcgill friendship questionnaire (mendelson & aboud, 1999) is a 30-item questionnaire used to measure the quality of friendships. the mfq consists of six dimensions: stimulating companionship (5 items, e.g., "my friend has interesting thoughts or ideas to do."), help (5 items, e.g., "my friend helps me with something."), intimacy (5 items, e.g., "my friend knows when i'm upset."), reliable alliance (5 items, e.g., "my friend wants to stay friends even if we argue."), self-validation (5 items, e.g., "my friend praises me when i do something well."), and emotional security (5 items, e.g., "my friend makes me feel better when i'm scared."). participants responded using a 9-point scale ranging from 0 (never) to 8 (always). the mfq demonstrated high reliability with a coefficient of .991 (corrected item-total correlation = .814 – .926) in this study. the mfq used in this study has been adapted into indonesian by previous researchers (mahirah & muttaqin, 2022; putri & muttaqin, 2022). the tolerance index questionnaire (sztejnberg & jasiński, 2018) measures general attitudes toward tolerance. it consists of 22 items that cover three dimensions: ethnic tolerance (7 items, e.g., "minority ethnic groups would be treated better if they changed their behavior"), social tolerance (8 items, e.g., "all forms of religious beliefs have the right to exist"), and personality trait (7 items, e.g., "i want to become more tolerant towards others"). responses to the ti are rated on a 6-point scale ranging from 1 (strongly agree) to 6 (strongly disagree). in this study, the ti demonstrated high reliability with a coefficient of .894 (corrected item-total correlation = .204 – .573). the ti was adapted to indonesian using the back-translation method, which involved two translators from english to indonesian, two reviewers, and two translators from indonesian to english. the stigma consciousness questionnaire (pinel, 1999) was used in this study to measure participants' stigma consciousness related to religion. the items of the scq were adapted to the context of the study. the scq is a unidimensional measure that consists of 10 items, for example, "i feel that people judge my behavior based on my religion when i interact with individuals of other religions." the scq responses use a 7-point scale, ranging from 0 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree). after eliminating three items with relatively very low scores of citc, the scq had a reliability coefficient of .892 (corrected item-total correlation = .477 – .827). the scq was adapted to indonesian using the back-translation method, which involved two translators from english to indonesian, two reviewers, and two translators from indonesian to english. data analysis the hypotheses were tested for the role of stigma consciousness and tolerance on friendship quality using ibm spss version 26. multiple regression analysis was used to test the research hypotheses. the criterion variable in this study is friendship quality, while the predictor variables are tolerance and stigma consciousness. a predictor variable can predict the criterion variable with a significance value of < .05. results the descriptive statistics of the variables and the categorization results for tolerance, stigma consciousness, and friendship quality are reported in table 1. in this study, participants had a friendship quality score (m = 5.567, sd = 1.743) that predominantly fell within the extremely high category (n=178; 44.50%). as for the stigma consciousness score (m = 3.524, sd = 1.018), it mostly fell within the extremely low category (n=164; 41.00%), while the humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 121 fonda & muttaqin (interfaith friendship among emerging adulthood in surabaya: the role…) tolerance (m = 3.880, sd = .669) score was predominantly categorized as moderate or average (n=227; 56.75%). table 1 descriptive and category of tolerance, friendship quality, and stigma consciousness frequency (percentage) variable mean range sd extremely low below average average above average extremely high fq 5.567 1-8 1.743 25 (6.25%) 72 (18.00%) 52 (13.00%) 73 (18.25%) 178 (44.50%) sc 3.524 1-7 1.018 164 (41.00%) 85 (21.25%) 77 (19.25%) 56 (14.00%) 18 (4.50%) t 3.880 1-6 .669 5 (1.25%) 20 (5.00%) 227 (56.75%) 108 (27.00%) 40 (10.00%) note: fq: friendship quality; sc: stigma consciousness; t: tolerance both tolerance and stigma consciousness factors collectively predict friendship quality with an effective contribution of 46.1% (f = 169.523; p = .001; p < .05). table 2 presents the regression analysis results of tolerance and stigma consciousness on friendship quality. in more detail, stigma consciousness contributes more to predicting the friendship quality with an effective contribution of 42.6% (β = -.636; t = -16.441; p = .001; p < 0.05) compared to tolerance, which only provides an effective contribution of 3.5% (β = .113; t = 2.925; p = .004; p < 0.05). furthermore, tolerance has a positive role in friendship quality, while stigma consciousness has a negative role. table 2 the regression of tolerance and stigma consciousness on friendship quality predictor r2 b β t p t .035 -.295 -.113 -12.925 .004** sc .426 -.819 -.636 -16.441 .001** note: t: tolerance; sc: stigma consciousness; *** p < .001; ** p < .01; * p < .05 discussion this study investigated how tolerance and stigma consciousness contribute to the quality of interfaith friendships among adolescents in surabaya, indonesia, particularly between muslims and non-muslims. surabaya was chosen as it is one of the biggest cities in indonesia, where individuals of different religions interact daily. the study revealed that the research participants predominantly fell into the moderate or average category for tolerance, the extremely low category for stigma consciousness, and the extremely high category for friendship quality. furthermore, the findings showed that tolerance and stigma consciousness were significant predictors of the quality of interfaith friendships. however, these factors had different directions and strengths in predicting the quality of interfaith friendships. specifically, individuals with high tolerance levels and low stigma consciousness will have high-quality interfaith friendships. conversely, individuals with low levels of tolerance and high levels of stigma consciousness will have low-quality interfaith friendships. additionally, the study indicated that stigma consciousness had a greater contribution than tolerance in predicting the quality of interfaith friendships. these findings confirm that tolerance cannot be ignored in interfaith friendships, as they serve as the foundation for individuals to initiate interactions with those from different religious groups. individuals with tolerance are characterized as people who do not pressure 122 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) fonda & muttaqin (interfaith friendship among emerging adulthood in surabaya: the role…) others to change, respect one another, and are free from biased or subjective thinking. these characteristics further direct individuals to easily accept differences in interpersonal relations (sztejnberg & jasiński, 2018). moreover, previous studies have shown that interfaith friendships can be established when individuals respect one another, are open to differences, consider each other's feelings, and are accustomed to doing activities together (al-gazali, 2022; harmi, 2019; rahmawati & haryanto, 2020; utami et al., 2021). these conditions can be considered indicators of an individual's readiness to respond to differences in their environment, including differences in religion (sztejnberg & jasiński, 2018). additionally, one of the key elements of a healthy relationship is respecting the presence of others without imposing one's will (berggren & nilsson, 2015; ghorba & lestari, 2021). although tolerance can serve as the foundation for establishing interfaith friendships, stigma consciousness also plays an equally important role. if individuals have a high level of stigma consciousness, it can decrease their desire to establish interfaith friendships due to the possibility of misunderstandings towards other religions (lubis et al., 2016; willemse et al., 2021). furthermore, if individuals receive various incorrect information about other religions, the possibility of having high stigma consciousness increases (durupinar et al., 2016; rauthmann et al., 2015). this condition may occur if individuals receive inaccurate information about other religions and are unwilling to verify the accuracy of that information through direct interaction. the information can then become a stigma that the individual believes (lewis et al., 2006). notably, the study revealed participants to have an extremely low stigma consciousness. this finding suggests that people in surabaya favor interfaith friendships and do not perceive any obstacles to establishing such relationships. this belief is reinforced by the assumption that individuals from their group or other groups do not have negative attitudes toward intergroup interactions (gordijn, 2014; putra, 2016; putra & sukabdi, 2020). several factors may account for this situation. firstly, surabaya is recognized as a large and peaceful city in indonesia despite its diverse ethnic, religious, and racial makeup (nissa et al., 2022; rosidah, 2019). this condition may have contributed to a society where people are accustomed to coexisting with others with different religious beliefs (sofinadya & warsono, 2022; yulianto & tohari, 2019). consequently, individuals tend to identify themselves more broadly as a member of a group with general characteristics, such as being a resident of the city (al-gazali, 2022; dvir-gvirsman, 2019; rahmah & amaludin, 2021; trepte & loy, 2017). in addition, people tend to prioritize factors such as comfort and power in friendship relationships, which can give them a higher position in the social status hierarchy within their community or among their peers (anggarani et al., 2022; privado et al., 2019). the second presumption about the relatively low stigma consciousness may be due to indonesia, especially in surabaya, individuals can interact with other religions in education and work contexts. moreover, some researchers have explained that joint activities between groups can gradually reduce individuals' tendency to worry about stigma consciousness (bazemore et al., 2010; lewis et al., 2006). this phenomenon is because individuals can evaluate the truth of the stigma they hold when interacting with other groups (clark et al., 2017). additionally, interfaith friendships do not generate rejection and negative societal labels (clark et al., 2017; shigihara, 2018). this condition is also supported by the passive effect of the motto "bhinneka tunggal ika" in indonesia, which implies unity in diversity, and therefore, there is no discriminatory treatment when individuals establish interfaith friendships (jacobs et al., 2017; künkler & lerner, 2016; mulya & aditomo, 2019). the findings of this research have implications for interfaith friendships in indonesia, particularly in surabaya. interfaith friendships can be formed when individuals have at least an average level of tolerance or relatively low stigma consciousness. therefore, initiative humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 123 fonda & muttaqin (interfaith friendship among emerging adulthood in surabaya: the role…) needs to be made to enhance tolerance as a foundation for building interfaith friendships that originate from within oneself. it is not only about focusing on improving tolerance alone; the efforts also need to consider changing existing stigma towards a more positive direction. moreover, this research found that stigma consciousness contributes more significantly than tolerance in predicting the quality of interfaith friendships. one approach that can be considered is the relational approach. this approach fosters tolerance through positive activities that enable direct interactions between two or more groups. this approach focuses on developing tolerance and aims to change the existing stigma towards a more positive direction for each individual (al-gazali, 2022; rahmawati & haryanto, 2020). the hope is that individuals will form high-quality interfaith friendships based on their tolerance and the absence of stigma that disrupts interfaith friendships. in the subsequent discussion, although this study provides new insights into interfaith friendships, it still has limitations. first, the study was conducted using a cross-sectional approach, which means it cannot explain changes in each variable over time. second, this study employed a person-centered approach, which has yet to explain the relationships among variables among individuals who engage in interfaith friendships. based on these limitations, future research is recommended to utilize more complex approaches such as the cross-lagged panel model and actor-partner interdependence model. through the cross-lagged panel model approach, it is expected that the study can examine the longitudinal dynamics of interfaith friendships (yang et al., 2023). conclusion this study concludes that tolerance and stigma consciousness play a role in predicting the quality of interfaith friendships. interfaith friendships can be of good quality when individuals have at least a moderate level of tolerance or relatively low to extremely low levels of stigma consciousness. although tolerance can serve as the foundation for interfaith friendships, stigma consciousness plays a more significant role in guiding individuals in establishing such friendships. in this study, most participants had extremely low levels of stigma consciousness, indicating a positive indication that there are no concerns about forming interfaith friendships due to misconceptions about interreligious interactions. acknowledgment the author would like to thank the universitas surabaya for granting ethical clearance for this research. special thanks and appreciation are extended to the participants’ openness and willingness to provide their opinions and complete the survey. declarations author contribution. nvf contributed to proposing the initial research idea, conducting literature reviews, preparing the measurement tools, data collection, data analysis, and writing the initial draft of the research article. dm contributed to adapting the initial idea into a more practical research topic, examining the measurement tools, conducting data analysis and performing verification checks, language review, writing, and providing necessary manuscript corrections. funding statement. the authors themselves funded the research. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. 124 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) fonda & muttaqin (interfaith friendship among emerging adulthood in surabaya: the role…) references agung, d. a. g. 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training to enhance the psychological well-being among adolescents with single parents nuriah halleyda 1,2 , muhammad japar 1 1 master of psychology, universitas muhammadiyah surakarta, indonesia 2 smp negeri 2 jatisrono, wonogiri, indonesia corresponding author: idabundanahdan@gmail.com introduction some children grow up with single parents. single parent refers to a family condition with only one parent due to death, divorce, and single-parent role action (ayuwanty et al., 2018). of course, missing one of the families' spouses will influence their social life, including their status, roles, and psychological, emotional, and economic conditions (noviati & jatiningsih, 2015). family conditions influence the psychological condition of the children. divorced parents negatively impact adolescents (ayulanningsih & karjuniwati, 2020). adolescents with divorced parents may experience sadness, stress, and trauma (hermansyah et al., 2020). lack of support, protection, and compassion also influenced the adolescents’ psychological condition (sukmawati & oktora, 2021), including negative emotional and social development, difficulty in developing personal concepts and controlling emotions, and the incapability to establish relationships with peers and the environment (hayati, 2016). art icle info ab st r act article history received january 24, 2023 revised june 15, 2023 accepted august 3, 2023 psychological well-being is an important component for adolescents. this research examined the influence of gratitude training to enhance the psychological well-being of adolescents with single parents at a junior high school. this research applied a true experimental method with a pretest-posttest control group design. the subjects were taken randomly and consisted of 24 adolescents with single parents. the subjects were then grouped into experimental and control groups, each consisting of 12 individuals. the experimental group received the gratitude training, consisting of 6 sessions. the psychological well-being scale for indonesian adolescents aged between 12 and 15 was used to collect the data. anova mixed design with spss 25 for windows was applied to analyze the data. the result shows a significant interaction between the group and test, indicating the changes between the experiment and control groups significantly differ from pretest to posttest. based on post hoc analysis, there is a significant mean difference in psychological well-being in the experimental group, with the mean of the pretest being lower than in the posttest. therefore, gratitude training enhances the psychological well-being of adolescents with single parents. adolescents need to apply gratitude to their daily activities to enhance their psychological well-being. keywords adolescents; gratitude training; psychological well-being; single parents. mailto:idabundanahdan@gmail.com humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 175 halleyda & japar (the gratitude training to enhance psychological well-being…) for children, losing parents due to death or divorce before reaching 17 years old is correlated to low self-acceptance, environmental mastery, and positive inter-individual interaction (ryff, 2013). moreover, students with divorced parents had low psychological well-being (ramadhani et al., 2016). lack of family support for children also correlates to depression symptoms and chronic conditions when adolescents get older and to well-being, in which personal dignity moderates the situation (ryff, 2013). a preliminary survey on the psychological well-being among adolescents with single parents at a junior high school has been conducted. the survey results showed 58.3% of 72 respondents thought they did not have something special. around half of the respondents did not feel proud of themselves, sad, embarrassed, powerless, did not receive what they wanted, lost their spirits, and anxious. these preliminary data indicate low wellbeing aspects, including negative affection, self-confidence, future orientation, and negative emotional management. a previous study found adolescents' psychological wellbeing could be decreased due to the absence of parents (alfinuha et al., 2019). therefore, adolescents with single parents' psychological well-being needs to be maintained. a previous study found a positive correlation between gratitude and psychological well-being (aisyah & chisol, 2018). gratitude is one of the factors in realizing a joyful and excellent situation (lestari, 2021). gratitude improves the positive perception of life events (anjani et al., 2020) and decreases adolescent depression (miller et al., 2014). gratitude significantly and positively correlates to personal development, self-acceptance, positive correlation, and life objective achievement (fauziah & chusairi, 2022). gratitude and self-compassion could significantly predict psychological well-being (sari et al., 2020). a previous study among university students found that all dimensions of gratitude positively correlate to psychological well-being (măirean et al., 2019). moreover, the gratitude intervention relieves psychological symptoms and improves physical and mental well-being (jans-beken et al., 2020). the result from a meta-analysis shows gratitude training effectively influences the well-being of individuals (wicaksono, 2021). a previous study found that the psychological well-being of mothers of children with specific necessities increased after being given gratitude training (nduru, 2020). at the same time, another study found a significant well-being difference among physically disabled children after gratitude training (dewanto & retnowati, 2015). the two weeks of gratitude and kindness intervention develop relationships, improve daily life satisfaction and optimism, and decrease anxiety (kerr et al., 2015). the psychological dynamics of gratitude training would provide reasoning changes while encountering life events and help the individuals with self-acceptance (rahman & nashori, 2022). the implementation of gratitude training could direct individuals to be grateful and see the positive side of every situation. even if the individual suffers many losses, these individual keeps creating positive feelings about life optimism, productiveness, and life sufficiency (froh et al., 2008). although many studies found a positive impact of gratitude training on psychological well-being, a correlational study found no significant correlation between gratitude and the psychological well-being of adolescents (prabowo, 2017). therefore, previous studies' results indicated inconsistencies in the role of gratitude training in dealing with the psychological well-being of the research subjects. this research examines the influence of gratitude training on psychological well-being, especially among adolescents with single parents as the research participants. the hypothesis is that gratitude training enhances the psychological well-being of adolescents with single parents. 176 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) halleyda & japar (the gratitude training to enhance psychological well-being…) method research design this research has been approved by the ethical commission of health research, kepk, faculty of medicine, with approval number: 4704/b.1/kep.k-fkums/i/2013. the true experimental method with the pretest-posttest control group design was applied in this research. first, the psychological well-being scale was administered to adolescents in the experiment and control groups as the pretest. then the gratitude training was delivered to the experimental group by an experienced trainer. during the intervention, two observers were involved. after the training, a session was conducted to reflect on the activities and the subjects' feelings. lastly, as the posttest, the psychological well-being scale was readministered to adolescents in both groups. participants participants were students in a junior high school between 12 and 15 years old with single parents who lived with one parent as the parents divorced or had passed away. sixty-seven students met the criteria; after being randomly selected, 24 were grouped into experiment and control groups, each consisting of 12 students. the students and the parents willingly joined the research procedure as stated in the informed consent. table 1 shows the participants' distribution. table 1 the research subject distribution groups gender classes parental status male female vii viii ix single father single mother experiment 6 6 6 3 3 4 8 control 6 6 2 7 3 4 8 instruments the data collection in the pretest and posttest stages was conducted with a psychological well-being scale developed for adolescents aged 12 to 15 (abidin et al., 2020). the psychological well-being scale consisted of 38 items that measure ten dimensions of psychological well-being: (1) positive affection, (2) negative affection, (3) self-confidence, (4) positive relationship, (5) future orientation, (6) self-development, (7) negative emotional management, (8) responsibility, (9) problem-solving skill, and (10) harmony (ryff, 1989; diener, 2000). the psychological well-being scale had a reliability score of α = .873 and a good construct validity (rmsea = .075; gfi = .91; cfi = .93; nnfi = .91; ifi = .93) (abidin et al., 2020). the gratitude training module a gratitude training module consisting of five sessions was developed in the previous study among adolescents living in orphanages (megawati et al., 2019). the module was modified before being applied in this research because of the different characteristics of research participants and different training delivery methods. in this research, the gratitude training is delivered offline with face-to-face meetings among adolescents with single parents aged 12 to 15. moreover, an activity that is writing the feelings in a gratitude journal every day for a week is also added for this research. the description of each session of the gratitude training is as follows: humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 177 halleyda & japar (the gratitude training to enhance psychological well-being…) 1) opening this stage lasted 40 minutes to manage the training participants and establish excellent rapport between the trainers and the trainee. the trainers explained shared arguments and promoted mini-games. 2) introduction for supporting thoughts of gratitude for blessings the introduction aims to support the notion of feeling grateful for his blessing and recognizing the sense of gratitude. this session lasted for 2x40 minutes to train the subjects to think positively about their lives and to be grateful for the received blessings. 3) learning to write the feelings in a gratitude journal this session lasted 40 minutes to direct the subjects to behave positively by describing goodness, joyful events, acknowledgment, and joy. 4) identifying the source of the joy this session lasted 40 minutes to determine the source of goodness. 5) expressing the grateful feeling to god the almighty this session lasted 50 minutes to express the gratitude of the participants. 6) writing the feeling in a gratitude journal for a week in this session, the subjects wrote their feelings in the gratitude journal for a week to apply the training results. five experts consisting of psychologists, trainers of the psychological field, and psychology lecturers were involved in validating the gratitude training module. the experts judge the module quantitatively and qualitatively. based on the quantitative judgment, the aiken v of the gratitude training module was .82, slightly higher than the standard of aiken v = .80. this result indicates that the gratitude training module is valid. on the qualitative judgment, the experts provided some feedback for further module improvement, such as (1) explaining the procedure of practicing gratitude, (2) adding an explanation about the materials on every season, (3) replacing the dictions with more understandable dictions, and (4) providing attachment of gratitude journal. after revising the module based on expert feedback, the gratitude training module was piloted among ten students of viii a class in a junior high school to evaluate the estimated time, the applied media, the material accuracy, the worksheet, and the implementation on every session. every student receives the worksheet, and then the facilitator shares the instructions for the training session based on the training module. the materials, time duration, and media were evaluated by scoring 1 to 4 for each item, resulting in a mean of 35.25 in the relevance category. the implementation of google forms to facilitate the recapitulation process was also evaluated. data analysis before testing the hypothesis, normality, and homogeneity tests were conducted. based on the shapiro-wilk test, the data from the pretest and posttest are normally distributed. based on the levene test, the data distribution from the experiment and control groups are homogenous. therefore, quantitative data analysis with mixed anova was conducted with spss version 23 for windows. results the mean psychological well-being scores in the pretest and posttest from the experiment and control groups are shown in table 2. the mean psychological well-being score in the experiment group increased by 23.16, as the pretest score was lower than the posttest score, 178 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) halleyda & japar (the gratitude training to enhance psychological well-being…) 138.92 and 162.08, respectively. on the contrary, the mean of psychological well-being in the control group remains the same, with 155.92 in the pretest and 155.00 in the posttest. table 2 the mean of psychological well-being score group mean pretest posttest difference experiment 138.92 162.08 23.16 control 155.92 155.00 -.92 table 3 shows the anova mixed analysis results. the interaction between the group (experiment-control) and test (pretest-posttest) is significant (f = 4.327; p = .043). the results indicate that the changes between the experiment and control groups significantly differ from pretest to posttest. table 3 the hypothesis statistic test with anova mixed source type iii sum of squares df mean square f p corrected model 3520.229 a 3 1173.410 2.918 .045* intercept 1123326.021 1 1123326.021 2793.593 <.001*** groups 295.021 1 295.021 .734 .396 test 1485.188 1 1485.188 3.694 .061 group*test 1740.021 1 1740.021 4.327 .043* error 17692.750 44 402.108 total 1144539.000 48 corrected total 21212.979 47 note: *** p < .001; ** p < .01; * p < .05 a post hoc test was conducted as there was a significant interaction between the group and the test. from the post hoc test, the mean difference of the experiment group is significant (p = .034; p < .05). therefore, gratitude training enhances the psychological well-being of adolescents with single parents. on the contrary, the result from the post hoc test shows the mean difference in the control group is not significant (p > .05). this result indicates no significant changes from the pretest to the posttest among the control group. figure 1 profile plot 125 130 135 140 145 150 155 160 165 pretest posttest experiment control humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 179 halleyda & japar (the gratitude training to enhance psychological well-being…) figure 1 shows the analysis with a profile plot. the profile plot reflects increasing psychological well-being scores before and after the gratitude training in the experimental group, as shown in the blue line. on the other hand, the psychological well-being score among the control group decreased from the pretest to the posttest, with a mean difference of -.92, as shown in the red line. discussion this research shows gratitude training enhances the psychological well-being of adolescents with single parents. adolescents with single parents are different from those with complete parents. teenagers from broken home families might feel inferior (ramadhani et al., 2016). they received pressures from the environment, as observable in adolescents with single parents, which made them feel different from other people. thus, they found themselves discriminated from the social environment. this situation decreased their psychological well-being (ifdil et al., 2020). this gratitude training encouraged the adolescents to tell their life stories. if they had adverse life experiences, they had been encouraged to think positively and find the positive sides. they were also encouraged to acknowledge that they received positive matters; therefore, they need to be grateful (emmons & mccullough, 2003). grateful for the positive matters is a broader life orientation (jans-beken et al., 2020). the findings align with a meta-analysis that gratitude training effectively improves individual well-being (wicaksono, 2021). gratitude training effectively improves psychological well-being and subjective well-being among hospital staff (sadeghi & pour, 2015). a study among adolescents with divorced parents also found that gratitude encourages individuals to perceive themselves positively, increasing subjective well-being (rahman & nashori, 2022). moreover, among clinical samples, the gratitude intervention constructed the relationship, enhancing satisfaction in daily life and optimism and lowering anxiety, increasing well-being (kerr et al., 2015). in one of the gratitude training sessions, participants were provided information about the sources of joy. in this research, the sources of joy are focused on joy from allah the almighty, parents, friends, and people's surroundings. the participants were asked to mention what joy they received. therefore, participants experienced cognitive processes that might include acknowledging external sources while sharing positive matters (emmons & mccullough, 2003). this activity is in line with the qur'an that suggests people be grateful by remembering the gifted joy and blessing of allah the almighty (karimulloh et al., 2021). in the other session, participants were asked to write a gratitude expression and share it with the persons that made them feel happy. most participants expressed thanking their parents and grandparents for taking care of them. writing gratitude impacts better joy and happiness up to a month after the intervention (seligman et al., 2005). feeling grateful directs the psychological function to the more significant things, empowering the greater adaptive coping strategy (sztachańska et al., 2019). simple training in gratitude strengthened individuals to understand well-being and the potential of well-being; thus, they could improve their well-being (deichert et al., 2021). individuals with knowledge, experience, and gratitude will achieve well-being (yoshimura & berzins, 2017). writing a gratitude journal is the most excellent applied intervention to enhance gratitude (caragol et al., 2022). the gratitude journal allowed the participants to write thanking expressions and to practice three good things to do. writing in a gratitude book helped establish a social source and a new relationship between gratitude feeling and a feeling of belonging (diebel et al., 2016). some previous studies found that after writing gratitude journals, the participants had joyful increments and low depression symptoms until six months later (caragol et al., 2022). the repetition and training under the theory of 180 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) halleyda & japar (the gratitude training to enhance psychological well-being…) behaviorism are applicable to reach the targeted behaviors as the most expected result. the demanded behaviors could positively empower, while the inappropriate behavior would lead to negative acknowledgment (shahbana et al., 2020). in this research, every session in the gratitude training led the subjects to enhance their gratitude. gratitude may support individuals to reach personal well-being and health (elosúa, 2015). feeling grateful positively and significantly influences adolescents' psychological well-being (rahayu et al., 2019). all dimensions of gratitude were correlated to the psychological well-being dimension (măirean et al., 2019). however, there are limitations in this research. first, the limitation dealt with no manipulation check as the evidence of the participant's attention, the intervention's effectiveness, and the mediating process. second, there is no follow-up measurement to know the long-term effect of gratitude training on the psychological well-being of adolescents with single parents. further research is expected to conduct manipulation checks and promote follow-up measurement for 1-2 weeks after the intervention of gratitude training. future researchers may deliver gratitude training for adolescents with vulnerable conditions having low psychological well-being, such as bullied victims, adolescents with specific necessities, and adolescents from low-income family backgrounds. conclusion gratitude training enhances the psychological well-being of adolescents with single parents. the results imply that adolescents with single parents need to practice gratitude training for better psychological well-being. adolescents may be grateful even with the slightest joy, as it will influence individuals' psychological well-being. gratitude training may be applied in schools to enhance the psychological well-being of adolescents. acknowledgment the authors would like to thank the junior high school students in wonogiri regency and the trainer for providing the gratitude training in this study. declarations author contribution. nh established the research topic, collected and analyzed the data, and wrote the report. mj developed research ideas and proofread and corrected the final manuscript. funding statement. this research has been carried out under the applied research scheme 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http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i1.387 the dynamic of decision-making: effect of intertemporal choice on clothing products amabel kylila, honey wahyuni sugiharto elgeka faculty of psychology, universitas surabaya, indonesia corresponding author: honeywahyuni@staff.ubaya.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction people often have various choices or alternatives in all their activities which require them to make decisions, including the decision to purchase clothing products. people sometimes choose to purchase new arrival products that tend to have high prices to be up to date with clothing trends. conversely, they can save up by waiting to purchase some products until the 'discount season' comes. those describe the phenomenon of intertemporal choice, a process by which individuals make decisions on several alternatives at various times (camerer et al., 2005). this concept represents an individual's present and future consumption model, which aims to achieve maximum satisfaction throughout his/her life that might be affected by several aspects such as the size, time, risk, and composition of the choices or alternatives (bota, 2021). the alternatives for intertemporal choice are divided into two types: an alternative that provides instant small rewards or the smaller-but-sooner (ss) option and an option that provides delayed large rewards or a larger-but-later (ll) article info abstract article history received: march 16, 2023 revised: august 25, 2023 accepted: september 26, 2023 individuals' emotional states (i.e., happy and sad emotions) might influence the intertemporal choice process, a decision of choosing between instant alternatives with small advantages or delayed alternatives with enormous benefits, when purchasing a product. this study tested the role of emotional states in individual intertemporal choices, especially when buying clothing products. 45 active students were involved as participants in this experimental study.' the results indicated that happy and sad emotions do not significantly differ in individuals' intertemporal choices, specifically in purchasing clothing products (ꭓ2 = 5.293, p > 0.05). this study also found that intertemporal choice was influenced by gender (f = 6.431, p < 0.05). this gender difference was significant (ꭓ2 = 4.099, p < 0.05), in which female participants had a higher average delayed gratification than male participants. even though differences in income did not significantly impact the differences in intertemporal choice (ꭓ2 = 5.962, p > 0.05), individual income influenced intertemporal choice (f = 4.381, p < 0.05), in which participants with smaller incomes tended to choose cheaper clothing product. moreover, the system of three thinking inhibited irrationality and made students more rational when making purchase decisions in accordance with their income or pocket money. keywords clothing products customer decision-making emotional state gratification intertemporal choice shopping http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i1.387 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 27 amabel kylila et.al (the dynamic of decision-making: effect of intertemporal choice on…) option (zhou et al., 2022). the individuals' tendency to choose the ss option is called immediate gratification, while the inclination to choose the ll alternative is regarded as delayed gratification (cheng et al., 2012). intertemporal choice influenced by individual's emotional state in which different emotions can lead to different intertemporal choice tendencies however, research on the effect of emotions on intertemporal choice revealed different results (suo et al., 2021). takemura (2021) found that positive emotions will shorten the duration of the decision-making process, which is related to the activity of system one thinking which operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. moreover, happiness, one of the positive emotions, can encourage individuals to seek immediate gratification and choose the smaller but sooner (ss) option (zhou et al., 2022). negative emotions, on the other hand, will slow the individual's decision-making, as it relies on the individual's system two which is more logical, analytical, conscious and effortful (takemura, 2021). these negative emotions encourage individuals to delay gratification and choose a larger but later (ll) option (zhou et al., 2022) however, those differs from the research by (liu et al., 2013), which found that positive emotions would encourage individuals to do delayed gratification, and negative emotions would encourage immediate gratification. based on the explanation above, this research was carried out to test the role of emotional state (happy and sad) in affecting intertemporal choice in purchasing clothing products.this research is important to complement the previous research and become a reference for future research on related topics. this research is also important in providing public knowledge to consumers regarding the role of the emotional state in decisionmaking, especially in purchasing clothing products as well as helping the clothing producer create a marketing strategy that targets the consumer's emotions, which can influence purchasing decisions. this study is equipped with two research hypotheses, namely: h1: there is a role difference between happy and sad emotions in immediate gratification. h2: there is a role difference between happy and sad emotions in delayed gratification. method research design this study used an experimental method to examine the role of emotional state on intertemporal choice (valente & mackinnon, 2017). there were two experimental groups and one control group, in which participants were randomised through a random assignment, divided into these three groups, and given different treatments. experimental group 1 received treatment by inducing happy emotions, and experimental group 2 received treatment by inducing sad emotions. meanwhile, the control group did not receive any treatment. the university of surabaya ethics committee issued the ethical clearance letter, and the number for this experimental research is 104/ke/viii/2022. see figure 1. figure 1 experiment design ke 1, ke 2 and kk refer to experimental group 1 (happy group), experimental group 2 (sad group) and control group, respectively. 28 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) amabel kylila et.al (the dynamic of decision-making: effect of intertemporal choice on…) participants the study involved forty-five active students (64,4 % female, mage = 20.47, sd = 0.89, range 18-22 years old) recruited from the university of surabaya, indonesia. the sampling technique used was non-random convenience sampling, with the criteria of those with experience purchasing h&m products. data was collected from september 2022 to october 2022, all through several google form links and qr codes. procedures the films and music were tested through offline tryouts during the preparatory stage before the experiment. this tryout was conducted on 20 people to test the ability of film and music to stimulate or induce an emotion by comparing the pretest and posttest about their emotional state check. based on the tryout it was found that all films and music proved to induce emotions as expected. all participants who met the criteria were randomised using excel, divided into three groups (i.e., happy group, sad group and control group), and invited to join the line group according to their respective groups. the informed consent sheet was then given through the groups, and all participants immediately filled out and sent the informed consent to the researcher. afterwards, information about the experimental implementation schedule was conveyed to each group. several things participants needed to prepare, such as gadgets and internet networks, were also conveyed via group chat. the experiment was conducted offline. the participants were brought together in a class according to their group schedules. the participants sat inside the class, and the researcher then gave a briefing as an introduction. the researcher gave a welcome greeting and thanked the participants for their presence, and then explained the process of the experiment. after the initial instruction, participants were directed to answer the first emotional state check via the qr or google form link on the screen. this initial emotional state check was used to eliminate participants who have emotional states in the form of "very sad" (score 1) or "very happy" (score 10) because their initial emotions (before getting treatment) are considered to influence the decision-making process in the experiment. after the first emotional state check, participants were asked to complete an identity form via a qr scan or the google form link in class. while filling out the identity, the music with emotional induction according to their group was played. in experimental group 1 (ke 1), the participants played music that induced happy emotions, and the participants in experimental group 2 (ke 2) played music that induced sad emotions. music was not played in the control group (kk) class. after completing the form, the music playing in class was stopped. ke 1 and ke 2 continued watching short films that could induce specific emotions. ke 1 watched films with happy emotions induction, while ke 2 watched films with sad emotions induction. for kk, the participants did not watch any short films. after watching the short film, the whole group filled out the second emotional state check form. then, participants continued to work on the panas-x form. these two forms could be accessed via the qr code or the google form link on the screen. during the formfilling, music with emotional induction is played in ke 1 and 2 classes (except in kk). after participants had filled in these two forms, the music was stopped, and the researcher continued to direct the participants to do the posttest. the posttest used in this study is an intertemporal choice scenario case. the participants were asked to imagine that they were shopping for clothing products, in which they had to choose the price and time of purchase they were most interested in. the experimental process then continued to the last stage, which was the debriefing stage. at this stage, the researcher gave some information that needed to be conveyed or humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 29 amabel kylila et.al (the dynamic of decision-making: effect of intertemporal choice on…) clarified, which was used to neutralise the participants' emotions. first, the researcher conveyed that the real purpose of experimental research is to find out how the emotional state influences the participants' decision-making tendencies. in addition, the researcher informed the procedure for withdrawing research data for participants who wanted their data processed only after a while. however, from the three experimental schedules that were carried out, not a single participant wanted to withdraw their data after receiving the debriefing. see figure 2. figure 2 experiment flow diagram experiment manipulation happy emotions were induced by a youtube video entitled "sucrd girls mastering the senses," which shows an atmosphere full of laughter and happy expressions, considered capable of inducing happy emotions (shevchenko & bröder, 2019) in addition, this study also used the spotify playlist "happy songs everyone knows," which contains various songs with fast tempos and significant modes, which are considered capable of inducing happy emotions (zhou et al., 2022). sad emotions were induced by a youtube video entitled "ibu short movie [sad story]," which shows disharmonious relationships and scenes of crying, so it is considered capable of inducing sad emotions (shevchenko & bröder, 2019) besides videos, this study also used the spotify playlist "sad songs 2022 crying and depressing music", which contains various songs with slow tempos and minor modes, which are considered capable of inducing sad emotions (zhou et al., 2022). instruments emotional state check an emotional state check is one of the experiment materials (in the form of a google form) useful for knowing participants' emotional states during the experimental process. 30 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) amabel kylila et.al (the dynamic of decision-making: effect of intertemporal choice on…) this form only determines the participant's emotional state through one question ("if you were asked to describe your current feelings, what would you choose?"). response options include very sad (1 to 2), sad (3 to 4), neutral (5 to 6), happy (7 to 8), and very happy (9 to 10). this emotional state check was given twice before and after the treatment. this instrument was used to identify the changes in the participants' emotional states before and after the treatment. panas-x the expanded version of positive and negative affect schedule with (panas-x) created by (watson & clark, 1999) provided in a google form, was used to measure the participants' emotional state. this scale measures 11 individual emotional states in 60 statement items. of the 11 emotional states, this study only used data on items that describe happy emotions, namely joviality items (8 items), and those that describe sad emotions, namely sadness items (5 items). the subject matter expert gave the content validity of panas-x. this instrument also has internal consistency with alpha cronbach's score of 0.971 for positive affect and 0.972 for negative affect (reliable). statements on joviality items consist of happy, joyful, cheerful, delighted, energetic, enthusiastic, excited, and lively (watson & clark, 1999). meanwhile, sadness consists of being alone, blue, downhearted, lonely, and sad. participants were asked to give scores from 1 (not at all), 2 (slightly), 3 (moderate), 4 (excellent), to 5 (very). then, all the answers on the emotional aspects of joy (happy emotions) and sadness (sad emotions) items from the participants were calculated. the total score for the emotional aspects of joy ranged from 8 to 40, while the total score for the emotional aspects of sadness ranged from 5 to 25. different from emotional state checks, which focused on knowing emotional changes before and after the treatment, this instrument was addressed to collect scores obtained by participants on certain emotional aspects, the stronger these emotions are felt by participants (watson & clark, 1999). intertemporal choice scenario case based on the participants' decision, the intertemporal choice assessed using 18 purchase clothing products scenario case items whith two choices presented: immediate or delayed rewards, which were delivered via google form questionnaire as posttest. this instrument has internal consistency with alpha cronbach's 0.760 (reliable) and content validity that determined by subject matter experts. figure 3 intertemporal choice scenario case's item humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 31 amabel kylila et.al (the dynamic of decision-making: effect of intertemporal choice on…) data analysis the study involved forty-five active students (64,4 % female, mage = 20.47, sd = 0.89, range 18-22 years old) recruited from the university of surabaya, indonesia. the sampling technique used was non-random convenience sampling, with the criteria of those with experience purchasing h&m products. data was collected from september 2022 to october 2022, all through several google form links and qr codes. kruskal-wallis the hypothesis was tested trough kruskal wallis to see whether there is a significant difference in intertemporal choices among the experimental and control groups (brabar et al., 2021). this test conducted to examine whether different emotions affecting the participants' tendency to make intertemporal choices. the alternative hypothesis (h1 and h2) would be accepted if the p-value < 0.05, and vice versa. anacova this study used anacova as an additional data analysis test. besides comparing the mean between groups, anacova calculates the correlation with other variables. in anacova, the independent variable can interact with the controlled variable or the covariate. the test was conducted to compare the participants' intertemporal choices regarding their emotional states while connecting the intertemporal choice with other variables, such as sex, age, and monthly income. if the p-value > 0.05, the test shows no statistically significant interaction between the independent and covariates in their effect on the dependent variables. results the demographic data of the participants of this study are presented in table 1, which consists of sex, age, monthly income, and purchasing priority. table 1 participants' demographic data category frequency percentage sex male 16 35.6% female 29 64.4% age 18 1 2,2% 19 7 15,6% 20 9 20% 21 26 57,8% 22 2 4,4% monthly income < 500.000 9 20% 500.000-1.000.000 10 22,2% 1.000.000-1.500.000 5 11,1% 1.500.000-2.000.000 7 15,6% 32 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) amabel kylila et.al (the dynamic of decision-making: effect of intertemporal choice on…) table 1 (continued) table 1 shows that 64.4% of participants were female, and 57.8% in 21 years old. most participants' income (per month) is below rp 2,000,000.00 (68.9%), and the participants are active students. besides that, it is also known that most participants choose food as their purchasing priority (64.4%). there are only 6 participants who prioritise the purchase of clothing products, which is the topic of this experimental research. participants completed several forms, including panas-x and intertemporal choice scenario case. the results of measuring emotional state with panas-x show the level of happy and sad emotions participants felt. the following is a depiction of the results: figure 4 average emotional state – happy emotions (panas-x) 0,00 5,00 10,00 15,00 20,00 25,00 30,00 35,00 40,00 ke 1 ke 2 kk emotional state happy (jovialty) male female category frequency percentage monthly income > 2.000.000 14 31,1% purchasing priority food 29 64,4% clothing products 6 13,3% college needs 6 13,3% gadget 1 2,3% savings 1 2,3% urgent needs 2 4,4% humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 33 amabel kylila et.al (the dynamic of decision-making: effect of intertemporal choice on…) figure 5 average emotional state – sad emotions (panas-x) based on figure 4 and figure 5, the average emotional state of participants in the experimental groups followed the induction of emotions. ke 1, which received treatment with happy emotions, showed a higher joviality score than ke 2 and kk, meaning they experienced happy emotions more than the other groups. meanwhile, ke 2, which received treatment with sad emotions, showed a higher sadness score than ke 1 and kk, meaning they experienced sad emotions higher than the other groups. in addition, participants' intertemporal choice tendencies are divided into three categories: immediate gratification, delayed gratification, and immediate and delayed gratification. the following is a depiction of the results: figure 6 average score of intertemporal choice scenario case 'postest’ 0,00 5,00 10,00 15,00 20,00 25,00 ke 1 ke 2 kk emotional state sad (sadness) male female 27,00 28,00 29,00 30,00 31,00 32,00 33,00 34,00 35,00 36,00 ke 1 ke 2 kk intertemporal choice scenario case male female 34 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) amabel kylila et.al (the dynamic of decision-making: effect of intertemporal choice on…) table 2 intertemporal choice categories category frequency percentage doing delayed gratification 37 82,22% doing delayed gratification and immediate gratification 8 17,78% doing immediate gratification 0 0% based on the three categories of intertemporal choice, table 2 shows that none of the participants was categorised as doing immediate gratification (h1 cannot be analysed). most participants were categorised as having delayed gratification (82.2%). figure 6 shows that the average intertemporal choice score of participants in ke 1 (happy emotions) showed a tendency to do delayed gratification, which was higher than in ke 2 and kk. ke 2 (sad emotions) has the lowest average intertemporal choice score. in addition, it can also be seen that female participants had a higher average intertemporal choice score than male participants, who tend to do more delayed gratification. furthermore, kruskal-wallis's test was conducted using spss 26.0 to test h2 ("there is a role difference between happy and sad emotions in delayed gratification") because no participant is categorised as doing immediate gratification (see table 2). the results t showed that the p-value is 0.071 ((ꭓ2 = 5.293; p > 0.05), and there was no significant role of emotional state (happy emotions and sad emotions) on intertemporal choice, especially in purchasing clothing products (h2 rejected). additional tests were also conducted, including the anacova and kruskal wallis tests to some measurement tool data and participants' demographic data. tabel 3 anacova test measurement f sig emotional state (jovialty and sadness) 0.361 0.552 sex 6.431 0.016 age 0.604 0.442 monthly income 4.368 0.044 based on table 3, the anacova test showed no significant effect of emotional state and age on participants' intertemporal choice (p > 0.05). however, participants' sex and monthly income significantly influenced individuals' intertemporal choice (p < 0.05). kruskal wallis test was then conducted to see the difference in intertemporal choice between several categories of sex, monthly income, and age. based on table 4, the kruskal wallis test results show no significant difference in intertemporal choice between participants' income and age groups (p > 0.05). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 35 amabel kylila et.al (the dynamic of decision-making: effect of intertemporal choice on…) tabel 4 kruskal wallis test measurement kruskal-wallis h df p sex 4.099 1 0.043 monthly income 5.962 4 0.202 age 2.537 4 0.638 however, there is a significant difference in intertemporal choice between participants' sex (p < 0.05) between female and male participants, in which female participants, on average, tended to do delayed gratification (see figure 6). discussion this experimental research aims to test the role of emotional states (happy and sad emotions) in affecting individual intertemporal choice, specifically in purchasing clothing products. previous research found that positive emotions increase impulsivity in decisionmaking where individuals tend to do immediate gratification. conversely, negative emotions encourage individuals to do delayed gratification (takemura, 2021; zhou et al., 2022). however, research needs to examine the role of these emotional states in decisionmaking when buying clothing products that illustrate the phenomenon of intertemporal choice. this study has two hypotheses examining the role of happy and sad emotions on the tendency of intertemporal choice between immediate and delayed gratification. however, hypothesis 1 was not analysed because no one choose immediate gratification. nevertheless, on the hypothesis test of h2, it is known that there was no significant difference between happy and sad emotions on the tendency of participants to do delayed gratification, so the research hypothesis was rejected. this suggests that participants tended to have low risk-seeking tendencies and high loss aversion, which make participants avoid losses because losses have more 'impact' than gains on individuals (tversky & kahneman, 1992). the success in avoiding the 'risk' of loss will be considered as 'gain' (takemura, 2021). in addition, participants tended to choose alternative clothing products with lower prices, even though they had to delay their acceptance, which showed the phenomenon of delayed gratification (zhou et al., 2022). this study showed that emotion did not impact intertemporal choice (decision), which aligns wih (houdé, 2019) that emotional states is influenced by system three thinking, which has the ability to inhibit the role of emotions in the system one thinking process and diverting it in system two, which is based on reasoning. system three thinking is the metacognitive system responsible for correcting bias from stereotypes, perceptual matching, and particular belief biases.when an individual experiences mental conflict, system three thinking will take a few times to block the intuition of system one thinking, and then the individual can express his/her actual logical capacities. individuals who are initially emotional and want immediate gratification to get a small reward will be encouraged to do delayed gratification, which brings a large delayed reward. accroding to (houdé, 2019), system three thinking prevents people from bias and heuristics and leads individuals to use actual logical capacities and make people doubt their emotions, consider system one thinking response, inhibit impulsive response, and respond differently. this result indicates that participants' emotional states resulting from the induction of treatment emotions might be inhibited by system three thinking. thus, the emotions evoked from watching movies 36 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) amabel kylila et.al (the dynamic of decision-making: effect of intertemporal choice on…) and listening to music could not influence the participants' decision-making process. moreover, as the participants' system two thinking became active, it helped them to do delayed gratification related to financial activities (purchasing clothing products), which is considered a more rational decision-making process (he, 2023). furthermore, intertemporal choice is also influenced by prioritising the types of products purchased. the findings indicated that the majority of participants prioritised their spending on food, whereas only small number of them prioritised their spending on clothes. the small number of participants who prioritise purchasing clothing products indicates a low level of fashion involvement among the participants. fashion involvement shows individual attachment to fashion-related concepts, including awareness, reaction, interest, and knowledge (dhurup, 2014). that can directly or indirectly influence impulse purchasing (liapati et al., 2015). low fashion involvement in most of these participants might creates a tendency to avoid impulsive buying of fashion products, or in other words, not to do immediate gratification. moreover, covid-19 is considered to have impacts on consumers' socio‐economic status, including customer purchase behavior in which people prioritise their spending on primary needs. past research found that there was an increase of more than 40% in the need to buy food before the covid-19 era meanwhile, the need to buy clothes for students decreased by around 25% from before the covid-19 era (utari et al., 2020) we also found that income of participants with the status of primarily unemployed students affected the tendency of their intertemporal choice. kruskal wallis test shows no difference between several monthly income ranges with the intertemporal choice tendency. the difference is caused by most participants having an income below rp 2,000,000 which is less than the average monthly income of indonesians. theoretically, economic circumstances influence individual intertemporal choices (mishra & sharestha, 2019) research by (hanum, 2017) found a positive relationship between the amount of student income and there found a positive relationship between the amount of student income and their consumption behavior. the post-test intertemporal choice scenario case used in this study shows a wide selection of clothing products at a high price compared to the participant's income. the finding differs from research by (mani et al., 2013; oshri et al., 2019), who found that poverty is associated with decision-making preferences for immediate gratification as an impact of cognitive overload. in addition, we found that sex significantly influences participants' intertemporal choice. the kruskal wallis test result showed that male and female participants significantly differ in intertemporal choice. based on the average, the tendency to do delayed gratification is higher in female than male participants. this alighn with (mcleish & oxoby, 2007) that found that female participants have a higher level of patience when making decisions, whereas male participants will make decisions that seem more significant now. the study also found positive emotions that reduce impulsivity and increase the selfcontrol of female participants, making them more focused on long-term goals. following what happened in happy experiement group, female participants who received treatment with induced happy emotions had the highest average intertemporal choice, which means they tend to have delayed gratification when experiencing happy emotions. although the research hypothesis cannot be proven statistically, happy group has the highest average for delayed gratification based on the post-test results. in contrast, sad group showed the lowest average for delayed gratification. based on the emotional state induced through treatment according to the group, it is known that sad emotions have a more decisive influence on immediate gratification than the influence of happy emotions. achar et al., (2016) found that impulsivity when purchasing will increase when feeling sad and ultimately lead individuals to immediate gratification which the result was consistent with sad experiement group which did delay gratification less than happy group. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 37 amabel kylila et.al (the dynamic of decision-making: effect of intertemporal choice on…) we did not measure the participants' initial emotional state before to treatment, which may have affected the treatment's potential to produce emotions in the subsequent steps of the experimental process. further study needs to measure the participants' initial emotional state prior to the treatment to ensure that the difference in the participants' emotional state is influenced by the treatment. conclusion this experimental research found that happy and sad emotions did not significantly differ in individuals' immediate and delayed gratification tendencies, especially when buying clothing products. based on the post-test average, participants chose the alternative of buying the product at a lower price despite waiting some time to purchase. the role of emotional state induced in this study became insignificant because the participants used system three thinking. system three thinking inhibited system one thinking, so the emotional states could not affect the decision-making process. then, system two thinking is activated to encourage participants to make rational decisions and make participants avoid detrimental immediate gratification alternatives and choose delayed gratification alternatives because they are considered the most rational. acknowledgment the authors thank the university of surabaya for the internal grants obtained and all students willing to participate in this data collection experiment. declarations author contribution. first author contributed to designing the study, collecting data, and writing the draft manuscript. second author contributed to supervising study design, consulting data analysis, reviewing manuscripts, and finalizing manuscripts . funding statement. this research was funded by the research and community service institution (lppm) of the university of surabaya. conflict of interest. the authors declare no 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(2022a). music-induced emotions influence intertemporal decision making. cognition and emotion, 36(2), 211–229. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2021.1995331 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 22 (1), february, 1-12 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas 10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.755 workforce agility in startup employees: the role of psychological empowerment, emotional intelligence and job autonomy hasna uzzakiyah1*, galang lufityanto2 1faculty of psychology, ahmad dahlan university, yogyakarta, indonesia 2 department of psychology, college of liberal arts, wenzhou-kean university corresponding author: hasna@psy.uad.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction a competitive market, unexpected situations, and fast-paced changes are faced by companies nowadays (varshney & varshney, 2020) especially in the post-covid era. this situation forces organizations to swiftly adapt to the challenges and opportunities in the unstable business environment (alviani et al., 2024). due to this situation, employee capability should be increased by companies to respond to the changing environment. workforce agility (wfa) is defined as the ability of workers to respond to rapid environmental changes and is divided into three aspects: proactivity, adaptability, and resilience (sherehiy & karwowski, 2014). it is considered vital for individuals facing dynamic situations and maintaining a competitive edge. according to the data, wfa has been proven to help companies adopt new ways of working (nww) in manufacturing companies in response to the changing environment (cornelis & febriansyah, 2023). in the small and medium-sized enterprises (sme) sector, wfa is also recognized for helping companies survive and grow postarticle info abstract article history received september 10, 2024 revised february 08, 2025 accepted february 12, 2025 workforce agility (wfa) is crucial for startup companies, particularly in unexpected situations. research shows that wfa significantly contributes to an organization's ability to thrive amidst uncertainty and competitive challenges. wfa can be influenced by both internal and external factors. in this study, psychological empowerment (pe) and emotional intelligence (ei) are represented the internal factors, while job autonomy (ja) served as the external factor. this research aims to explore the relationships between pe and ei on wfa with ja as grouping variable. a quantitative approach was utilized, involving 180 employees from various startups. multiple regression analysis was conducted to assess the relationships between pe, ei, and wfa, categorized into three levels of ja. the results indicated that pe and ei simultaneously have a significant positive impact on wfa. the model explained 52% of the variance (r² = 0.52, f=93.8, p< 0.01). the study concluded that enhancing pe and ei among startup employees can improve their wfa. however, when ja levels segmented participants, only those in the low and medium ja groups exhibited a relationship between pe and ei on wfa. thus, pe and ei can only increase wfa in subjects with low and medium level of ja. keywords emotional intelligence job autonomy psychological empowerment startup workforce agility mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.755 mailto:hasna@psy.uad.ac.id https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 2 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) hasna uzzakiyah et.al (workforce agility in startup employees: the role of...) pandemic by implementing cross-training, work design, and employee empowerment techniques within the organization (elanthi & dhanabhakyam, 2021). although wfa has become necessary for companies to respond quickly to changes, the literature examining wfa in the startup sector is limited. at the same time, it is known that the number of startups in indonesia has been growing each year. unfortunately, not all startups in indonesia achieve success in the first year. a study shows that a high startup failure rate is faced by indonesia, with 75% being confronted with difficulties in scaling their business (afdi & purwanggono, 2017). according to the study, the failures of startups in indonesia are attributed to the lack of appropriate team capabilities to build a business, caused by a lack of experience in dealing with change, difficulty finding investors, and a lack of business experience (singgih & sari, 2024). therefore, a team with high wfa is required in the startup sector for long-term business continuity. a preliminary study indicated that wfa is needed for startups in indonesia. environmental changes have made it necessary for startups in indonesia to change products or services to survive (cnn indonesia, 2020). therefore, it was revealed by several startups in preliminary studies that they need people who are innovative, creative, and adaptable (resource person-1), employees who are willing to act without being ordered by superiors, flexible to change (resource person-2), and employees who can complete tasks quickly, effectively, without reducing the quality of work (resource person-3). the conclusion of the preliminary study shows that the changing business direction in startups requires human resources (hr) that are listed in aspects of wfa (sherehiy & karwowski, 2014). based on previous research, wfa is more studied from the external side, such as the role of technology (youndt et al., 1996), organizational structure (alavi et al., 2014), and work organization (sherehiy, 2008). on the other hand, wfa literature that discusses the internal side of individuals is still limited. individual internal factors need to be developed so that individuals can increase independence in work and not depend on environmental factors (thomas & velthouse, 1990). internal factors in employees play a more significant role in eliciting expected behavior in the work environment than external factors (olafsen et al., 2015). this is because internal factors arise within the individual due to liking and satisfaction with the work done. meanwhile, external factors depend on environmental factors that encourage individuals to work (beqiri, 2019). this internal factor is essential, especially when companies face significant changes. of course, this also impacts startup companies, which are considered the most vulnerable actors in the world economy (kuckertz et al., 2020). therefore, companies must pay attention to individual internal factors to produce optimal performance even when the company undergoes system changes. internal factors in this study are represented by psychological empowerment (pe), known to enhance wfa. previous research has demonstrated that pe contributes to increasing wfa among the public and private sectors (muduli & pandya, 2018). however, this relationship has not yet been explored in startup companies. pe is defined as an individual’s intrinsic motivation to perform their work role, comprising four cognitive factors: meaning, competence, impact, and self-determination. individuals with high pe are often capable of working independently without depending on direction and rewards from others (thomas & velthouse, 1990). consequently, their task completion speed increases, their initiative in problem-solving grows, and their resilience when facing challenges improves (thomas & velthouse, 1990). the influence of pe on wfa is also shaped by the provision of job autonomy (ja) to employees (scott & bruce, 1994). ja allows employees to make decisions and complete tasks independently without overly relying on superiors. this autonomy positively impacts pe, as employees feel that they feel the sufficient ability to tackle problems (wang & netemeyer, 2002). the individual motivation to solve problems humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 3 hasna uzzakiyah et.al (workforce agility in startup employees: the role of...) independently can expedite responses to environmental changes (condry & chambers, 1978), because guidance and coordination from superiors are unnecessary (gunasekaran, 1999). emotional intelligence is another internal factor that can influence wfa (hosein & yousefi, 2012). emotional intelligence (ei) refers to the capacity to manage one's emotions and respond suitably to the feelings of others. it encompasses four key aspects: selfawareness, self-control, self-motivation, empathy, and social relationships (goleman, 1998). people with high ei often adapt more readily to different situations (goleman, 1998). thus, ei is seen as a crucial factor when individuals face rapid changes in the organizational environment (vakola et al., 2004). by understanding their own emotions and others, individuals can communicate ideas and goals more effectively (vakola, 2013), enabling organizations to better prepare for competitive situations (hosein & yousefi, 2012). the relationship between ei and wfa is also influenced by how the organization provides ja to employees. ja allows individuals to express genuine emotions and encourages proactive behavior (cooper & sawaf, 1997). conversely, individuals who are not given ja are limited in expressing emotions due to their fear of a response from supervisors or superiors. therefore, ja is needed to develop fundamental emotional reactions and encourage employees to take the initiative in responding to environmental changes. based on theoretical studies, wfa is considered as a factor that startup employees must have when facing dynamic changes (sherehiy & karwowski, 2014). employees with a high wfa are likely to see a change as a challenge and take positive opportunities from the change (zhang & sharifi, 2000). internal factors such as pe and ei are known to increase wfa (hosein & yousefi, 2012; muduli & pandya, 2018). in addition, external factors such as ja is considered to influence the role of pe and ei on wfa (abraham, 2000; scott & bruce, 1994). this study aims to determine the role of pe and ei on wfa in all subjects and to examine the role of pe and ei on wfa based on ja type, especially in startup companies. in the future, this research can be used as a reference for startup companies that want to develop wfa based on individual internal and external factor. existing research on wfa has predominantly explored pe and ei separately, with limited attention to their combined effects. this study investigates the gap by integrating pe & ei into wfa. additionally, while prior studies have primarily treated wfa as a general trait, this study considers how different levels of ja shape these relationships. furthermore, unlike most studies that are conducted on wfa in the manufacturing sector, this study extends the investigation to startup companies, offering new insight into wfa within dynamic work environments. based on previous theoretical studies, the hypothesis is stated as follows: (1) pe and ei impact on wfa across subjects; (2) pe and ei impact on wfa for subjects with low ja; (3) pe and ei impact on wfa for subjects with medium ja; and (4) pe and ei impact on wfa for subjects with high ja method this research method utilized a quantitative approach by distributing surveys through the google form application. in this research, pe and ei were considered predictor variables that positively influence the criterion variable wfa. meanwhile, ja was used as a grouping variable, affecting the impact of pe and ei on wfa. the ja variables were categorized into low, medium, and high levels. 4 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) hasna uzzakiyah et.al (workforce agility in startup employees: the role of...) participants the study's population comprised startup employees actively working for the company. a purposive sampling technique was utilized, focusing on employees with specific characteristics: those working at startups for 0 to 5 years, involved in technology services, exhibiting a dynamic organizational culture, having completed their probation period, and aged between 20 and 35. it has been noted that most young employees in this age prefer working at startups due to the opportunities for career growth, risk-taking culture, and high levels of innovation that appeal to young employees (ouimet & zarutskie, 2014). table 1 characteristics of the research subject category low ja (%) n=30 medium ja (%) n=114 high ja (%) n=36 total (%) n=180 gender man 61.5% 57.9% 77.8% 61% woman 38.5% 42.1% 22.2% 39% employee status full time 90% 86% 88.9% 87% part time 3.3% 7.9% 5.6% 7% freelance 6.7% 6.1% 5.6% 6% startup type to 13.3% 19.3% 19.4% 19% e-commerce 10% 14% 2.8% 11% service 23.3% 28.1% 33.3% 28% education 10% 12.3% 13.9% 12% tourism 16.7% 5.3% 11.1% 8% other 26.7% 21.1% 19.4% 22% length of work (years) 0 – 1 46.7% 61.4% 66.7% 60% 1 – 2 33.3% 22.8% 25% 25% 2 – 3 3.3% 12.3% 2.8% 9% 3 – 4 6.7% 2.6% 5.6% 4% >4 10% 0.9% 0% 2% note: % = percentage; ja = job autonomy the total number of subjects in this research is 180 employees who are currently working in a startup companies. the sample size was determined based on the recommendations of hair et al. (2010) who indicated that the minimum required sample size for regression analysis depends on the number of independent variables. they stated that each independent variable requires a minimum total sample of 15 to 20 subjects. therefore, the inclusion of 180 subjects was appropriate for this research. the full characteristics of the subject can be seen in table 1 and table 2 table 2 advanced characteristics of research subjects note: r = average; sd = standard deviation; ja = job autonomy; wfa = workforce agility; pe = psychological empowerment; ei = emotional intelligence variable all data low ja medium ja high ja r sd distance r sd r sd r sd wfa 121.53 15.49 88-161 108.93 12.65 120.36 12.45 135.75 15.61 pe 49.29 4.67 35-60 44.63 4.57 48.43 4.88 55.88 4.38 ei 38.77 5.92 28-52 36.90 3.23 38.32 3.95 41.72 6.30 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 5 hasna uzzakiyah et.al (workforce agility in startup employees: the role of...) instruments the wfa scale in this study utilizes a version adapted by the mind, brain & behavior laboratory at the faculty of psychology, universitas gadjah mada. this scale consists of 23 items reflecting proactivity, adaptability, and resilience. the wfa scale's validity is based on the content validity of aiken v, which has a threshold value of 0.63 (aiken, 1985). the test results indicate that the aiken v values range from 0.75 to 0.97 demonstrating validity. the wfa scale was administered to 60 subjects with characteristics similar to the participants. the results show that the reliability of cronbach’s alpha is 0.89, indicating it is reliable or consistent (gudmundsson, 2009). this scale is assessed using a 7-point likert scale, ranging from 1 (never) to 7 (always). the scale used to measure pe is based on spreitzer (1995) which was adapted by nastiti (2015). this scale consists of 12 items that represent four aspects: meaning, competence, selfdetermination, and impact. the validity of the pe scale is determined using aiken v content validity, with a minimum value of 0.63 (aiken, 1985). test results indicate that the aiken v value for the pe scale ranges from 0.79 to 1.00, which is considered valid. the pe scale was administered to 60 subjects with characteristics similar to the participants. the results show that the reliability, as measured by cronbach's alpha, is 0.92, which is regarded as reliable or consistent (gudmundsson, 2009). responses on this scale are evaluated using a 5-point scale that ranges from 1 (very inappropriate) to 5 (very appropriate). the scale used to measure ei refers to goleman et al. (2007) adapted by santyafatni (2018). this scale consists of 13 items representing five aspects: self-awareness, motivation, self-regulation, empathy, and relationship management or social skills. the validity of the ei scale utilizes aiken v content with a value threshold of 0.63 (aiken, 1985). the test results show that the aiken v value on the ei scale moves from 0.76 – 0.84, which is considered valid. the ei scale was tested on 60 subjects with the same characteristics as the study subjects. the results show that the reliability of cronbach alpha is 0.70, which is considered reliable or consistent (gudmundsson, 2009). the response in this scale is measured using a 4-point scale with a range of 1 (very inappropriate) to 4 (very appropriate). the scale for measuring ja is based on breaugh (1985) and was adapted by saragih (2011). the ja scale includes 9 items that represent three aspects: work methods, work scheduling, and work criteria. saragih (2011) stated that the ja scale has satisfactory goodness fit indices for the context of workers in the industrial field. based on the cfa results, this scale has an rmsea of 0.00, a cfi of 1.00, and a tli of 1.03. the value indicates that this scale has been constructively validated. the ja scale was tested on 60 subjects with the same characteristics as the study subjects. the results show that the reliability of cronbach alpha is 0.81, which is considered reliable or consistent (gudmundsson, 2009). responses on this scale were measured using a 7-point scale ranging from 1 strongly disagree to 7 strongly agree. data analysis the data analysis used in this study was multiple linear regression to determine the role of pe and ei on wfa. next, to assess the role of pe and ei on wfa within the ja category, the data analysis employed was multiple regression with multigroup. before performing regression, this study tested assumptions: residual normality, multicollinearity and linearity. statistical analysis was conducted using the statistical package for social science (spss) program version 25. 6 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) hasna uzzakiyah et.al (workforce agility in startup employees: the role of...) results the categorization of research data is carried out using an empirical approach that uses references to subject data. the categorization used is by dividing the data into three levels according to (azwar, 2011). the results of data categorization are listed in table 3. table 3 number of subjects based on data categorization of each variable category formula wfa pe ei ja low x < m-1sd 26 20 21 30 medium m-1sd x < m+1sd 127 120 124 114 high m+1sd x 27 40 35 36 note: x: sample raw score; m: average distribution in sample; sd: standard deviation; wfa = workforce agility; pe = psychological empowerment; ei = emotional intelligence; ja = job autonomy. the correlation matrix in this study is listed in table 4. the results show that the ei positively correlated with the wfa variable of 0.53 (p<0.01). the pe positively correlated with the wfa variable of 0.67 (p<0.01), while the pe and ei simultaneously positively correlated with the wfa of 0.45 (p<0.01). table 4 correlation matrix of predictor variables to criteria variables variable m sd 1 2 wfa 121.53 15.49 ei 38.77 4.67 0.53** pe 49.29 5.92 0.67** 0.45** note: **significant with p<0.01; *significant with p<0.05; m=mean; sd=standard deviation; wfa=workforce agility; pe=psychological empowerment; ei=emotional intelligence to answer hypothesis 1 in this study, the analysis used is multiple regression analysis, while to answer hypotheses 2 4, the analysis used is multiple regression analysis with multigroup. the results of the analysis are summarized in table 5. table 5 regression analysis results ja n ei p-value pe p-value r-squared f df all data 180 0.28** p< 0.01 0.54** p< 0.01 51.5% 93.8 2.18 low 30 0.42** p< 0.01 0.44** p< 0.01 47.4% 12.14 2.27 medium 114 0.28** p< 0.01 0.46** p< 0.01 35.3% 30.26 2.11 high 36 0.30 p= 0.09 0.34 p= 0.06 31.6% 7.62 2.33 note: ** significant with p<0.01 ; * significant with p<0.05; pe=psychological empowerment; ei=emotional intelligence; ja=job autonomy table 5, results from the multiple regression analysis indicated that variations in the pe and ei variables could account for 52% of the variations in the wfa variables across all subjects. meanwhile, another 48% were influenced by other variables not included in this research. this study demonstrates that pe and ei significantly impact on wfa, with values of (f=9.38; p<0.01). additionally, ei accounted for a role of 0.28 (p<0.01) and pe accounted for 0.54 (p<0.01) in relation to wfa. an increase of 1 unit in the standard deviation of ei will lead to an increase of 0.28 units in the standard deviation of the wfa score, while an increase of 1 unit in the standard deviation of pe will result in an increase of 0.54 units in the humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 7 hasna uzzakiyah et.al (workforce agility in startup employees: the role of...) standard deviation of the wfa score. therefore, the study's results support the first hypothesis, indicating the impact of pe and ei on wfa. table 5 indicates that, for subjects with low ja, variations in the pe and ei variables accounted for 47% of the variations in the wfa variables, while the remaining 53% were influenced by factors not included in this research model. in the low ja category, both pe and ei significantly contribute to wfa with values (f= 12.14; p<0.01). additionally, ei has a role of 0.42 (p<0.01), while pe's role is 0.44 (p<0.01) in relation to wfa. an increase of 1 unit in standard deviation of ei will result in an increase of 0.42 units standard deviation of wfa score, while an increase of 1 standard deviation of pe will lead to an increase of 0.44 units in the standard deviation of wfa score. additionally, the analysis results indicated that both pe and ei significantly impacted on the moderate ja category. in the subject category with moderate ja, the variation in pe and ei variables explained 35% of the variation in wfa variables, while the remaining 65% was influenced by variables not included in this research model. in the medium ja category, pe and ei together play a significant role in wfa with values (f= 30.26; p< 0.01). furthermore, ei has a role of 0.28 (p< 0.01) and pe of 0.46 (p<0.01) to wfa. that is, an increase of 1 standard deviation in ei will result in an increase of 0.28 units standard deviation of wfa score, while an increase of 1 standard deviation of pe will lead to an increase of 0.46 units in the standard deviation of wfa score. meanwhile, the analysis results indicated that pe and ei did not significantly contribute to wfa in the high ja category. in addition to the hypothesis test, further analyses were conducted to determine the average differences of each variable across ja categories. additional analyses performed using anova analysis techniques are listed in table 6. table 6 summary of additional analyses of pe, ei and wfa variables from all ja categories variable ja category n average f df p pe low 30 44.63 51.15 2 p< 0.01 medium 114 48.44 177 high 36 55.89 ei low 30 36.90 11.27 2 p< 0.01 medium 114 38.33 177 high 36 41.72 wfa low 30 108.93 35.10 2 p< 0.01 medium 114 120.36 177 high 36 135.75 table 6 presents analysis results showing that in general there are significant ja category differences (p<0.01) in pe variables (f= 51.15; p<0.01); ei variables (f= 11.27; p<0.01) and wfa variables (f= 35.10; p<0.01) where the high ja category has the highest value among other categories. discussion this research examines the role of pe and ei to wfa based on ja level among employees working in startup companies in technology services. the majority of subjects involved in this study were male, worked full time, engaged in technological services and worked for less than one year. 8 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) hasna uzzakiyah et.al (workforce agility in startup employees: the role of...) the results found that there is a positive relationship between pe and wfa in all startup employees. individuals with high pe tend to have high intrinsic motivation in doing work. high intrinsic motivation can make individuals feel empowered and able to make a major contribution to the organization. this perception is what keeps individuals motivated to contribute proactively and flexibly in the face of change without orders from superiors. conversely, individuals with low pe feel less empowered and able to contribute to the organization, so initiative and proactive behavior do not naturally arise in individuals. the results of this study support the findings of several studies regarding the relationship between pe to wfa in employees both in the public and private sectors (muduli & pandya, 2018), in which intrinsic motivation in work can lead to proactive and resilient behavior (thomas & velthouse, 1990), and also intrinsically motivated individuals will do work without fixating on external factors, rather it is due to the internal impulse of the individual (ryan & deci, 2000). thus, even though organizations undergo system changes, people with high intrinsic motivation still perform best in the work environment. pe becomes an important factor that needs to be developed to improve wfa, especially when startup companies face significant environmental changes. significant changes can impact changes in organizational systems such as changes in working hours, technology systems (gigauri, 2020), and salary reductions due to the recession (estrada, 2020). this change will certainly affect employee well-being, so it impacts decreasing performance (gigauri, 2020). therefore, startups need to increase intrinsic motivation that can encourage individuals to do work activities because the work is meaningful to them. this satisfaction will later be rewarded internally for individuals, so they do not have to rely on external rewards to motivate them to work. other findings in the study suggest that ei plays a positive role in wfa. the positive results of ei’s role in wfa can be explained in several ways. first, for startup workers, facing change has become a daily routine (hamel & välikangas, 2003). this change requires employees to be able to quickly adjust to existing changes and provide innovation to the company’s progress. these demands sometimes make some employees depressed and stressed because it is not easy for them to work with several possibilities and uncertain situations. however, individuals with high ei tend to be able to understand their emotions, making it easier for them to manage stress, anxiety, and worry that arise when facing pressure. second, when confronting change, startup companies need good teamwork, so that employees can respond to changes more effectively. individuals with high ei tend to cooperate with colleagues, because they can respond appropriately to other people’s emotions and communicate ideas and goals effectively (vakola, 2013). thus, individuals with high ei can help organizations to be better prepared for competitive situations (hosein & yousefi, 2012). the third finding in this study revealed that pe and ei together play a significant role in wfa only in the low and medium ja categories. however, pe and ei did not significantly increase wfa in the high ja category. in addition, this study found that the results of the anova test on the average variables pe, ei and wfa in each ja category showed significant differences. from these data, it shows that the high ja category has the highest average of pe, ei, and wfa compared to other categories. in the context of startup companies, pe and ei have insignificant roles in increasing wfa among employees with the high ja category can be caused by several things. employees with high ja tend to have full control over the work (nie et al., 2023). this allows them to make decisions regarding the work they do. pe involves feelings of control and influence over one’s work. thus, employees with high levels of ja already have significant control in making decisions regarding their work, which is a major component of pe. therefore, additional pe may not provide a significant control or influence for employees humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 9 hasna uzzakiyah et.al (workforce agility in startup employees: the role of...) with high ja. on the other hand, ei doesn’t play a significant role in increasing wfa. this is because employees with high ja, like ceos, tend to have greater responsibilities than those with low and medium ja. they are responsible for making decisions and guiding organizations toward long-term objectives (papadakis, 2006). this explanation demonstrates that employees with high ja need other skills to boost wfa rather than improving ei. however, this study has some limitations; specifically, it involves subjects who work in startup companies, which vary significantly in valuation levels in indonesia. in fact, differences in valuation levels also influence variations in subject characteristics among startup companies. additional research is necessary to identify the level of startup will be studied, ensuring that the results are more representative of specific types of startups. the results of this study indicated among employees with high ja, pe and ei did not influence wfa. further research is anticipated to investigate other factors, such as strategic thinking, leadership, and the capability to forecast the market, which are likely to enhance agility in employees with high ja. conclusion psychological empowerment and emotional intelligent play a role in workforce agility in startup employees. meanwhile, psychological empowerment and emotional intelligent play a role in workforce agility only in the low and medium job autonomy categories, while the high job autonomy category does not show a significant role of psychological empowerment and emotional intelligent in workforce agility. declarations author contribution. first author: idea conceptualization, review literature, data collection, and writing the article. second author: guide the research framework, review and improve the manuscript. funding statement. this research was conducted with independent funding from author. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references abraham, r. 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(2000). a methodology for achieving agility in manufacturing organisations. international journal of operations & production management, 20(4), 496–513. https://doi.org/10.1108/01443570010314818 https://doi.org/10.2307/258687 https://doi.org/10.1080/14697017.2013.768436 https://doi.org/10.1108/02683940410526082 https://doi.org/10.1002/joe.22012 https://doi.org/10.1177/00970302030003003 https://doi.org/10.2307/256714 https://doi.org/10.1108/01443570010314818 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 21 (1), february 2024, 40-52 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i1.472 why stay despite intimate partner violence? lived experiences of victims in positions of strength solly matshonisa seeletse sefako makgatho health sciences university, south africa corresponding author: solly.seeletse@smu.ac.za this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction almost every community has victims of domestic violence (woodlock, 2017). domestic violence seems to have received little or no attention in south africa during the apartheid years, as there were no specific acts directed directly at it, despite intimate partners reporting cases of abuse at police stations and cases of partner murders occurring at high rates, especially femicide. this condition means that domestic violence has become widespread. when democracy dawned in 1994, the south african government started to pay attention and saw it proper to tackle the problem head-on. as a result, the government introduced and implemented the domestic violence act in the year 1998 to address domestic violence, including intimate partner violence problems, in an attempt to stop partners from abusing and killing each other (domestic violence act, 1998). the government also brought a new phenomenon of protecting every citizen from any form of harassment, but mainly as an effort article info abstract article history received june 29, 2023 revised october 1, 2023 accepted february 6, 2024 intimate partner violence is a problem in every country worldwide, including south africa. this qualitative study aimed to gather insights into the lived experiences of victims of intimate partner violence, who were the financial providers in their families and the more stable in terms of careers but remained in the relationships for prolonged periods. five face-to-face interviews were conducted with individual participants from pretoria township communities in the gauteng province of south africa. the interviews were transcribed verbatim and then analyzed using the thematic content analysis. the themes generated from the victims’ lived experiences explain their disempowerment. the themes that emerged were the aggressor being untouchable, fear for one’s life, feeling helpless, desperate and vulnerable, self-blame, and being trapped in the relationship. the experience of being abused, especially by a completely weaker partner, was shattered and associated with a helpless life during the relationship. therefore, the victims of intimate partner violence need exposure beyond the police and guidance in social work services that can help them seek alternative ways to escape intimate partner violence. people need to be empowered to have courage, to be brave, to have knowledge about resourceful institutions, and to be independent. keywords domestic violence; fear; threat; vulnerable. mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i1.472 mailto:solly.seeletse@smu.ac.za https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 41 solly matshonisa seeletse (why stay despite intimate partner violence? lived experiences of…) to fortify the efforts of the domestic violence act by introducing the protection from harassment act in 2011 (the protection from harassment act, 2011). south africa still observes domestic violence, including intimate partner violence, in particular, is escalating. with the ineffective justice system for the victims of domestic violence, including intimate partner violence, these two acts remain ineffective, and the number of victims is bound to escalate. in the meantime, victims of domestic violence, including intimate partner violence, face many life challenges that threaten their physical, mental, and social health, resulting in a higher prevalence of stress and mental instability (stark, 2012). domestic violence occurs in many forms within the domestic sphere. the united kingdom government defines domestic violence as any incident or pattern of incidents of bullying, controlling, making threats, violence, or abuse of anyone who is, or was, an intimate partner or family member, irrespective of gender or sexuality (lloyd, 2018). domestic violence can incorporate forms of emotional, financial, psychological, physical, and sexual, among others (domestic violence and abuse: new definition, 2018). being exposed to domestic violence engenders several responses and needs (etherington & baker, 2018), resulting in anyone experiencing domestic violence, including intimate partner violence, displaying difficulties in their daily activities. intimate partner violence victims experience plentiful challenges and barriers when they want to leave abusive relationships. it seems worse in the case of ethnic minorities and immigrants. moreover, additional barriers to leaving abusive relationships include institutional racism, immigration laws, culture and religion, issues of cultural competence, and lack of diversity within frontline services (hulley et al., 2023). such barriers increase feelings of fear, threat, isolation, and powerlessness. abusers also further tighten the barriers to extend their reign of terror and control. as a result, victims stay in an abusive relationship or face further threats and consequences if they attempt to leave. intimate partner violence survivors need, and some even seek help. an initial step is identifying how intimate partner violence victims employ their sense of individual agency (waller & bent-goodley, 2023). many intimate partner violence victims usually end up being murdered, while others have to fight to be free from their tormentors. intimate partner violence can be disastrous to family, children, or new dating partners, and some can even die in resultant homicides (kafka et al., 2023). in the us, intimate partner violence abusers also sometimes die during law enforcement response to intimate partner violence, and others by suicide after committing homicide. intimate partner violence is widespread, costly, and associated with increased morbidity and mortality, with the short-term and long-term effects being on the physical, mental health, and social well-being of those affected and their children (miller & mccaw, 2019). more research is needed to understand intimate partner violence's various dynamics in different contexts, even though healthcare systems attempt to educate about intimate partner violence, including prevention, identification of intimate partner violence victims, intervention, and recovery. social and legislative policies related to intimate partner violence exist. still, intimate partner violence prevails more in women than conditions such as diabetes, depression, or breast cancer, but it often remains unnoticed by health professionals (miller & mccaw, 2019). the case of the us shows that after leaving the abusive partners, some victims continue to be victimized, such as nonphysical violence, which affects mental health (redding et al., 2023). it is common to be stalked, where protective orders have been issued. the abusers often find ways to torment their intimate partner violence victims using many nonphysical ways that have adverse health outcomes, mainly of a mental nature (redding et al., 2023). intimate partner violence in canada, mainly migrants from several countries, showed that the abuser follows the victim even after separation, continuing the abuse (giesbrecht et al., 2023). intimate partner violence abuse consists of physical, sexual, emotional, economic, and legal forms. even after separation, the victims experienced coercive control, isolation, surveillance, 42 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) solly matshonisa seeletse (why stay despite intimate partner violence? lived experiences of…) stalking, and harassment. the weakness of these victims was their status as newcomers to the areas, poor social connections, and limited or no english language proficiency (giesbrecht et al., 2023). leaving an abusive relationship is a difficult process for all survivors (carthy et al., 2023). for men, this can be particularly challenging due to the current knowledge and support for survivors being heavily influenced by a feminist discourse despite a growing body of research that examines men’s experiences. this condition raises concerns about how men make sense of abuse, where they seek support for injuries and psychological distress, and what services are available to them to help them move on from abuse. narrative interviews with 12 midlife and older men (aged 45–65 years) who had experienced intimate partner violence from a female were conducted to explore their journey of leaving the abuse (carthy et al., 2023). the men’s stories revealed themes of how they made sense of what was happening to them (legitimacy as a survivor and self-help), their experiences of service readiness to respond to male victimization (discrimination from police, legal system set up to support women, and service readiness for males), and how men can leave abuse (postseparation abuse and support from friends and family). implications of the findings demonstrate that many services are still not equipped to support male survivors; therefore, they found it difficult to comprehend their actions as abuse. this condition seemed to have been negatively reinforced by ineffective services and stereotypical beliefs about abuse. however, informal support through friends and family is a powerful tool in supporting men to leave abusive relationships. more effort is needed to increase awareness of male survivors and ensure that services, including legal systems services, are inclusive. it is difficult to leave an abusive relationship, especially for male victims (carthy et al., 2023). this condition is thought to mean that men assign meanings differently from women to intimate partner violence abuse. systems have been developed to cater to women intimate partner violence survivors, but there are no platforms and services equipped to support male survivors. the case of intimate partner violence victims seeking help when trying to leave their abusive partners has been studied among african countries to determine the dynamics of intimate partner violence (selestine et al., 2023). in africa, mostly, women are shamed when they leave their partners, even due to abuse. this condition then makes some women stay. in developed areas of africa, though, victims who attempt to leave often lead to abuser intensifying abuse, making it even more difficult to leave. fear of further abuse, shame, and acceptance of intimate partner violence often compel the victims to remain in abusive relationships (selestine et al., 2023). in cases of most men who are being abused by women, children become the tools of the abuse (bates & hine, 2023). while most men find it difficult to leave, those who manage to leave tend to be abused even more, mostly emotionally. coercive control is usually applied when women force children to alienate from their fathers. women would manipulate systems such as false allegations against men. manipulation is often the adverse outcome: direct contract manipulation (such as relocation and contract control), systems manipulation (such as lying in court and school settings), children manipulation, and other varied violence contexts such as controlling, physical, and psychological manipulations. when these happen before the man leaves, he is sometimes unable to leave. even though people may question why the abuser abuses or how the victim could be helped, it is more common to ask why the victim does not leave the victim or why they stay in the relationship (hulley et al., 2023); there are several barriers to safety in an abusive relationship, as leaving can be more dangerous. the common barriers to leaving an abusive partner include considerations for children, connections, pressures, economic necessity, justice system failure, fear, homelessness, hope of change, immigration status, isolation, lacking resources, physical harm, discrimination, shame, lacking shelter, and threats (femiajao et al., 2020; kiamanesh & hauge, 2019; monterrosa, 2021; tonsing & barn, 2017). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 43 solly matshonisa seeletse (why stay despite intimate partner violence? lived experiences of…) hence, an intimate partner violence survivor needs to consider various factors carefully before reacting to an abusive partner. intimate partner violence perpetrators may hurt the children of their victims to punish the victim who tries to leave. some victims may feel so connected to the tormentor that they do not wish them arrest or any harm. pressures from family, religion, or culture, and even shame, may also drive the intimate partner violence victim to stay in the marriage. another factor keeping intimate partner violence victims in a relationship is when the abuser is the provider of the family, where without the abuse, there cannot be food or other life support. this condition includes victims who lack, such as having no resources, no shelter or home, and are entirely reliant on the perpetrator. the inadequacy of the legal system failing the victims, as the perpetrators, are not punished and they repeat their abuses, causes the victims to stay due to fear. the victims may fear that the actions that the intimate partner violence perpetrators may take against them could lead to retaliation. hope and belief that the abusive partner may change makes some victims stay. an immigrant who fears deportation may endure intimate partner violence. some victims may fear being isolated by their associates if they leave an abusive relationship. fearing to be physically, and threats, harmed often is the reason; isolation and discrimination may also pressure the victim to stay. in the case of victims of abuse in intimate relationships, the historical difficulty in south african undeveloped communities was that abusers were mainly bullies and thugs who did not have anyone to deal with because of deficient and unproductive legal and social systems. it was also possible for children of rich families to bail the children out of jail when they had been charged for offenses that seem require or warrant jail terms. when democracy dawned in 1994, the system was formalized so that such crimes would be curbed, and legislations were initiated, such as the domestic violence act (domestic violence act, 1998) and the protection from harassment act (2011), among others. these laws were initiated to protect victims (and would be victims), mostly women, people living with disabilities, and children who were seen as being vulnerable, as well as men and anyone who others may victimize. this study aimed to explore why the intimate partner violence victims, who were selected because they were the ones with financial strength in their relationships, remained victimized but stayed in the relationships for a long time. moreover, the details of these abuses and the meaning that these victims ascribe to the abuses will be explored. the study also intended to understand the wisdom that informed these victims’ decisions to remain in these relationships against the logic that they could easily find better alternatives than to remain in the relationships of perceived trouble for them. method this study was qualitative, with a self-administered interview guide designed to explore the lived experiences of abuse victims in intimate relationships who were major economic contributors in their households, such as earning higher than their partners and contributing more to their families' or relationships' economic welfare. the study adhered to the research ethics, and the researchers undertook the following: the respondents knew of their right to participate or withdraw at any time. they participated by choice, i.e., voluntarily, and their rights were respected. confidentiality was attempted by not asking for the respondents' names. they knew about the purpose of the study, which was to determine the diverse meanings and experiences of the syndicate members. anonymity in report writing was adhered to. the respondents also had the right not to respond to sensitive and highly personal issues. the undertaking was that the information derived from the interviews could be used for research purposes and manuscripts of academic journals, as well as by any practitioner, provided that the participants were not indicated by names. 44 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) solly matshonisa seeletse (why stay despite intimate partner violence? lived experiences of…) instrument interviews were used to collect the data based on an interview guide. the interview guide consisted of questions, including demographic questions such as age, education, employment, gender, religion, and questions related to intimate partner violence. are you the higher earner between you and your partner? how significant is the difference between your earnings and your partner’s? how does he or she abuse you? how long has this been the case? how do you take it? what does it mean to you? what makes you endure this? tell more if there is any. these questions seemed straightforward; however, two experts in the public health department of a local university were asked to review the interview guide and then comment and advise on the questions, primarily on the structure of the questions. the instrument was then finalized and presented as a semi-structured interview guide. participants the study participants were recruited with a snowballing method. five intimate partner violence victims (four females and one male) were purposefully sampled such that they were the main earners in their households or their relationships. the dominance of female victims coincides with most intimate partner violence studies, but those studies presented cases where the victims were from positions of weakness. in this study, these female victims are from stronger positions. the sample size of five meets saturation, as creswell (2007) endorsed, and the sample size issues in qualitative research are irrelevant (marshall et al., 2013). table 1 shows the demographic characteristics of this study's participants. table 1 demographic characteristics characteristic participant 1 participant 2 participant 3 participant 4 participant 5 gender female female female female male age (years old) 33 36 46 28 42 education university degree graduate higher certificate holder national diploma holder bachelor’s degree holder master’s degree holder long of married (year) 2 8 17 3 21 number of children two sons one daughter & one son two sons one son one daughter and two sons employment employed fulltime permanent working fulltime permanent self-employed (entrepreneur) worked on fixed-term high, highearning contract a full-time permanent employment data collection face-to-face interviews were held with the respondents. they were informed about the purpose of the study and an interest in determining their experiences of abuse by their intimate partners, of their right to participate or to withdraw at any time if they decided not to participate any longer. they participated without coercion, with their rights respected and no names required. the respondents also had the right not to respond to sensitive and highly personal issues. they were told that the information was required for research purposes towards a manuscript of an academic journal. data were gathered about the victims’ demographic characteristics, how they were abused, and why they chose not to leave but to remain in those ‘unhealthy’ relationships. the interviews ranged from 52 to 62 minutes, averaging 54 minutes and 48 seconds, due to probing disparities and having to clarify humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 45 solly matshonisa seeletse (why stay despite intimate partner violence? lived experiences of…) questions and explain responses. the previous studies' interviews lasted 45 minutes and about an hour (azhar et al., 2023; fillon et al., 2023). data analysis the study then used thematic content analysis to develop themes around the responses. the thematic content analysis followed a reflexive thematic analysis, a flexible interpretative method to qualitative data analysis to facilitate identifying and analyzing patterns or themes in the data set (braun & clarke, 2021), as applied by byrne (2022), with four domains of reflexive thematic analysis as an orientation to data; the focus of meaning; qualitative framework; and theoretical frameworks where each of these reflects orientations to data. results five key themes emerged from the study. the themes were the aggressor being untouchable, fear for one’s life, feeling helpless, desperate and vulnerable, self-blame, and being trapped in the relationship. reflective explanations of these themes are as follows. the aggressor being untouchable this theme emerged from the interviews with some participants. participants tried to report the violence to the police or the church, but the perpetrators were untouchable. participant 4 claimed that this abusive man boasted of having killed before but was free, so she found him to be untouchable. furthermore, the abuser of participant 2, who was unemployed, was released each time she reported an incident of violence he had caused her. she informs that he was arrested several times for physically and sexually abusing her and released on warning each time. moreover, he was untouchable, citing the releases after she reported him and referring to the past when he got scot-free when he had offended the law. she also pointed out that he befriended the police, as former schoolmates, so apparently, the police did not even put him in a cell. she had lost faith in the police as they did not arrest her abuser. she said that he boasted regularly that he was untouchable and that it would be worse if she divorced. participant 5, who is a christian, also felt that his abuser was untouchable, as the priest of their church was on her side. the abuse was more than 25 years, older than the marriage. when he asked for advice from priests of their church, they advised, “marry her, she will change,” not knowing that one priest is also her lover. the abuse was emotional, as she talked and threw insults at ease. the children's paternity was in doubt, but she threatened him with thugs for trying to get paternity tests. the priest was also against the tests. this husband feared her and her associates. fear for one’s life four of five participants reported the fear of one’s life. the extent of abuse that participant 1 endured from her abuser was so intense that she felt she would die in the relationship. she experienced so much violence from her abuser that she thought making him angrier would make him kill her. so, by implication, she thought divorce would be immediate death by him. therefore, she seems to have felt she would die quicker by leaving. participant 2 claimed to fear for her life. she claims that she often contemplates poisoning him, but every time she tries, she develops fear. “he will kill me if i fail and he finds out,” she remarked. she was sexually and physically abused and feared that the abuser would kill her if she tried to leave the relationship. participant 3 also feared for her life due to the way her husband shoved her at will. she feels that the physical (wo)manhandling she receives from him shows that he does not care for her welfare or even her life. 46 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) solly matshonisa seeletse (why stay despite intimate partner violence? lived experiences of…) participant 4 was given signals that she had nowhere to go or else she would die if she dared to leave the relationship. she was a high earner who experienced sexual abuse from an abuser who viewed himself as a killer who would kill if abandoned by her. she claimed that he raped and beat her and threatened to kill her if she would dare lay criminal charges against him. she feared divorce because she felt the abuser was going to kill her if she did. she stated that she viewed divorcing this man as meaning death, as “he will kill me.” the feeling of helplessness, desperate and vulnerable the majority of participants felt helpless, desperate, and vulnerable. they felt helpless as there was no support for them, as participant 3 indicated to have felt empty and helpless. participant 2 felt helpless on the law side and avoided putting her own family in danger by even making them aware of her suffering. moreover, the priest who advised participant 5 was not supporting or helping him; instead, the priest was aggravating the victimization. feeling desperate and vulnerable arose among participants. participant 1 was beaten when she disagreed with her abusive partner. the abuser also insisted she finances his family but refused to allow her to use her money for her own family. she lamented, “my money feeds his family,” “he beats me so hard when i do not oblige,” and “he refuses me to help my own family financially.” she continued, “my mother died when i finally married him.” “he teases me that i killed my mother.” furthermore, participant 3 felt desperate, empty, helpless, and vulnerable, as there was no one she knew as a relative – except her sons. “i have always wanted to leave, but to where?” she proclaimed. self-blame two participants reported blaming themselves for the violence they experienced. participant 1 blamed herself for refusing to listen to her family regarding a known criminal and for her mother’s death due to not listening to her advice. she then blamed herself for not listening to her family’s advice not to marry a known ‘notorious.’ she felt guilty for killing her mother. participant 5, even though he did not pronounce it clearly, somehow seemed to have been regretting the decision that he took from his advisers. trapped in the relationship four of five participants felt trapped in the relationship. participant 1 claimed to be imprisoned. even though she earns much more than her partner and is self-reliant, she could not leave the relationship, and she was the one on whom the abuser depended. the abuse started immediately after they signed at the magistrate, which was only two years. her family warned her about her husband before they married, as a known abuser and womanizer. “when i insisted on marrying him, they told me never to return home when he abuses me,” she said. she stated, “i feel empty, nowhere to run.” she was scared to go back home, fearing that the siblings would reject her for not supporting them and for killing their mother. she felt imprisoned in her marriage, and she did it to herself. the same situation was also experienced by participant 3, who did not know where to go. she lamented, “if i run, to where?”. participant 4 viewed herself as stranded, and she stated that she felt suicidal sometimes. participant 5 feared abusing his partner’s associates and stayed in the marriage. the explanation was also unpacked to mean he felt trapped in the marriage. he felt that the church and his education had trapped him to behave this weak. discussion all the victims in this study were educated and were financially stronger as compared to their abusive partners. therefore, even highly educated people can become victims of intimate humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 47 solly matshonisa seeletse (why stay despite intimate partner violence? lived experiences of…) partner violence. none of these marriages was new; the victims had been abused for lengthy periods, but they had not divorced or opted out of the relationships. moreover, in this study, the victims were all in better livelihood conditions than their abusers, as they were all working and were the ones providing for the abuser. this condition provokes the mind to ask, “why?” some hints have been given. participants reported that being trapped in the relationship. no support from family or community, therefore they had no place to run. however, participant had not explored being independent, like finding an apartment. this condition was unlike some us victims who indicated that they had to fight to get out of such relationships (waller & bent-goodley, 2023). the five respondents were all employed educated, most of them in long-term abuses, financial providers in their households, but being abused at will. this condition contradicts the notion that victims are in a position of weakness (cai et al., 2023; machado et al., 2023). here, the victims had what it takes to be away from their abusive partners. abuses were from two years to about 25 years. the lengthy abuses can weaken even the strongest victim (foley et al., 2023). all five victims of this study wished to leave the relationship or marriage but felt trapped. even though each participant used different terms, such as imprisoned, fear of dying if they divorced or left, had nowhere to go, and trapped. the case of victims feeling trapped is also expounded as the victim fears divorce in anticipation of worse outcomes (ullman et al., 2023). the negative outcomes that often occur from prolonged intimate partner violence, such as disempowerment (rosenthal et al., 2018). all five victims in this study were the major contributors to finances in their households, and thus, none of them stayed in the relationship because of financial dependence. this condition contradicts the common intimate partner violence, where victims fear to leave because of being financially dependent on the abuser (lin et al., 2023). instead, the victims seemed that the feared to be killed if they divorced or left the relationship. facing death is more terrifying than sacrificing wealth (tobin-tyler, 2023). participants reported a fear of being killed by their abusers. being killed is common when abusers are dumbed, but a case of community collaboration is given as an example where community members save victims from their abusers (spearman et al., 2023). the fear of being killed is stronger if participants take any action for leaving or divorce the abusers. the killings by victims who left their abusive partners explain and justify the fear of being killed after leaving an abusive partner (spearman et al., 2023). especially for a participant who had no home, literally, as an orphan. the vulnerability of orphans who are turned into sex objects because no one protects them makes the orphan feel less traumatized in an abusive marriage than to try to escape the marriage, as the orphanage had released her due to age and marriage (ngidi & mayeza, 2023). the condition even more worse as none to talk to. it may be unsafe to talk, based on the experiences of victims being killed when they laid charges, as the abusers silence the victims and delete traces or evidence of possible criminal offenses (leigh et al., 2023). this condition was also equated to viewing the police as being ineffective, as the need for the police's possible value in restoring victims' well-being after intimate partner violence abuse (gasik et al., 2023). this condition means that the victims had lost trust in the police system. another condition that lead to staying with the abusers is self blame. the male participant relied on the advisors’ guidance, which makes weak as not seem to think. this condition was in line with the lack of self, which in this case happened similarly to cases where chinese university students were victimized by their intimate partners (ye et al., 2023). more than anything, the man was in coercive control (mcleod & flood, 2018), which generally refers to assault, humiliation, intimidation, threats, or other abuses applied to frighten, harm, or punish their victim. this condition means that the victims had no power, or the abusers had more power. there were indications that participants seemed to be under coercive control (bates & hine, 2023; mcleod & flood, 2018). moreover, the findings concerning participants were also incomprehensible regarding the reasons that led them to marry their abusive spouses, which are denial and refusing advice (diamant, 2023). these 48 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) solly matshonisa seeletse (why stay despite intimate partner violence? lived experiences of…) participants, in particular, seemed also to have compassion for their abusers (ustunel, 2023), as if by their abusive means, they demonstrated more love. the results seem to contradict sentiments that suggest that victims fear leaving the abuser for fear of losing benefits (ullman et al., 2023). the notable forms of abuse include financial, physical through beating, emotional including fear, sexual, verbal, perceived cheating, threats or perceived threats to kill. these forms of abuse are common, as in previous studies (bhandari & sabri, 2020; brown, 2018; francis & pearson, 2021; tchokossa et al., 2018). the fact that these abuses have existed globally over the years indicates inadequacies or failures of strategies and approaches used by the world's different nations. the case where local communities showed resilience and almost won their battles were dismissed as being unlawful, even the cases where communities dealt with abusers who were caught red-handed such as rapists and men who beat their women in public, such as on streets in full view of people (bengesai & khan, 2023; harper, 2023; kadengye et al., 2023). these cases were even said to have been watched by police who did not intervene but comprehended the retaliating communities (asif et al., 2023; biswas, 2022), which caused people to intervene. based on this study’s findings, intimate partner violence victims need to be empowered to realize the possibility of reporting the police who release their abusive partners without opening criminal cases or investigating thoroughly, counselled for the trauma they could be experiencing, and exposed to social services such as social workers for seeking help with abuses and to be trained as members of the general public in matters of partner violence. at the same time, communities need to be empowered to handle intimate partner violence suspects by handing them over to police and to deal with violent abusers and those resisting apprehension or arrest by the community. moreover, police need to be empowered to assertively manage even the intimate partner violence offenders that they know. they are barred from releasing abusers without a court order allowing such release. conclusion the study confirmed that staying in relationships with intimate partner violence victims is not always due to being dependent on the abusive partner. therefore, there is an indication that some decisions were made before getting into the relationships because, from the start, these relationships were already showing to lack tenderness. the study reveals that fear is the foremost reason for these intimate partner violence victims not leaving their abusive partners, especially losing their lives at the hands of their abusive partners, was the summit of all reasons. these victims also indicated some secondary feelings that compelled them to stay in the relationships, which include emptiness, desperation, imprisonment, shame, trapped, vulnerability, and weakness, among others. fear was shown to be the most apparent form of emotional, intimate partner violence transpiring in this study. others were reluctant to report the abuses due to a lack of trust in the police services and the shame of being judged. the feeling of lacking power also occurred, and their vulnerability persisted. all these were summed to equate to general disempowerment, even in some formally educated people. the male victim experienced emotional abuse, while the female ones also included emotional, sexual, financial, physical, psychological, social, and sexual forms of abuse. these victims experienced different forms of intimate partner violence, but the reactions of both females and males are the same. they stayed in an abusive relationship, even though none of them stayed because of needing anything from their abusers. being abused by an intimate partner generated victims’ feelings of being desperate, detached, foolish, misunderstood, and weak. some victims did not get protection when they sought help from the police or religious leaders. instead, some victims were misled. as a result, there would not be protection in the victims' minds, and they would be aggressed more if they took the initiative to save humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 49 solly matshonisa seeletse (why stay despite intimate partner violence? lived experiences of…) themselves or retaliate. also, the laws to protect them have proven ineffective. the intimate partner violence victims seemed to indicate that they had lost hope in the system that should safeguard them. acknowledgment sefako makgatho health sciences university is acknowledged for enabling the conditions and the environment to conduct research. the researcher profoundly acknowledges the victim he encountered at a motivational speaking session in randfontein, johannesburg. the victims who participated in this study have made it happen and are deeply acknowledged. the critical reader of this paper, who refused to be named, is also acknowledged. i am grateful for your efforts. declarations author contribution. sms collected and analyzed the data, prepared the original draft, reviewed the document, undertook supervision, validation, editing, final review, revising, and intellectual content. funding statement. the author received no funding or financial support for this article's research, authorship, and publication. he funded the study. conflict of interest. the author declares no conflict of interest in this article's research, authorship, and publication. additional information. this study has the potential to enlighten intervention officials and counselors dealing with intimate partner violence and even domestic violence in general about the challenges that people in intimate relationships often experience. it brings the interventions closer to being client-centered/victim-centered. references asif, m., weenink, d., & mascini, p. 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(2023). the concept of self among chinese university victims of child abuse: an interpretative phenomenological analysis. current psychology, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04261-5 https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12691 https://doi.org/10.1177/10778012221101921 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psym.2018.04.007 https://doi.org/10.1177/10778012221077130 https://doi.org/10.1080/26904586.2023.2177233 https://doi.org/10.1080/15332586.2012.725016 https://doi.org/10.1017/jme.2023.41 https://doi.org/10.1177/0020872816655868 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-023-00535-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-023-00588-6 https://doi.org/10.1177/08862605221113008 https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801216646277 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04261-5 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 22 (1), february 2025, 74-86 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas 10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.934 the contribution of psychological capital in improving work-family balance in female entrepreneurs tiara alfiani saputri, ismarli muis, hilwa anwar faculty of psychology, universitas negeri makassar, makassar, indonesia corresponding author: ismarli.muis@unm.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction the rise of women's entrepreneurship marks a significant shift in gender equality and economic participation. in indonesia, women lead approximately 60% of the 65 million micro, small, and medium enterprises (msmes) as of 2019 (legal and public relations bureau of the ministry of women's empowerment and child protection, 2021). this substantial representation stems primarily from economic necessity, with the 2020 global entrepreneurship monitor (gem) data indicating that 75.8% of indonesian women pursue entrepreneurship due to limited job opportunities and the desire for flexible working arrangements to balance family responsibilities (elam et al., 2021; hudson breen et al., 2017; kumalasari, 2018). while entrepreneurship offers women the flexibility to manage both professional and family responsibilities, this apparent advantage often presents its own challenges. research indicates that entrepreneurs, despite their autonomy, face unique needs than traditional employees (annink & den dulk, 2012). this is particularly true for married female entrepreneurs who must balance business responsibilities with their roles as partners, caregivers, and mothers (mathew & panchanatham, 2011). the pressure intensifies due to high expectations in household management and caregiving responsibilities (hosseini et al., 2024; vieira et al., 2018), often leading to work-family conflicts that can affect both business article info abstract article history received july 11, 2024 revised february 12, 2025 accepted february 26, 205 the flexibility of entrepreneurship allows individuals to set their working hours. however, juggling family responsibilities with work demands can increase stress for female entrepreneurs. this study investigates the impact of psychological capital, including self-efficacy, hope, resilience, and optimism, on the work-family balance of female entrepreneurs. the research involved 302 female entrepreneurs who completed the workfamily balance scale and the psychological capital questionnaire (pcq) through an online survey. the research suggests that psychological capital positively influences work-family balance and emphasizes the significant role of self-efficacy and resilience as the primary predictor of work-family balance. moreover, the duration of business operation, educational attainment, and the size of the workforce were found to have a notable impact on work-family balance. interestingly, the number of children was determined to have no effect. keywords female entrepreneurs psychological capital work-family balance mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.934 mailto:ismarli.muis@unm.ac.id https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 75 tiara alfiani saputri et.al (the contribution of psychological capital in improving work-family….) performance and family well-being (rahimi et al., 2024; rembulan et al., 2016; reynolds & renzulli, 2005; schieman et al., 2009; tuffour et al., 2021). the challenge of managing work-family balance can have detrimental effects on the well-being of married female entrepreneurs. emphasizing work over family can lead to reduced family engagement, heightened conflict, limited involvement in child development, shorter breastfeeding periods, depression, and diminished overall quality of life. conversely, prioritizing family commitments can result in stress and decreased job satisfaction due to familial pressure (chittenden & ritchie, 2011). successful management of the work-family balance can enhance commitment, productivity, and leadership potential among female entrepreneurs, positioning them for career advancement (sahay & lall, 2024). therefore, it is crucial for female entrepreneurs to strive for work-family balance to ensure the welfare of both their businesses and their families. the concept of work-family balance, defined as satisfaction in meeting both work and family demands valcour (2007), becomes crucial in this context. recent research suggests that psychological capital—comprising self-efficacy, resilience, optimism, and hope—plays a vital role in achieving this balance (luthans et al., 2007). the conservation of resources (cor) theory provides a theoretical framework explaining how psychological capital contributes to work-family balance. according to cor theory, individuals with strong psychological resources can better manage stress and replenish depleted resources when facing demanding situations (hobfoll, 1989). each component of psychological capital potentially contributes uniquely to workfamily balance. self-efficacy enables women entrepreneurs to maintain confidence in their ability to manage multiple roles effectively. resilience helps them bounce back from workfamily conflicts and adaptively respond to challenges. optimism promotes positive expectations about managing dual roles, while hope facilitates goal-directed energy and alternative pathways to achieve work-family balance (luthans et al., 2007). while previous research has explored the relationship between psychological capital and work-family balance in traditional employment settings (anushi et al., 2022; bakri et al., 2022; sarwar et al., 2021; sen & hooja, 2015), limited attention has been paid to female entrepreneurs who face distinct challenges. unlike employees who manage assigned tasks, entrepreneurs must handle additional responsibilities such as strategic planning, decisionmaking, and risk management in uncertain business environments (gibb, 2000). these unique demands may influence how psychological capital operates in achieving work-family balance among female entrepreneurs. based on the explanation above, the following hypothesis is proposed: h1: psychological capital positively influences work-family balance among female entrepreneurs. research indicates that self-efficacy is positively linked to improved problem-solving skills and proactive behavior, which are vital for achieving work-family balance. for instance, akanni et al. (2023) found that self-efficacy significantly predicts work-family balance. employees with sufficient belief in their capacity to plan and execute tasks at work and family domains are most likely to attain adequate balance (akanni et al., 2023). consequently, as female entrepreneurs cultivate a strong sense of self-efficacy, they enhance their ability to integrate their professional and personal lives, leading to improved work-family balance and overall well-being. based on the explanation above, the following hypothesis is proposed: h2: self-efficacy positively influences work-family balance among female entrepreneurs. hope, defined as a positive motivational state rooted in successful planning and goal attainment, plays a crucial role for female entrepreneurs. a strong sense of hope enables them to set realistic goals and devise effective strategies for managing time and resources, enhancing their resilience in overcoming challenges. this optimistic perspective fosters a harmonious integration of their professional and personal lives, ultimately improving workfamily balance. research by siu (2013) and christy et al. (2021) supports the notion that hope 76 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) tiara alfiani saputri et.al (the contribution of psychological capital in improving work-family….) significantly predicts work-family balance. based on the explanation above, the following hypothesis is proposed: h3: hope positively influences work-family balance among female entrepreneurs. based on research conducted by bagire et al. (2023) indicates that resilience significantly predicts work-family balance. resilience, defined as the ability to endure and thrive amid challenges, enables female entrepreneurs to maintain a positive mindset, recover from setbacks, and develop effective coping strategies. this adaptability not only aids in overcoming work-related obstacles but also fosters a supportive family environment, resulting in a more harmonious work-family balance. based on the explanation above, the following hypothesis is proposed: h4: resilience positively influences work-family balance among female entrepreneurs. an optimistic outlook allows individuals to tackle challenges with a constructive and proactive mindset. female entrepreneurs, who often juggle business and family responsibilities, may experience stress and conflict; however, those who maintain optimism are more likely to see obstacles as opportunities for growth (bakri et al., 2022). consequently, optimism reduces work-family conflict and enhances satisfaction and well-being in both personal and professional spheres. based on the explanation above, the following hypothesis is proposed: h5: optimism positively influences work-family balance among female entrepreneurs. the findings will extend our understanding of psychological capital's role in entrepreneurial contexts and inform interventions supporting women entrepreneurs in achieving work-family balance. this research is particularly timely given the growing number of female entrepreneurs in indonesia post-covid-19 pandemic and can guide organizations developing support programs for aspiring female entrepreneurs. method research design this study employed a quantitative approach examining the relationship between psychological capital (predictor variable) and work-family balance (outcome variable) among female entrepreneurs in indonesia. participants the research was executed in indonesia and involved 302 female entrepreneurs who met specific criteria: (1) married with children under 18 years old, (2) owning and managing their businesses daily, and (3) having operated their businesses for at least 1 year. participants’ ages ranged from under 20 to 50 years, with business experience spanning from 1 to 20 years and the number of employees varying from 0 to 30. on average, participants had 1 to 8 children. the sample selection employed an accidental sampling technique, in which the samples were randomly chosen based on the research theme. the collected data were analyzed descriptively to highlight the participants' characteristics, as presented in table 1. table 1 presents the demographic information of 302 participants. the sample predominantly consisted of entrepreneurs with 1-10 years of business experience (90.4%), while the remaining 9.6% had more than 10 years of experience. specifically, 48% female entrepreneurs completed their education at the primary and secondary education level. additionally, 67.2% female entrepreneurs have 1-2 children, and 48% have 1-2 employees. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 77 tiara alfiani saputri et.al (the contribution of psychological capital in improving work-family….) table 1 participant demographic data type frequency percentage length of business 1-10 years 273 90.4 >10 years 29 9.6 level of education primary and secondary education 145 48 diploma 32 10.6 bachelor 125 41.4 number of children 1-2 children 203 67.2 3-5 children 89 29.5 6-8 children 10 3.3 number of employees 0 employees 91 30.1 1-2 employees 145 48 3-5 employees 40 13.2 6-8 employees 9 3 >8 employees 17 5.6 instrument the data was collected by administering an online questionnaire through the google forms platform. researchers shared links to the survey on different social media platforms including facebook, linkedin, instagram, twitter, and whatsapp groups. participants were asked to provide informed consent at the beginning of the questionnaire, agreeing to participate in the study, and were assured that all responses would be kept confidential. we modified the scale by translating it into indonesian using the international test commission (itc) procedure. this process involved two types of translators: native translators and informed translators who are professionals in their respective fields. following the translation of the items, we refined them to suit the research context, which centered on entrepreneurship. subsequently, we conducted tests to assess the reliability and discriminative power of each item. work-family balance scale. the concept of work-family balance refers to the overall satisfaction experienced by female entrepreneurs as they navigate the demands of their roles as business owners and mothers. satisfaction with work–family balance was measured by valcour's (2007) work-family balance scale, which focuses on three key aspects: time, attention (energy), and the integration of work and family demands. the scale comprises five items, such as “the way you divide your time between work and personal or family life”, and “the way you divide your attention between work and home”. participants were asked to rate these items on a five-point likert scale ranging from "very dissatisfied" (1) to "very satisfied" (5). the reliability of this scale, as measured by cronbach's alpha, was found to be 0.85, indicating high internal consistency. additionally, confirmatory factor analysis provided evidence of the validity of the scale, with factor loadings ranging from 0.60 to 0.90, demonstrating the robustness of the scale's items. psychological capital questionnaire. the concept of psychological capital represents a positive attribute found in female entrepreneurs, characterized by traits such as self-efficacy, resilience, optimism, and hope. to assess the psychological capital of female entrepreneurs, we utilized the psychological capital questionnaire (pcq) by luthans et al. (2007). this measuring tool comprises 21 favorable items and three unfavorable items, which are categorized into four dimensions: self-efficacy, resilience, optimism, and hope. an example of an item in the self-efficacy dimension is "i feel confident in analyzing longterm problems to find solutions". the hope dimension is "if i face a problem in business, i 78 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) tiara alfiani saputri et.al (the contribution of psychological capital in improving work-family….) can think of many ways to solve it". the resiliency dimension is "i am able to overcome difficult times in running a business because i have experienced difficulties before". the optimism dimension is "in running a business, i have hope and believe that there will always be wisdom in every problem". participants rated their responses on a five-point likert scale, ranging from "strongly disagree (1)" to "strongly agree (5)." the reliability calculation using alpha cronbach yielded a coefficient of 0.94, indicating high reliability. additionally, reliability coefficients for the four dimensions of psychological capital were as follows: self-efficacy (0.79), hope (0.81), resilience (0.86), and optimism (0.74). the validity of the psychological capital scale, consisting of 24 items, was further confirmed through confirmatory factor analysis, with factor loadings ranging from 0.31 to 0.85, ensuring that all items were appropriately represented in the scale. data analysis the normality test was conducted using the one-sample kolmogorov-smirnov analysis in spss 25.0 for windows. the results indicated a non-normal distribution with a significance value of <0.05. to address this, we applied the sample bootstrap method (n=2000) to account for the non-normal distribution of the data. to test the research hypothesis, we conducted statistical analysis using the spss 25.0 for windows. the data analysis technique employed in this study involved a regression test, which aimed to examine the relationship and influence between the two variables. the statistical analysis was conducted in two steps: first, a simple regression analysis was used to ascertain the influence of psychological capital in general on work-family balance, and second, multiple linear regression with enter method. additionally, we used one-way anova to examine how demographic factors affect work-family balance, helping us identify significant differences and provide targeted recommendations for female entrepreneurs. results a simple regression analysis has been carried out to determine the effect of work-family balance and psychological capital between two variables. the results of regression analysis found that overall psychological capital contributed to work-family balance (r2 = 0.61; p = .001; p < 0.05) (see table 2). table 2 result of simple regression variable unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients beta t p b standards error constant 1.17 0.94 1.25 psychological capital 0.20 0.01 0.78 21.86 0.001* note: *p < 0.05 with r = 0.78, r2 = 0.61, and f = 477.69 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 79 tiara alfiani saputri et.al (the contribution of psychological capital in improving work-family….) table 3 result of multiple regressions of aspect of psychological capital toward work-family balance variables unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients beta t p b standard error constant 1.69 0.99 1.69 0.10 self-efficacy 0.27 0.06 0.33 5.19 0.001* hope 0.11 0.06 0.12 1.80 0.07 resilience 0.29 0.06 0.31 4.62 0.001* optimism 0.12 0.06 0.20 1.86 0.06 note: *p < 0.05; r = 0.79; r2 = 0.62; f = 121.95 a one-way anova test was conducted for additional analysis, yielding significant results regarding work-family balance across different factors such as length of business, level of education, and number of employees (refer to table 4). specifically, the study found significant differences in work-family balance based on the number of employees (p = 0.001 < 0.05), length of business (p = 0.03 < 0.05), and level of education (p = 0.04 < 0.05). however, there was no significant difference in work-family balance based on the number of children (p = 0.09 > 0.05). table 4 results of the one-way anova work-family balance test and demographic data variable demographic data f mean p workfamily balance length of business 1-10 years 4.17 21.59 0.04* >10 years 20.21 level of education primary and secondary education 5.07 20.88 0.01* diploma 21.16 bachelor 22.20 number of children 1-2 children 2.44 21.16 0.09 3-5 children 22.01 6-8 children 22.60 number of employees 0 employees 4.53 20.30 0.001* 1-2 employees 21.84 3-5 employees 22.38 6-8 employees 23.33 >8 employees 21.46 note. *p < 0.05. discussion the primary objective of this study is to investigate the influence of psychological capital on achieving work-family balance among female entrepreneurs, particularly those with children. the findings reveal that possessing psychological capital concurrently can contribute to a 61.4% satisfaction derived from of female entrepreneurs of balance their work and family life. these results are consistent with prior research on the relationship between psychological capital and work-family balance (anushi et al., 2022; christy et al., 2021; sen & hooja, 2015; siu, 2013). several previous studies (anushi et al., 2022; bakri et al., 2022; christy et al., 2021; siu, 2013) have highlighted variations in how each component of psychological capital such as self-efficacy, hope, resilience, and optimism—affects the enhancement of work-family balance. the findings of christy et al. (2021) demonstrated that all dimensions of psychological capital consistently influence work-family balance. conversely, anushi et al. 80 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) tiara alfiani saputri et.al (the contribution of psychological capital in improving work-family….) (2022) identified self-efficacy, hope, and resilience as being related to work-family balance, while bakri et al. (2022) found that only efficacy and optimism are associated with it. in contrast to these studies, our research indicates that only self-efficacy and resilience have a significant relationship with work-family balance. this research identified self-efficacy and resilience, components of psychological capital, as key contributors to a balanced work-family life. notably, self-efficacy enhances individuals' confidence in managing work and family responsibilities, fostering a proactive problem-solving approach. this capability leads to successful navigation of challenges, thereby increasing satisfaction in both work and family roles (chan et al., 2015). although studies on the link between self-efficacy and work-family balance are limited, a positive relationship has been established (akanni & ajila, 2021; situmorang & wijayanti, 2017). individuals with high self-efficacy are driven to meet challenging goals, making their beliefs essential for maintaining resilience during psychological challenges (luthans et al., 2007). for female entrepreneurs, high self-efficacy enhances resilience, aiding in balancing entrepreneurial and maternal roles, and leading to satisfaction in both areas. research by santoro et al. (2020) indicates that resilience and self-efficacy are complementary, playing a crucial role in enhancing perceptions of personal and business success. thus, female entrepreneurs should strengthen their confidence in managing dual responsibilities, which can be achieved by observing the success of peers in similar situations. this study highlights the critical role of resilience in achieving work-family balance, particularly for female entrepreneurs. resilience comprises two key components in psychological capital assessment (masten, 2001). the first component involves recognizing potential threats, enabling individuals to identify stressors that may disrupt their work-family balance, such as increased workloads or family obligations. the second component involves a positive response and adaptation process, allowing individuals to implement effective coping strategies in the face of inevitable challenges. ultimately, resilience empowers female entrepreneurs to navigate their responsibilities, enhancing well-being and satisfaction in both personal and professional domains. research indicates a positive relationship between resilience and work-family balance (krisor et al., 2015; liossis et al., 2009; wayne et al., 2020). resilient female entrepreneurs tend to maintain a positive outlook, viewing challenges as opportunities for growth, which enhances their adaptability in demanding situations. for instance, they may reorganize their schedules or delegate tasks to manage increased family obligations, thereby achieving balance and satisfaction in both personal and professional domains. balancing work and family can be highly stressful, but resilience equips female entrepreneurs with the ability to manage stress effectively. resilient individuals are better at regulating their emotions and maintaining a calm, composed demeanor under pressure. additionally, resilience fosters problem-solving skills, enabling female entrepreneurs to develop proactive strategies that facilitate work-family balance. for example, they may establish flexible business structures, such as remote work options or adaptable work hours, to accommodate family responsibilities without compromising business growth. this resourcefulness helps them create systems that support both their business and family needs. resilience, as the ability to "bounce back," is a crucial resource that influences female entrepreneurs' work, family dynamics, and overall well-being (krisor et al., 2015). while prior studies associate hope and optimism with achieving work-family balance (christy et al., 2021; das & singh, 2023; siu, 2013), this study found no significant impact, aligning with sen and hooja (2015), who similarly reported no correlation between hope, optimism, and work-family balance. the unique challenges faced by female entrepreneurs in balancing professional and personal responsibilities can explain this phenomenon. while hope in psychological capital, as defined by luthans et al. (2007), emphasizes energy and goal-directed planning, the reality of managing a business often involves unexpected obstacles, such as fluctuating market conditions, demanding clients, and family obligations humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 81 tiara alfiani saputri et.al (the contribution of psychological capital in improving work-family….) that disrupt even the best-laid plans. these competing demands can overwhelm female entrepreneurs, leading to frustration when their aspirations for balance remain unmet. additionally, the pressure to excel in both work and family roles can create conflict, hindering their ability to maintain a positive outlook and effectively leverage their hopes. this study reveals that optimism does not significantly enhance work-family balance. research by kipkosgei (2022) indicates that while entrepreneurs are often seen as enthusiastic and risk-taking, they frequently experience negative affective states such as stress, fear, and anxiety, which adversely impact their well-being. additionally, entrepreneurs grapple with significant uncertainty and numerous questions about the future (block et al., 2022). this context renders female entrepreneurs particularly susceptible to negative thinking, hindering their ability to convert optimism into effective strategies for achieving work-family balance. consequently, the disparity between their optimistic beliefs and the practical challenges they face results in lower satisfaction in both professional and personal domains, underscoring the limitations of optimism in facilitating work-family balance for female entrepreneurs. one notable finding of this study is that certain demographic factors, such as the length of time in business, educational attainment, and the number of employees, significantly impact the work-family balance of female entrepreneurs. this finding offers a significant contribution as it highlights a fundamental distinction from previous studies that examined psychological capital and work-family balance in the entrepreneurial context. this research indicates that female entrepreneurs who have been in business for over 10 years generally experience a higher level of work-family balance compared those in the 1-10-year range. these results align with previous research (christy et al., 2021), highlighting that businesses with a long operating history (>20 years) tend to demonstrate superior work-family balance compared those in the short-term category (<5 years). female entrepreneurs often struggle with balancing work and family responsibilities during the early stages of their businesses. this situation is often attributed to their heightened dedication to business innovation during the early stages, leading to greater investment of time and focus on work rather than family commitments (zerwas, 2019). an additional finding reveals that the level of education among female entrepreneurs significantly impacts their work-family balance. those with undergraduate degrees demonstrate higher levels of balance compared to individuals with primary or secondary education. this correlation suggests that education equips female entrepreneurs with the experience and skills necessary to implement flexible work strategies and manage their routines effectively. higher education fosters critical cognitive and managerial skills, such as strategic planning, financial literacy, and decision-making, which enable entrepreneurs to structure their businesses in ways that accommodate family obligations without compromising professional success. moreover, education enhances access to valuable networks and resources that can further support work-family balance. university graduates are more likely to be exposed to business mentorship programs, entrepreneurial incubators, and industry networks that provide guidance on managing both personal and professional responsibilities. additionally, they tend to have greater familiarity with digital tools and technological solutions that streamline work processes, allowing for more efficient time management and task delegation. these advantages create an environment where educated female entrepreneurs can implement proactive strategies to reduce role conflicts and maintain equilibrium between work and family demands. this finding aligns with kromydas (2020) which found that educational achievement modestly influences work-family balance among women across 17 european countries, as it fosters essential skills such as time management and problemsolving, facilitating the navigation of work-family complexities. the size of the workforce significantly influences the work-family balance of female entrepreneurs. having employees allows for task delegation, reducing workload and stress, 82 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) tiara alfiani saputri et.al (the contribution of psychological capital in improving work-family….) and enabling a focus on strategic decision-making and business growth while freeing time for family obligations. entrepreneurs who operate as sole proprietors often find themselves overwhelmed by the need to manage every aspect of their business, from daily operations to financial planning, leaving little flexibility to attend to family responsibilities. in contrast, those with a dedicated workforce can distribute operational tasks, ensuring business continuity while mitigating role strain. zerwas (2019) similarly found that female entrepreneurs managing their businesses alone often struggle with work-family balance, whereas those with employees can more easily achieve this balance by delegating responsibilities. consequently, they can dedicate more time to their families, enhancing satisfaction in both work and personal life. this research shows that the presence of children does not significantly impact female entrepreneurs' work-family balance due to various influencing factors. this finding contrasts with valcour's (2007) study, which suggested that more children negatively affect workfamily balance. while having children can increase responsibilities, it is not solely the number of children that determines balance; several factors, such as the age of the children, social support, and available resources for entrepreneurs, also play a crucial role (aras et al., 2022; leung et al., 2020; mcnamara et al., 2013). younger children require more care, creating challenges, while older, more independent children reduce demands (zerwas, 2019), allowing for greater flexibility in managing work responsibilities. moreover, access to social support—such as spouses, extended family members, or professional childcare services—can significantly alleviate the burden associated with parenting, enabling female entrepreneurs to sustain both their business operations and family responsibilities effectively. entrepreneurs with strong networks often leverage this support to mitigate work-family tensions, whereas those with limited assistance may struggle to maintain balance. in our study, this represents a limitation that needs to be addressed, as the analysis did not thoroughly consider the variations in children's ages that could influence the work-family balance. future research should adopt a more nuanced approach by exploring how different stages of child development interact with entrepreneurial work structures, social support systems, and adaptive business strategies. this would provide a more comprehensive understanding of how female entrepreneurs navigate work-family balance across diverse family and business contexts. this research has implications for how female entrepreneurs can enhance their workfamily balance by developing their psychological capital which can be achieved through targeted interventions such as attending training sessions or seminars on the importance of psychological capital and work-family balance, utilizing childcare support services, and leveraging technology to efficiently manage work and family schedules, as well as fostering supportive networks that provide emotional and practical assistance. in addition, policymakers and business support organizations can play a crucial role by designing initiatives that promote resilience-building programs tailored for female entrepreneurs. this could include mentorship programs that connect experienced female business owners with emerging entrepreneurs to share strategies for overcoming work-family conflicts. financial institutions and investors should also recognize the unique challenges faced by female entrepreneurs and develop funding models that allow for more flexible financial arrangements, such as grants or microloans that support business continuity during familyrelated disruptions. however, limitations exist. first, the study excluded the age of children and its impact on female entrepreneurs without children, which may influence work-family dynamics across different child development stages. methodological bias and a non-normal sample distribution, influenced by age or socio-economic factors, further limit generalizability. future research should address these gaps with diverse samples and methods to ensure broader applicability. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 83 tiara alfiani saputri et.al (the contribution of psychological capital in improving work-family….) conclusion the research underscores the importance of psychological capital and work-family balance for female entrepreneurs in indonesia. the findings demonstrate a positive correlation between psychological capital and work-family balance, indicating that higher psychological capital correlates with better work-family balance. furthermore, the study emphasizes the influential roles of self-efficacy and resilience as predictors of work-family balance within the dimensions of psychological capital. this study also identifies key findings indicating that demographic factors, such as business tenure, number of employees, and education level, significantly influence the work-family balance of female entrepreneurs. declarations author’s contributions. all authors contributed to the research drafting and design process. atas wrote the manuscript draft, collected data, and analyzed the data. im contributed to providin guidance on research direction and data analysis, as well as conducting revision, and refinement of the manuscript. ha contributed to providing advice on research directions. all three authors have read and approved the final manuscript. funding. the researchers received no financial support for this study. conflict of interest. the authors have no potential conflicts of interest regarding this article's research, authorship, and publication. consent to participate. informed consent was obtained from the participants, and the data obtained were anonymized before analysis and publication. consent for publication. the authors agree to submit the manuscript for publication. acknowledgments. not 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(2019). work-life balance and women’s entrepreneurship: an exploration of influencing factors. springer nature switzerland ag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3030-29804-3 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 21 (2), august 2024, 143-156 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas http://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i2.565 the adaptation and validation of adolescent emotional competence scale for indonesian adolescents dinie ratri desiningrum1*, jessica dhoria arywibowo1 1faculty of psychology, diponegoro university, semarang, indonesia corresponding author: dn.psiundip@gmail.com this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction hurlock (2017) defines adolescence based on chronological age, from age 13 to 18 years. during this period, adolescents are faced with developmental tasks that are different from childhood developmental tasks, such as forming relationships with peers of the same and opposite sex, achieving emotional independence from parents, and being responsible for their actions. if these tasks are completed, they will gain satisfaction, happiness and acceptance from the environment. the success of adolescents in fulfilling the tasks will also determine their success in fulfilling developmental tasks in the next phase. as it develops, adolescence is often associated with deviation and impropriety. this is based on the developmental theories discussing emotional and behavioural disorders due to various pressures from changes in themselves and the environment. according to (lestari et al., 2019), the association occurs due to a lack of positive and constructive development of one's emotions, as well as low self-control in controlling emotions, which is considered to be one of the driving factors for someone to take actions that are not following the rules and norms that apply in the society. during this period, adolescents are susceptible to significant emotional lability and the onset of social-emotional disorders. this shows that the developmental stage heralds a rapid increase in mental disorders, including disruptive, article info abst ract article history received october 26, 2023 revised may 15, 2024 accepted may 20, 2024 assessing emotional competence is crucial for understanding how adolescents handle negative emotions and form their future scenarios. however, none of the emotional competency measurements are available for indonesian’ adolescents. this research aimed to adapt and validate the short version of the emotional competency scale for indonesian adolescents. 352 high school students were selected as participants through a cluster sampling method. twenty indicators of the short version of the emotional competence scale were employed to collect data. the data was analysed using second order confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) in the lisrel 7.9 program to determine the scale's reliability and validity. the results showed that 18 indicators had loading factors larger than 0.5; the cr and ave values were greater than 0.7 and 0.5, respectively. thus, the 18 indicators of the short version of the emotional competency scale demonstrated validity and reliability and were suitable for widespread use among indonesian adolescents. keywords adolescant emotional competence reliability validity mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas http://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v21i2.565 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 144 desiningrum et al. (the adaptation and validation of adolescent emotional competence scale for indonesian adolescents) depression, eating disorders, and anxiety-related problems (potterton et al., 2022). this phase is characterized by significant neurobiological changes, marked by a high level of emotional lability and a substantial increase in emotional reactivity, which can impact their well-being and lead to the emergence of emotional and behavioural disorders (guyer et al., 2016). moreover, challenges such as peer pressure, identity crisis, and academic stress, can exacerbate emotional turmoil, potentially leading to maladaptive behaviours and emotional disorders if not adequately addressed. one important factor in coping with those situations is the ability to manage their emotion successful emotional development determines a person's potential to interact constructively with other people (honmore & jadhav, 2015), academic success (blankson et al., 2017), achieve a higher social level (denham et al., 2012), have stable employment in the future and promote prosocial behaviour (mesurado et al., 2019). conversely, a lack of skills in managing one's emotions leads to various levels of anxiety, withdrawal (czekóová et al., 2020), risk of maladaptive behaviour and engagement in aggressive behaviour which indicates that the early development of emotional competence is critical for the shortand long-term well-being of adolescents (jones et al., 2017). emotional intelligence and emotional competence are important aspects related to adolescent emotions. it refers to the ability to recognise, understand, and manage one's own emotions and others, as well as the ability to express emotions in a socially appropriate manner. emotional intelligence and emotional competence affect individuals’ choice of coping style, which determines the level of emotional disorders. moreover, higher levels of emotional intelligence affect emotional understanding and regulation which associated with better mental health outcomes (vucenovic & sipek, 2023). understanding and addressing the emotional and behavioral needs of adolescents is essential for promoting their well-being and successful development (bailen et al., 2019). denham (2019) emphasizes that emotional competence is the ability to intentionally and fully engage in various emotions, while also managing the expression of emotions when necessary. housman (2017) points out the significance of emotional competence, starting from birth, which involves recognizing, interpreting, and responding constructively to emotions in oneself and others. this competence not only improves personal and relational performance but also contributes to overall quality of life (housman, 2017). studies in the field, as highlighted in the research on teenagers' emotions and complex thinking, suggest that adolescents experience emotions differently from adults and may struggle more to regulate their emotions effectively. acknowledging and fostering emotional competence during adolescence is crucial for their well-being and successful navigation through life challenges (oberauer et al., 2023). emotional competence is the ability to manage emotions, including the ability to identify, express, understand, regulate and use emotions (brasseur et al., 2013; saarni et al., 2007). sass et al. (2013) discovered that emotional processes within individuals play a role in executive functions such as planning for the future. in other words, positive expectations for the future depend on current emotional states (tejada-gallardo et al., 2022). individuals with poor emotional competence tend to validate the negative emotions they are currently feeling, resulting in maladaptive behaviour, for example, looking for situations that trigger negative emotions. on this basis, adolescents who lack emotional competence tend to form awful future scenarios (montalvo-garcia et al., 2021). there needs to be more research regarding emotional competence among teenagers in indonesia. however, none of the emotional competence measurements are available for indonesians. thus, this research aimed to adapt the profile of emotional competence scale ( pec) developed by brasseur et al. (2013) for indonesian adolescents. the pec was humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 145 desiningrum et al. (the adaptation and validation of adolescent emotional competence scale for indonesian adolescents) constructed based on five dimensions of emotional competence, which are identification, understanding, expression, regulation and use of emotions (brasseur et al., 2013). this research chose brasseur et al.’s pec scale as it is comprehensive and encompasses the requirements for individuals’ development of emotional competence including in facing stressful situations. the definition and development of the emotional competency theory and scale are discussed in the following section. definition of emotional competence emotion is one of an individual's internal aspects that influences how a person will behave (denham et al., 2007). saarni et al. (2007) define emotion as a physiological reaction, cognitive interpretation, communication, and behaviour toward situations. furthermore, emotion is a feeling or affection that arises when a person is in a situation or interaction that is considered necessary to him, especially his well-being. emotions are a form of communication. emotions are represented by behaviour that expresses comfort or discomfort with the circumstances or interactions a person experiences (santrock, 2017). one psychological construct that can indicate a person's emotions is emotional competence. emotional competence is an adaptability obtained from emotional experience (saarni, 1999). an individual who has emotional competence in varied contexts tends to be able to manage their emotions effectively, be resilient in dealing with stressful situations, and build positive relationships (denham et al., 2007). another definition of emotional competence is the ability to manage emotions or the ability to identify, express, understand, regulate, and use emotions (mikolajczak, 2015). when an individual cannot manage emotions effectively, this will lead to depression, anger, and a lack of emotional regulation, which trigger adjustment difficulties, deviant behaviour and perpetrators of violence in the family (santrock, 2017). this research is based on brasseur et al. (2013) definition of emotional competence, which is the ability to manage emotions, including the ability to identify, which refers to, express, understand, regulate, and use emotions. according to brasseur et al. (2013) emotional competence encompasses five dimensions, those are: identification, which refers to the ability to acknowledge emotions when they arise and identify these emotions; understanding, the ability to understand the causes and consequences of the emergence of emotions and be able to differentiate between various causes of the emergence of emotions; expression, the ability to express emotions in a socially acceptable way, regulation, the ability to regulate emotions that emerge not according to the context, thereby avoiding stress; utilisation, the ability to use emotions to improve skills in self-reflection, making decisions and taking action. development of emotional competence measurement over the past two decades, emotional competence (ec) has received increasing attention from the general public and the scientific society. sometimes better known as emotional intelligence (ei), this concept emphasises how individuals deal with intrapersonal or interpersonal emotional information. furthermore, emotional competence (ec) refers to how a person identifies, expresses, understands, regulates, and uses his or her emotions or the emotions of others (brasseur et al., 2013). in other words, ei and ec are both related to individual emotions. however, ei is the individual's ability to respond to the emotions, while ec is the individual’s ability to process and use the emotions. in indonesia, there was research conducted by wulandari (2013) regarding the emotional intelligence instrument. wulandari developed the emotional competence inventory 2.0 (eci) based on goleman’s theories and dimensions (i.e., self-awareness, selfhumanitas: indonesian psychological journal 146 desiningrum et al. (the adaptation and validation of adolescent emotional competence scale for indonesian adolescents) management, social awareness, and relationship management). research on emotional intelligence instruments has a different approach to theories with emotional competence. we chose to develop an emotional competence scale because it considered measuring emotions by looking at the interpersonal and intrapersonal aspects of the individual. several ec measurements were subjected to in-depth validation tests, which have proven to be very useful in predicting several effects, making it easier to understand the significance of ec in psychological, somatic, professional, and social adjustment. in some cases, intrapersonal ec carries more weight than interpersonal ec (e.g., predicting health rather than social relationship quality). the scale test conducted by brasseur (2013) was carried out on 5,676 subjects (in 6 sample groups). reliability analysis conducted on the six samples shows good consistency of the internal subscale (α from .60 to .83) and good consistency of the two-factor (.84), and the total score (.88). pearson's bilateral correlation was carried out on ten subscales, two-factor score and global score. all correlations were significant (p<0.001). the results of the analysis show strong correlations between each subscale and the global score (from .55 to .71). at the intrapersonal level, correlations between subscales were moderate to strong (from .34 to .60). at the interpersonal level, correlations within the interpersonal scales were moderate to strong (from .44 to .48), except that the utilization scale showed lower correlations compared to other scales (.19 to .41) (brasseur et al., 2013). there are two versions of the pec brasseur scale, a long version which has 50 items, and a short one which consists of 20 items. this short version was obtained from a study developed by mikolajczak (2015). researchers used the short version because it is easier for the high school teenage subject group, and easier to understand. researchers chose the scale developed by brasseur et al. (2013) because the five aspects of brasseur's emotional competence were important for individuals and were approved by scientists who developed the theory of individual emotions, but brasseur then developed it completely by focusing on the five aspects at the same time from an interpersonal and intrapersonal perspective, how individuals see the five aspects within themselves, and when individuals relate to other people. the pec brasseur scale was also used by aouani, h. et al. in 2018-2019 in saudi arabia. method study participants the inclusion criteria for participants were (1) adolescents studying in grades 10, 11 and 12 from public high school in semarang; (2) male and female; (3) domiciled in semarang. the exclusion criteria for the participants were (1) domiciled outside the city of semarang; and (2) having attended emotional competency training. this research involved a total of 352 female high school students, aged 15-18 years, that were selected through cluster sampling methods. the sampling was carried out by taking representatives from each class even though they were not evenly distributed. all participants had filled in informed consent as evidence of their willingness to participate voluntarily. the data collection procedures met the standard issued by the faculty research ethics committee. instruments we used the short version of the profile of emotional competence (pec) (brasseur et al., 2013; mikolajczak, 2015) to measure emotional competency which consists of 20 indicators (10 indicators for the interpersonal section and 10 indicators for the intrapersonal section). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 147 desiningrum et al. (the adaptation and validation of adolescent emotional competence scale for indonesian adolescents) the pec scale adaptation process has received permission from the original owner, brasseur. we carried out a scale adaptation process as each indicator of the pec needed to be translated into indonesian and adjusted with the characteristics of the subject’s emotional competence (i.e., high school teenagers) and indonesian culture. the experts chosen for this process are selected based on considerations of educational background, proficiency in both indonesian and english languages, cultural understanding, measurement expertise, as well as experience and knowledge in developmental psychology. drawing from beaton's (2000) theory, the process of adaptation encompasses: (1) translation to indonesians, conducted by 2 (two) translators, (2) back translation, conducted by 2 (two) colleagues from other countries; (3) indicator revision process, supported by 2 (two) experts; (4) sentence comprehension test, carried out to 2 (two) samples of subjects; (5) scales try out. the operational definition of emotional competence in this research refers to the theory of brasseur (mikolajczak, 2015), that is the ability of adolescents to manage their emotions related to the dimensions of emotional competence, namely the ability to identify, express, understand, regulate, and use their emotions well, in interacting with other people. the scale was scored from 1 for strongly disagree to 5 for strongly agree, for 20 indicators. the higher the score indicates the higher the individual's emotional competence ability. the blueprint of the scale can be seen in table 1. table 1 blueprint of adolescents’ emotional competence scale no. component intrapersonal interpersonal 1. identification, the ability to acknowledge emotions when they arise and identify these emotions. 6.20 11.17 2. understanding, the ability to understand the causes and consequences of the emergence of emotions and be able to differentiate between various causes of the emergence of emotions. 10.16 1.3 3. expression, the ability to express emotions in a socially acceptable way. listen to other emotions, the ability to listen to and accept others’ emotions. 5.9 8.18 4. regulation, the ability to regulate emotions that emerge not according to the context, thereby avoiding stress. 4.14 13.19 5. use/utilization, the ability to use emotions to improve skills in self-reflection, making decisions and taking action. 7.15 2.12 statistical analysis the factor loading of the pec scale was between 0.60-0.89, all indicators showed a factor loading value greater than 0.5, so it is concluded that all the indicators were valid. based on the goodness of fit table, the fit of the pec scale model meets the model fit criteria. the value of each dimension (cr) is greater than 0.6 and the ave value of each dimension is greater than 0.5 indicating high validity and reliability (mikolajczak, 2015). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 148 desiningrum et al. (the adaptation and validation of adolescent emotional competence scale for indonesian adolescents) results adaptation process the process begins with the forward translation process, namely translating the instrument from the original language (english) into indonesian. this process was carried out by two translators by providing information regarding the purpose of the translation which was tailored to the research objectives. the results of this process were given to the forward translation reviewer whose task was to synthesize the two translation results. the next stage is back translation by two translators who have good english and indonesian skills. the translator did not see the original measuring instruments used in this study. synthesis results were carried out by a backward translation reviewer. the next stage was the indicator revision process by the linguist experts who provided validation by comparing the original version of the scale and the translated scale. the components were assessed related to the level of comparability and similarity of items between the original version and the backtranslated version using a likert scale assessment with 7 choices, starting from 1 (very comparable/similar) to 7 (very incomparable/ very dissimilar). comparability is the level of formal similarity of language, phrases, terms, words and sentences. similarity refers to the degree of similarity in meaning between two versions of an item, even though the terms used are different. the scale content reviewer stated that the measuring instrument was quite understandable both in terms of instructions and sentences, resulting in the final item and then the content reviewer gave a score of relevance, importance and clarity. the tryout was carried out offline which involved 396 participants. table 2 goodness of fit (gfi) table no criteria cut off value result conclusion 1 gfi ≥ 0.9 0.94 good fit 2 rmr ≤ 0.05 0.02 good fit 3 rmsea ≤ 0.08 0.01 good fit 4 nnfi ≥ 0.9 1.00 good fit 5 nfi ≥ 0.9 0.98 good fit 6 agfi ≥ 0.9 0.92 good fit 7 rfi ≥ 0,9 0.98 good fit 8 ifi ≥ 0,9 1.00 good fit 9 cfi ≥ 0,9 1.00 good fit 10 pgfi 0 1 0.74 good fit 11 cmin/df < 5.0 1.02 good fit 12 pnfi 0 1 0.85 good fit table 2 shows that the pec scale model meets the model fit criteria. the value of each dimension (cr) was greater than 0.6 and the ave value of each dimension was greater than 0.5. thus, validity and reliability were high. table 3 emotional competence (em) cfa test level indicator λ remark λ2 e cr ave variable emotional competence (em) em1 0.73 valid 0.527 0.473 0.850 0.534 em2 0.76 valid 0.578 0.422 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 149 desiningrum et al. (the adaptation and validation of adolescent emotional competence scale for indonesian adolescents) table 3 (continued) level indicator λ remark λ2 e cr ave variable emotional competence (em) em3 0.589 valid 0.347 0.653 0.850 0.534 em4 0.742 valid 0.551 0.449 em5 0.817 valid 0.667 0.333 e1.1 0.638 valid 0.407 0.593 e1.2 0.656 valid 0.430 0.570 identification (e1) e1.3 0.789 valid 0.623 0.377 0.826 0.546 e1.4 0.852 valid 0.726 0.274 e2.1 0.699 valid 0.489 0.511 e2.2 0.601 valid 0.361 0.639 understanding (e2) e2.3 0.478 not valid 0.228 0.772 0.763 0.457 e2.4 0.867 valid 0.752 0.248 e3.1 0.746 valid 0.557 0.443 e3.2 0.495 not valid 0.245 0.755 dimension expression (e3) e3.3 0.705 valid 0.497 0.503 0.766 0.456 e3.4 0.724 valid 0.524 0.476 e4.1 0.616 valid 0.379 0.621 e4.2 0.631 valid 0.398 0.602 regulation (e4) e4.3 0.736 valid 0.542 0.458 0.804 0.510 e4.4 0.849 valid 0.721 0.279 e5.1 0.679 valid 0.461 0.539 e5.2 0.584 valid 0.341 0.659 use/utilization (e5) e5.3 0.784 valid 0.615 0.385 0.802 0.506 e5.4 0.779 valid 0.607 0.393 figure 1 emotional competence (em) cfa model table 3 and figure 1 show two indicators with standardized loading estimate values lower than 0.5, so it can be concluded that these two indicators were invalid. since they were invalid, the two indicators were omitted, and then the remaining indicators were retested, resulting in the following figures. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 150 desiningrum et al. (the adaptation and validation of adolescent emotional competence scale for indonesian adolescents) table 4 emotional competence (em) cfa test after dropping invalid indicators figure 2 emotional competence (em) cfa model after dropping invalid indicators level indicator λ remark λ2 e cr ave variable emotional competence (em) em1 0.708 valid 0.501 0.499 0.840 0.516 em2 0.728 valid 0.530 0.470 em3 0.547 valid 0.299 0.701 em4 0.755 valid 0.570 0.430 em5 0.824 valid 0.679 0.321 identification (e1) e1.1 0.637 valid 0.406 0.594 0.826 0.547 e1.2 0.656 valid 0.430 0.570 e1.3 0.789 valid 0.623 0.377 e1.4 0.853 valid 0.728 0.272 understanding (e2) e2.1 0.695 valid 0.483 0.517 0.777 0.543 e2.2 0.610 valid 0.372 0.628 e2.4 0.879 valid 0.773 0.227 dimension expression (e3) e3.1 0.790 valid 0.624 0.376 0.779 0.540 e3.3 0.711 valid 0.506 0.494 e3.4 0.701 valid 0.491 0.509 regulation (e4) e4.1 0.617 valid 0.381 0.619 0.804 0.510 e4.2 0.632 valid 0.399 0.601 e4.3 0.736 valid 0.542 0.458 e4.4 0.848 valid 0.719 0.281 use/utilization (e5) e5.1 0.680 valid 0.462 0.538 0.801 0.506 e5.2 0.583 valid 0.340 0.660 e5.3 0.783 valid 0.613 0.387 e5.4 0.779 valid 0.607 0.393 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 151 desiningrum et al. (the adaptation and validation of adolescent emotional competence scale for indonesian adolescents) table 4 and figure 2 depict that each indicator of the emotional competency (em) cfa had standardized loading estimate scores greater than 0.5 after the two invalid indicators had been dropped. thus, it can be concluded that each indicator in the emotional competency (em) cfa was valid. the cr score was greater than 0.7, and the ave score was greater than 0.5, indicating that the emotional competence (em) cfa was reliable. see table 5. table 5 loading factor table the following is the formula to measure cr score: 𝐶𝑅 = (∑𝜆𝑖) 2 (∑𝜆𝑖) ± ∑(1 − 𝜆𝑖) the λ is the loading factor for each indicator. after carrying out calculations using the formula above, the cr value for each construct is presented in table 6. table 6 composite reliability (cr) construct indicator λ λ2 e reliability em1 0.713 0.508 0.492 0.840 emotional competence (em) em2 0.733 0.537 0.463 em3 0.547 0.299 0.701 em4 0.750 0.563 0.438 em5 0.821 0.674 0.326 ∑λ 3.564 2.581 2.419 ∑λ2 12.702 dimension indicator λ cr λ2 ∑ λ2 ve identification iden 6 0.79 0.844 0.624 2.30 0.575 iden 20 0.71 0.504 iden 11 0.75 0.563 iden 17 0.78 0.608 understanding und 10 0.80 0.828 0.640 2.19 0.549 und 16 0.76 0.578 und 1 0.62 0.384 und 3 0.77 0.593 expression exps 5 0.77 0.829 0.593 2.20 0.550 exps 9 0.79 0.624 exps 8 0.79 0.624 exps 18 0.60 0.360 regulation reg 4 0.85 0.865 0.723 2.47 0.618 reg 14 0.80 0.640 reg 13 0.66 0.436 reg 19 0.82 0.672 use/utilization utilz 2 0.89 0.908 0.792 2.85 0.713 utilz 7 0.74 utilz 12 0.86 utilz 15 0.88 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 152 desiningrum et al. (the adaptation and validation of adolescent emotional competence scale for indonesian adolescents) based on table 6, the construct of emotional competence (em) shows a cr value of 0.840. a cr value greater than 0.7 indicates that the construct was reliable. discussion the study aimed to adapt and test the validity of brasseur’s pec scale for indonesian adolescents. the result showed that two unfavourable indicators were invalid “i often need clarification about understanding other people's emotional responses” and “i find it difficult to explain my feelings to others even if i want to”. a standardized loading estimate value lower than 0.5 on both indicators indicates that the sentence in the indicator is invalid (wijanto, 2015), meaning that the sentence can be ambiguous so that participants have very varied answers. on this indicator, the data pattern was not evenly distributed, showing an inconsistent pattern of answers from respondents. the subjects in this research were adolescents studying in high school, aged 15-18 years. good emotional competence is necessary for them because as these abilities progress during childhood and adolescence. santrock (2017) explains that social interactions with peers are essential in adolescence, and success in friendships is one of their developmental tasks. obstacles in socializing for adolescents include understanding other people's emotional responses and expressing one's emotions so that others can understand them. these abilities are not commonly observed in adolescents. adolescents who have problems understanding the emotions of themselves and others can be shown to be apathetic, close themselves off and experience failure in social adjustment (ross et al., 2019). some adolescents experience academic failure due to obstacles in social interactions (oberle et al., 2014). another impact of adolescents' difficulties in understanding their own and other people's emotions is intenal and external conflict, which can be the perpetrator or victim of bullying (espejo-siles et al., 2020). the second order confirmatory factor analysis test was performed on a scale by omitting two invalid indicators based on the loading factor. the loading factor is the correlation between variables (indicators) and their latent constructs (factors). the loading factor cutoff is 0.5. if the loading factor value is > 0.5, convergent validity is met; if the value is < 0.5, then the construct must be dropped from the analysis (ghozali, 2016). the results show a standardized loading estimate value that is greater than 0.5 (jöreskog & sörbom, 1996), so it is concluded that each indicator in the 18-indicator emotional competence (em) cfa is valid. a test is considered valid if it measures what it intends to measure (mohajan, 2017). validity measures how accurately a measuring instrument performs its measuring function. this time, the validity test of the emotional competence scale showed that the scale correctly reflects the emotional competence state of the participants, namely teenagers. adolescents need emotional competence as one of the fundamental basis for achieving lasting success in academics, personal life, and social interactions while also contributing to mental health and overall well-being (housman, 2017). the importance of interpersonal and intrapersonal emotional competence means that individuals are required to have the ability to understand, regulate and express their own emotions as well as the emotions of others (mikolajczak, 2015). for adolescents, it is not enough to understand one's own emotions. understanding other people's emotions is also essential so that teenagers are not hampered in their social interactions to be able to successfully complete developmental tasks in terms of social skills (santrock, 2017). adolescents must be able to understand other people as unique individuals, whether humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 153 desiningrum et al. (the adaptation and validation of adolescent emotional competence scale for indonesian adolescents) regarding personal traits, interests, values, or feelings, encouraging adolescents to socialize more closely with peers or the community through friendship (espejo-siles et al., 2020). the results of the measurement of the emotional competency scale show that the construct reliability (cr) value is 0.840 or greater than 0.7, and the average variance extract (ave) value is 0.516 or greater than 0.5, meaning that the results of the confirmatory factor analysis test of the emotional competency scale are reliable. construct reliability is a measure of the internal consistency of the indicators of a variable, which shows the levels of the variable being formed (emotional competence). the ave value describes the variance or diversity of manifest variables in a latent construct. thus, the greater the variance or diversity of manifest variables in a latent construct, the greater the representation of the manifest variables in the latent construct (iapichino et al., 2016). in other words, the emotional competence scale (brasseur et al., 2013) having 18 items shows good reliability, meaning that the test measurements remain consistent after being carried out repeatedly on subjects under the same conditions, that is, adolescent subjects. this study has limitations in terms of the technique of distributing the scale because the scale is distributed in large quantities at once and this has the possibility of subjects not understanding the items due to the limited number of companions. apart from that, limitations lie in the research subjects, where the subjects are only female which may limit generalization. future research may involve more varied data sources both in terms of gender and residence coverage. conclusion the study was purpose to adapt the emotional competency scale from brasseur et al. (2013) to indonesian, with adolescents as the subjects. using second order confirmatory factor analysis (cfa), the results show that 18 indicators were valid. also, each indicator in the emotional competency cfa is classified as valid and reliable. thus, it can be used in various studies related to high school teenagers in indonesia declarations author contribution. the main author conducted research from preparation, and implementation, data processing and discussion, as well as drafting articles. the second author assisted in data scoring and discussion and participated in compiling the article. funding statement. this research was funded by the faculty of psychology, diponegoro university conflict of interest. no conflict of interest of the research. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references aouani, h., slimani, m., bragazzi, n. l., hamrouni, s., & elloumi, m. 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(2013). uji validitas alat ukur kecerdasan emosi [validity test of the emotional intelligence measurement tool] (the emotional inventory 2.0). jurnal pengukuran psikologi dan pendidikan indonesia, 2(8), 504-513. https:// //doi.org/10.15408/jp3i.v2i8.10780 https://doi.org/10.3390/bs3030372 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-01061-z https://doi.org/10.3390/ejihpe13030041 https://doi.org/10.15408/jp3i.v2i8.10780 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 22 (1), february 2025, 57-73 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas 10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.898 do role overload and negative emotions lead healthcare workers to cyberloafing? aprilia wulandari, silvia kristanti tri febriana, muhammad abdan shadiqi psychology study program, faculty of medicine and health sciences, lambung mangkurat university, south kalimantan, indonesia corresponding author: s.kristanti@ulm.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction health workers serve as the spearhead of public health (hukormas, 2018). their work is very tiring and stressful due to high work demands (ugwu et al., 2017) and high risk and only qualified people can be involved therein (angioha et al., 2020). to cope with stress, frustration, and anxiety associated with their demanding jobs, health workers may turn to personal internet use as a form of distraction or emotional relief (krishna & agrawal, 2023). most health workers use gadgets, not only for tasks like opening emails, but also for other things like posting photos, sending messages, watching videos on youtube, and various other activities that are not related to work during working hours (ross, 2018). the practice of employees utilizing the company's internet network for leisurely activities is known as cyberloafing (lim, 2002; blanchard & henle, 2008; ozler & polat, 2012). cyberloafing refers to the practice of employees using their work time to engage in non-workarticle info abstract article history received: june 28, 2024 revised: november 17, 2024 accepted: november 24, 2024 cyberloafing is a serious problem in the workplace, including in the health sector. role overload is a significant stressor that contributes to its onset. referring to the stressor emotion counterproductive work behavior model, this study aimed to determine the effect of role overload on cyberloafing behavior mediated by negative emotions. this research involved 230 health workers (doctors, nurses, and midwives) in indonesia as participants. data was collected using the role overload scale, the jobrelated affective well-being scale, and the cyberloafing scale (minor and serious) and was analyzed through ibm spss statistics 25 process macro hayes v4.1. the results showed that through negative emotions, role overload both directly and indirectly predicts serious cyberloafing. on the other hand, the role overload did not significantly predict minor cyberloafing; rather, it did so indirectly through the mediator's unpleasant emotions. this research implies how the government could create policies to manage excessive workloads by regulating working hours, providing incentives, and ensuring equitable distribution of healthcare facilities. organizations could regularly evaluate workloads and offer stress management programs. healthcare workers could adopt effective stress management techniques and seek professional support when necessary while also communicating openly about role overload. keywords cyberloafing role overload negative emotions healthcare workers mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.898 mailto:s.kristanti@ulm.ac.id https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 58 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) aprilia wulandari et.al (do role overload and negative emotions lead healthcare workers to…) related activities on the internet. this behavior can include browsing social media, checking personal emails, online shopping, or engaging in other leisure activities while on the job (dudija & miranti, 2024). cyberloafing can be categorized into two types: minor and serious cyberloafing. minor cyberloafing involves non-work-related internet usage that is generally considered less harmful. this includes activities such as sending and receiving personal emails, browsing general news websites, checking social media (e.g., facebook, twitter), and online shopping for non-work-related items. meanwhile, serious cyberloafing encompasses more risky or potentially illegal internet activities during work hours, which is considered a serious problem and detrimental to many parties. this includes playing online games, accessing adult content or gambling sites, and engaging in illegal downloading or streaming (fateh ur rahman & shah, 2020). research indicates that just 30% of 50 millennial employees can finish projects on time, with the other 30% experiencing delays due to excessive internet use during working hours (diastama & fajrianthi, 2018). according to a different survey, between 60 and 80 percent of employees cyberloaf at work (ross, 2018). cyberloafing behavior can decrease productivity and harm companies in terms of costs incurred (lim, 2002). in terms of health workers, it harms patient safety (ross, 2018). we are focusing this research on health workers in indonesia. several cases of violations committed by unscrupulous health workers had gone viral on the internet such as a beautician played online games while working, causing the patient’s face to be injured (harahap, 2021), a nurse was busy playing gadgets and was indifferent to the patient who finally died after giving birth (natalia, 2021), and a midwife played tiktok while holding a patient’s baby while pinching the baby’s cheek (purnamasari, 2018). ironically, those committing the violations were health workers who served as the spearhead of public health (hukormas, 2018) who must have high job demands both physically and emotionally (ugwu et al., 2017). moreover, the nature of their work is also dangerous and requires qualified people only (angioha et al., 2020). we, therefore, were interested in taking context and focusing on health workers in indonesia. unfortunately, there are still very few studies that fully address the psychological factors that lead to cyberloafing among healthcare professionals. prior research has only demonstrated that loneliness and stress are the main causes of cyberloafing among healthcare professionals (pangani & munyenyembe, 2024). according to the stressor-emotion paradigm, unpleasant emotions do contribute to the initiation of unproductive job practices. in terms of psychology, people who consider different things to be stresses typically see them as demands that elicit unpleasant feelings. uncontrollable negative emotions cause people to act in a variety of unproductive ways at work (spector & fox, 2005). we used three variables, namely role overload as the predictor, negative emotions as the mediator, and cyberloafing as the outcome. given that cyberloafing consists of two dimensions, minor and serious, in this study, we built two separate mediation models to explain the dynamics of role overload and negative emotions in the two types of cyberloafing. cyberloafing may come from perceptions and attitudes, personality traits, habits, addiction to the internet, demographic factors, willingness to get involved, and personal code of ethics (ozler and polat, 2012). it may also emerge due to organizational sanctions and work stressors such as role conflict, role ambiguity, and role overload (henle and blanchard, 2008), referring to the counterproductive work behavior’stressor-emotional model, counterproductive work behavior (cwb) is caused by an individual’s inability to manage negative emotions when faced with work pressure. work duties and responsibilities that are perceived as pressure tend to trigger negative emotions such as feelings of anger, annoyance, anxiety, sadness, etc. individuals who are unable to control negative emotions tend to release humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 59 aprilia wulandari et.al (do role overload and negative emotions lead healthcare workers to…) them by acting counterproductive to work (spector & fox, 2005). in this regard, bauer and spector (2015) suggested that employees who have negative emotions can commit production deviations (spector et al., 2006). in this study, we relate it to cyberloafing as a variable that is allied with cwb (lim, 2002). based on the stressor-emotion model (spector & fox ,2005), cyberloafing may occur due to job stressors. an important job stressor is role overload, which is defined as a condition in which an individual lacks the resources to fulfil his/her work commitments, obligations, and requirements (peterson et al., 1995). role overload is considered as exhausting as it is perceived as situational demands that exceed one's personal capabilities. role overload can therefore result in a range of stress responses, from minor psychological distress like anxiety to more severe ones like depression (tang & vandenberghe, 2021). previous research found that role overload was associated with reduced work performance, physical and psychological health and burnout (huang et al., 2022; tang & vandenberghe, 2021). employees who experience role overloads are likely to commit to cyberloafing. however, research on how role overload affects cyberloafing revealed different results. previous research found that employees are more likely to engage in cyberloafing as a coping mechanism for reducing work-related stress when they encounter a higher level of role overload (rosalinda et.al., 2023). this implies that employees may utilize their personal internet as a way to decompress from their job demands. in contrast, other found that role overload has no discernible effect on cyberloafing (hardiani, et al., 2018). this research aims to address the gaps and contribute to extending the existing knowledge on cyberloafing among employees by investigating the relationship between role overload and cyberloafing and the underlying mechanisms explaining this relationship according to the stressor-emotion model (spector & fox ,2005), individuals monitor and evaluate environmental events, and note that some situations are viewed as job-related stressors that endanger their well-being. this results in unpleasant emotional reactions such as anger or anxiety, which in turn lead to strain that manifests behaviourally (such as smoking or cwb), physically (such as headaches, increased blood pressure), or psychologically (such as job dissatisfaction or intention to leave). role overload occurs when employees have too much work to do on a tight schedule that does not match their abilities. this situation is then perceived as a stressor that might lead to cwb, including cyberloafing as it is viewed as a threat. previous research found that employees are more likely to engage in cyberloafing as a coping mechanism for reducing work-related stress when they encounter a higher level of role overload. they may utilize their internet as a way to decompress from their job demands (rosalinda et.al., 2023). thus, the hypotheses built from this explanation are: (h1) role overload predicts minor cyberloafing among health workers and (h2) role overload predicts serious cyberloafing among health workers. negative emotions frequently occur in reaction to pressures at work, which has a detrimental impact on productivity. stressors can cause negative emotional reactions, which can then affect an employee's conduct and attitudes toward their work (jasiński & derbis, 2022). employees may feel overburdened if they are assigned more work than they can complete in the allotted working hours. feelings of overwhelm can be made worse by the pressure to achieve deadlines without sufficient resources (hardiani et al, 2018). this disparity has a detrimental effect on work performance and causes a great deal of psychological strain (tang & vandenberghe, 2021). bauer & spector (2015) state that employees who experience negative emotions can commit production deviations. thus, hypotheses built from this assumption were: (h3) negative emotions predict minor 60 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) aprilia wulandari et.al (do role overload and negative emotions lead healthcare workers to…) cyberloafing among health workers and (h4) negative emotions predict serious cyberloafing among health workers. when employees feel they have been required to do more than they can properly handle, they are perceived to be experiencing role overload, which may lead to cwb. this association is mediated by negative affect (spector & fox, 2005). according to tariq et al. (2024), role overload is commonly perceived as a stressor that results in retreat tendencies. previous research found that job stressors trigger negative emotions which in turn affect cwb (zhang et al, 2019). furthermore, research indicates that job uncertainty, a particular kind of role stressor, causes negative feelings that further reduce workers' motivation to take part in constructive activities outside of their primary duties, hence raising cwb (nugraheni & wahyuni, 2016). conversely, workers who experience high levels of role stress may act out by withdrawing from work-related activities or acting aggressively toward coworkers as a way to vent their negative feelings (yu et al., 2021). based on the stressor-emotion model, we used negative emotions as a mediating variable between role overload and cyberloafing thus, we expected that: (h5) negative emotions mediate the relationship between role overload and minor cyberloafing among health workers (h6) negative emotions mediate the relationship between role overload and serious cyberloafing among health workers. method this study used a quantitative research method with a cross-sectional approach and using scales to collect the data. participants using a purposive sampling technique, we involved 273 participants. of them, 43 were indicated as outliers, thus having to be eliminated. the final number of participants analyzed, therefore, was 230. the subjects in this study should meet the preset criteria: (1) currently being a doctor/nurse/midwife providing health services directly to patients, not administrative or teaching staff, and (2) working at hospitals, health centers, clinics, or independent practice. based on the data, 187 (68.50%) were women, 112 (44.69%) were nurses, 96 (35.16%) were doctors (general practitioners, dentists, specialists, etc.), and 55 (20.15%) were midwives. as many as 115 participants (42.12%) were aged between 26-30 years. the data came from 19 of 33 provinces in indonesia. the respondents’ profiles in this study, including gender, age, occupation, workplace institution, and tenure, can be seen in table 1. table 1 detailed description of research subjects research participants frequency percentage (%) gender male female 86 187 31.50% 68.50% age 20-25 years 26-30 years 31-35 years >35 years 44 115 76 38 16.12% 42.12% 27.84% 13.92% humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 61 aprilia wulandari et.al (do role overload and negative emotions lead healthcare workers to…) table 1 (continued) job midwifery staff (midwives) nursing staff (nurses) medical staff (general practitioners, dentists, specialist dentists, etc). 55 122 96 20.15% 44.69% 35.16% job institution clinic private practice community health center hospital 70 30 89 84 25.64% 10.99% 32.60% 30.77% work period over 6 months between 1 and 2 years between 3 and 4 years more than 5 years more than 12 years more than 16 years 31 88 122 30 1 1 11.36% 32.23% 44.69% 10.99% 0.37% 0.37% province west java east java central java south kalimantan central kalimantan west kalimantan east kalimantan north sumatra south sumatra west sumatra south jakarta east jakarta west jakarta south sulawesi riau banten lampung east nusa tenggara aceh 79 19 12 71 2 19 3 5 7 3 14 2 9 2 2 17 5 1 1 28.90% 7.00% 4.40% 26.00% 0.70% 7.00% 1.10% 1.80% 2.60% 1.10% 5.10% 0.70% 3.30% 0.70% 0.70% 6.20% 1.80% 0.40% 0.40% instruments we tested the instruments on 100 health workers before distributing it to research participants. the trial was carried out on 3 groups of health workers according to the criteria 62 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) aprilia wulandari et.al (do role overload and negative emotions lead healthcare workers to…) previously mentioned. the distribution of the questionnaires was carried out online using the google form. role overload was assessed using a subscale the role stressor scale that specifically measure role overload developed by peterson et al. (1995) and had been adapted into indonesian by febriana (2020). the number of role overload items was 5, all of which were favorable, with a likert scale type with 5 answer choices: 1) strongly disagree, 2) disagree, 3) disagree, 4) agree, and 5) strongly agree. the reliability value of this measuring instrument was 0.84. all items exceed the threshold value of the item-total correlation coefficient, which is 0.57 to 0.73. the statement items on this scale are “i feel overwhelmed by my roles”, “i have been given too much responsibility", “my workload is too heavy.” cyberloafing was assessed using the cyberloafing scale developed by blanchard and henle (2008) to measure minor and serious cyberloafing. the instrument was first adapted into bahasa indonesia based on the guidelines for adapting measuring instruments from the international test commission (itc). this instrument was a likert scale type consisting of 22 items, one of which failed at the trial stage, leaving 21 favourable items. participants may respond to one of 5 answer choices ranging from 1) never, 2) rarely, 3) sometimes, 4) quite often, and 5) very often. the reliability of the scale was 0.95. all items exceed the threshold value of the item-total correlation coefficient, which is 0.39 to 0.81. based on the article by blanchard and henle (2008), the reliability value for minor cyberloafing is 0.86 and for serious cyberloafing is 0.80. examples of minor cyberloafing items include “checking nonwork-related e-mail”, “checking online personals”, “shopped online personal goods”. examples of serious cyberloafing items include “participated in chat rooms”, “downloaded music”, “read blogs.” we used the job-related affective well-being scale (jaws) specific for the dimension of negative emotions to measure negative emotions. the scale had been adapted into bahasa indonesia by febriana (2020). despite the two subscales, the calculation was still made into one score. this instrument was a type of likert scale consisting of ten favourable items with 5 answer choices: 1) never, 2) rarely, 3) sometimes, 4) quite often, and 5) very often. the reliability value of this measuring instrument was 0.93. all items exceed the threshold value of the item-total correlation coefficient, which is 0.63 to 0.83. one of the items in this negative emotion scale was “my job makes me feel angry”, ”my job makes me feel anxious”, “my job makes me feel bored.” procedure we received ethical approval from the faculty of medicine of universitas lambung mangkurat no. 75/kepk-fk ulm/ec/iii/2022). we used google forms to distribute the questionnaires. participants were recruited via online and completed the anonymous questionnaires voluntarily data analysis data analysis was performed using the ibm spss statistics 25 application. the stages for conducting data analysis were divided into the assumption test and the hypothesis test using the mediation model regression analysis process proposed by hayes. we tested the hayes mediation regression model twice on two models based on the type of cyberloafing. in testing the hypotheses, we used data whose outliers had been removed with a multivariate outliers detection technique, namely the mahalanobis distances, cook’s distances, and leverage distances. as a result, 43 people were deleted, leaving 230 people. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 63 aprilia wulandari et.al (do role overload and negative emotions lead healthcare workers to…) results in the assumption analysis stage, we conducted a residual normality test and found a normal distribution (normal probability plot; the dots spread out and coincided around the diagonal). we also carried out a linearity test and found that it was linear (sig. <0.05). no multicollinearity was found for all the predicting variables (vif < 10); heteroscedasticity was also not found. in the next analysis stage, we performed pearson's bivariate correlation analysis (see table 2). overall, there were significant positive relationships between the variables. table 2. correlation and descriptive statistics α scale mean sd 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 role overload minor cyberloafing serious cyberloafing negative emotions 0.78 0.92 0.77 0.79 1-5 1-5 1-5 1-5 9.54 24.00 16.70 21.19 2.97 7.38 4.23 7.22 0.66** 0.64** 0.59** 0.73** 0.85** 0.67** note: **p<0.01. hypothesis testing we used process v4.1 by andrew f. hayes using model 4; 5000 bootstraps. we tested model 4 twice based on the type of cyberloafing (minor vs serious). figure 1 shows that role overload not significantly predict minor cyberloafing (direct effect) with β =0.09; t(228) = 1.73; p = 0.09, and 95% ci [-0.03; 0.47] (h1 was not accepted). the analysis results proved a significant effect of negative emotions on minor cyberloafing with β = 0.78; t(228) = 15.27; p<.001, and 95% ci [0.70; 0.90] (h3 was accepted). the analysis results also showed that role overload significantly predicted minor cyberloafing under the mediation of negative emotions with β = 0.58; bootse = 0.06, and bootci 95% [0.47; 0.69] (h5 was accepted). in figures 1 and 2, we find that significant negative emotions were predicted by role overload with β = 0.73; t(228) = 16.31; p<0.001, and 95% ci [1.57; 1.99]. both role overload and negative emotions significantly predicted minor cyberloafing r2 = 0.72; f(1. 23) = 297.95; p<.001. so, as much as 72.4% of the variance of the two very significant predictors explained minor cyberloafing. figure 1. schematic of hypothesis test results between role overload (x), minor cyberloafing (y1), and negative emotions (m) role overload (x) minor cyberloafing (y1) negative emotions (m) β = 0.78 p< 0.001 β = 0.73 p< 0.001 β = 0.09 p< 0.001 64 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) aprilia wulandari et.al (do role overload and negative emotions lead healthcare workers to…) figure 2 shows that role overload significantly predicted serious cyberloafing with β = 0.33; t(228) = 4.71; 95% ci [0.27; 0.66] (h2 was accepted). the analysis results showed a significant effect of negative emotions on serious cyberloafing with β = 0.43; t(228) = 6.16; p <0.001; 95% ci [0.17; 0.35] (h4 was accepted). the results of another hypothesis test found that role overload very significantly predicted serious cyberloafing under the mediation of negative emotions with β = 0.32; bootse = 0.06; ci 95% [0.21; 0.44] (h6 was accepted). both role overload and negative emotions very significantly predicted serious cyberloafing r2 =0.49; f(1.228)= 111.12; p <.001. so, 49.5% of the variance of the two very significant predictors explained serious cyberloafing. figure 2. schematic of hypothesis test results between role overload (x), serious cyberloafing (y2), and negative emotions (m) discussion this study aimed to determine the effect of role overload on cyberloafing among health workers in indonesia under the mediation of negative emotions. health workers who experience role overload may experience negative emotions such as anger, boredom, and anxiety, which can trigger them to engage in cyberloafing such as visiting sports websites, responding to personal chats, shopping online, playing online games, and various other behaviors that are not related to their work. according to stressor-emotion model proposed by spector and fox (2005), when a person encounters a situation that is considered unfair, he/she will have negative emotions, which, if not handled properly, can trigger cwb. however, on the other side, according to vitak et al. (2011), cyberloafing can serve as a reliever of boredom, fatigue, or stress, increases job satisfaction, recovery, and recreation, and makes employees happy; it can be said that cyberloafing is a kind of stress coping to deal with work stressors, including role overload (henle & blanchard, 2008). based on the analysis, we found that role overload predicted serious cyberloafing both directly and indirectly through the mediation of negative emotions. conversely, we revealed that role overload only predicts minor cyberloafing through the indirect effect of the mediator of negative emotions. these findings indicated that in the context of healthcare workers in indonesia, they tend to engage in minor cyberloafing as a form of emotional release when facing stress due to role overload. minor cyberloafing, such as sending and receiving personal emails, browsing general news websites, and checking social media, can function as a temporary escape or coping mechanism to reduce negative feelings that allow individuals to manage their emotional state during periods of stress. role overload (x) serious cyberloafing (y2) negative emotions (m) β = 0.43 p< 0.001 β = 0.73 p< 0.001 β = 0.33 p< 0.001 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 65 aprilia wulandari et.al (do role overload and negative emotions lead healthcare workers to…) this study highlights that while role stress can lead to emotional exhaustion, which in turn encourages cyberloafing, the direct effects of role stress on cyberloafing are less significant. this aligns with the idea that negative emotions mediate the relationship between role overload and cyberloafing behaviors (lu et al., 2024). in addition, jamaluddin's study (2023) found a tendency to release instant gratification or diversion from piling tasks, further strengthening the cycle of using cyberloafing as a strategy to overcome work stress. this research proposes that cyberloafing can serve as a coping strategy for employees facing work stressors such as role ambiguity, conflict, and overload. it was found that emotional exhaustion mediates the relationship between these stressors and job-related strain. the study emphasizes that while role overload can lead to increased cyberloafing, it does so indirectly through emotional responses rather than a direct effect. similarly, zhang et al. (2024) study explains that observing colleagues engaging in cyberloafing can normalize this behavior within a team, leading to collective engagement in the activity as a response to role stressors. this social reinforcement can strengthen the indirect effect of negative emotions on minor cyberloafing behavior. serious cyberloafing occurs more frequently among healthcare workers than minor cyberloafing due to several interconnected factors, including a study by alqahtani et al. (2022) showing that stress due to significant work pressure, such as high patient load and emotional demands, causes healthcare workers to engage in serious cyberloafing as a coping mechanism, allowing workers to escape their stressful environment for a while. this study confirms that healthcare workers may engage in more serious forms of cyberloafing when their obligations are too heavy. on the other hand, a study by aciksoz et al. (2024) suggests that the culture in healthcare environments may inadvertently encourage serious cyberloafing. in environments where employees feel underappreciated or overworked, they may turn to more substantial online distractions, such as engaging in social media or watching videos, rather than simply engaging in minor activities such as checking email or browsing the news. this behavior may be exacerbated by the lack of strict policies regarding internet use during work hours. in addition, the ease of access to technology can lead to deeper distractions that draw employees' attention away from their tasks for longer periods of time. serious cyberloafing often involves engaging with content that requires more time and focus, such as streaming services or extensive social media interactions (sarıoğlu & dedeşin, 2021). another reason why serious cyberloafing is more common is that healthcare workers may perceive that there are fewer sanctions or negative consequences for serious cyberloafing compared to mild cyberloafing. if employees believe that they can engage in serious online activities without immediate consequences, they may be more likely to engage in these behaviors during work hours. this perception may lead to a culture where serious cyberloafing becomes commonplace (sarıoğlu & dedeşin, 2021). furthermore, role overload significantly predicts serious cyberloafing both directly and indirectly through the mediation of negative emotions. this is in line with several studies, including alqahtani et al. (2022), which examine how stressors specific to nursing, such as high workloads and emotional demands, contribute to cyberloafing behaviors. it highlights that nurses often resort to cyberloafing as a coping mechanism for workplace stress, which aligns with the idea that role overload can lead to increased cyberloafing through negative emotions. likewise, the study of pangani and munyenyembe (2024) found that increased stress levels were significantly correlated with increased cyberloafing behavior, indicating that negative emotional states can drive healthcare workers to engage 66 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) aprilia wulandari et.al (do role overload and negative emotions lead healthcare workers to…) in non-work-related online activities during work hours. on the other hand, the study of zein el din and baddar (2019) shows how personality traits influence cyberloafing among nurses. it indicates that those with higher levels of procrastination are more likely to engage in serious cyberloafing, supporting the notion that personal characteristics combined with workplace stressors can lead to increased non-productive online behavior. the results of the analysis of direct and indirect effects in this study were in accordance with zhang et al.’s (2019) finding that role overload has an indirect effect on cwb through negative emotions as the mediating variable. similarly, the study by ng and yang (2023) shows that employees who perceive themselves as experiencing a career plateau at a stagnant point are likely to engage in cwb when they experience negative emotions. likewise, the study by yu et al. (2021) proves that workers who experience job insecurity as a stressor can trigger negative emotions that lead to reluctance to perform extra-role work behavior. so, it can be concluded that role overload can affect cyberloafing behavior (both minor and serious) through negative emotions. health workers tend to carry out cyberloafing behavior when they get role overload. according to moffan et al. (2020), the higher the work stress experienced by a person, the higher his/her possibility of engaging in cyberloafing behavior. this is not in line with the research by henle and blanchard (2008) and hardiani et al. (2018) who found that when experiencing role oveload, a person tends not to perform behavior that is not related to work; role overload, therefore, do not affect cyberloafing behavior. based on the analysis of the direct effect, role overload has a very significant effect on cyberloafing (both minor and serious) without using negative emotions as a mediator. this is inversely proportional to the research of zhang et al. (2019) that stated that role overload does not have a significant effect on cwb without the presence of a mediating variable.the discrepancy between the results of this study and those of previous studies in the analysis of the effect of role overload and cyberloafing was because of the difference of the subjects observed. henle and blanchard (2008) studied mba students at southeastern university; hardiani et al. (2018) studied employees of pt pln (persero) construction management center in semarang; zhang et al. (2019) studied employees in general in china. meanwhile, we studied doctors/nurses/midwives in indonesia who provide health services directly to patients which make them have more roles, workloads, responsibilities, and busier activities than those in other fields. besides, their works are dangerous and require qualified workers only (angioha et al., 2020). this is supported by the statement of ugwu et al. (2017) that health workers are one of the six most tiring and stressful jobs. in addition, the research location and the criteria for this study were different from those of previous studies. this research covered 19 provinces in indonesia and focused on cyberloafing (both minor and serious), which had been defined as internet-based violations, not on more general variables like cwb. another difference was in the analytical method used, where previous research used sem for factor analysis, while this research used hayes' mediation model regression analysis. therefore, the results of this study were naturally irrelevant to previous theories and provided a new contribution to the theory of the effect of role overload on cyberloafing. the results showed that health workers who get role overload tend to have negative emotions such as anger, frustration, and various other negative feelings. these results were in line with research conducted by eissa and lester (2017) that said that role overload can increase frustration, which is of negative emotions. according to research, employees who experience job overload are more likely to experience anxiety and sadness. for example, role overload was associated with worse psychological health outcomes for low-ranking government employees, according to a study (huang et al., 2022). additionally, role overload humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 67 aprilia wulandari et.al (do role overload and negative emotions lead healthcare workers to…) increases psychological strain through a number of processes. for instance, feelings of frustration and inadequacy might result from an imbalance between demands and resources, and these emotions are important precursors to negative emotions like sadness (tang & vanderberghe, 2021). frequently researched in conjunction with other job stressors like role conflict and role ambiguity. together, these stresses lead to emotions of stress and discontent at work (hardiani et al., 2018). such a situation can happen because the high demands of their work both physically and emotionally (ugwu et al., 2017). moreover, their works are dangerous and require qualified people only (angioha et al., 2020). because of that pressure, they tend to feel negative emotions which, if not handled properly, can lead them to further behavior, such as deviance at work. other studies showed that when having negative emotions, such as feeling anxious and depressed, health workers may tend to carry out cyberloafing behavior, such as participating in chat rooms and playing online games. this is in line with several studies on counterproductive work behavior, including adelia et al., (2024) that higher levels of negative affectivity have been found to be directly associated with employees' intentions to leave their jobs. for example, it has been demonstrated that emotional tiredness, a factor frequently linked to negative affectivity, considerably reduces job satisfaction and raises the possibility that workers would think about quitting their positions. another study discovered that those who have high levels of negative affectivity frequently perform worse, especially under pressure. what is known as "passive performance"—characterised by disengagement or a lack of initiative—can result from this loss in effort and involvement with tasks (shaya et al., 2024). furthermore, a study examining coworker incivility found that such negative interactions can lead to feelings of workplace loneliness, which in turn fosters withdrawal behavior. the findings suggest that employees who experience incivility are likely to withdrawl not only due to the immediate emotional impact but also because of the resulting loneliness and disconnection from their work environment (zhu, et al., 2024). on the other side, henle & blanchard (2008) stated that cyberloafing is a way to cope with stress when dealing with job stressors, while moffan et al. (2020) said that cyberloafing is a way for employees to escape or reduce the negative emotions they have at work. the results of this study certainly enriched the literature on the influence of these three variables, especially cyberloafing which is still rarely researched and, most importantly, enriched the recent literature on the stressor-emotion model of spector and fox (2005) that says that a person, when experiencing pressure at work, tends to have negative emotions, which, if not handled properly, can lead to further behavior in the form of deviation at work. likewise, in this study, when experiencing role overload, health workers tend to have negative emotions such as anger, depression, and various other negative feelings. when these emotions are not handled properly, they tend to carry out cyberloafing behaviors, such as reading websites, playing online games, and various other behaviors, such as surfing the internet, which are certainly not for work purposes. therefore, the government needs to design policies related to regulating healthcare workers' workloads and developing their capacity. similarly, organizations need to make practical efforts such as conducting regular workload evaluations and creating a positive and supportive work culture where healthcare workers feel valued and supported. in addition, organizations also need to pay attention to the mental health issues of healthcare workers, such as providing an employee assistance program to offer psychological support to each worker. the practical implications of this research are that the government is expected to create better policies for handling excessive workloads, such as regulating shift working hours and providing additional incentives for healthcare workers that exceed regular working hours. furthermore, the government must establish sufficient healthcare facilities across all regions 68 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) aprilia wulandari et.al (do role overload and negative emotions lead healthcare workers to…) to ensure an equitable distribution of healthcare workers' workloads, rather than concentrating them in a single facility. the government is also expected to pay more attention to psychological support for healthcare workers. nevertheless, organizations are expected to conduct regular evaluations of healthcare workers' workloads. if the workload is found to be excessive, they will likely hire additional staff. additionally, in terms of managing employee stress, they are expected to provide programs such as counseling and relaxation therapy training that can independently help healthcare workers when facing stress. for healthcare workers, they need to learn more effective methods of stress management, like independent relaxation techniques. if self-management proves insufficient, they should seek support from professionals such as psychologists or psychiatrists. additionally, when experiencing role overload, they should learn to be open with supervisors or colleagues to ask for help. this study used the correlational method only, thus requiring more in-depth research using experimental and longitudinal methods. another limitation was that the research sample did not fully represent national data because it only came from 19 out of 33 provinces throughout indonesia. we also recommended that future research broaden the criteria of the research subjects to be more general than health workers, such as the general public. conclusion this study found that role overload has an influence on the cyberloafing behavior (both minor and serious) of health workers in indonesia under the mediation of negative emotions. we found that role overload can only predict minor cyberloafing through the mediating effect of negative emotions, demonstrating the presence of full mediation. compared to the indirect effect through negative emotions, the direct effect of role overload on serious cyberloafing seems to be stronger. the fact that the difference is so slight, however, indicates that both the direct and mediated routes play a significant role in the explanation of severe cyberloafing. on the other hand, role overload has a stronger predictive indirect impact on minor cyberloafing through bad emotions; the direct effect is not significant. consequently, the indirect pathway is a more important predictor of minor cyberloafing as unpleasant emotions explain the role-overload and cyberloafing relationships. acknowledgement we sincerely thank all respondents for their participation in this study. our gratitude also goes to colleagues for their valuable insights and support. declarations author contribution. the first author contributed to conceiving and designing the study, collecting data, analyzing data, writing the draft of the manuscript and finalizing the manuscript. the second author as corresponding author contributes to carrying out communication and administrative tasks required for manuscript publication, supervising research design, reviewing the manuscript and data analysis, and also writing the draft of the manuscript. the third author contributed to data analysis and writing the draft of the manuscript. funding statement. the authors did not receive funding for this research. conflict of interest. all authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 69 aprilia wulandari et.al (do role overload and negative emotions lead healthcare workers to…) references adelia, a., daud, i., azazi, a., kalis, m. c. i., & hendri, m. i. 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(2024). testing the process of coworker incivility to work withdrawal behavior: the moderated mediation effects of employee resilience in achieving organizational sustainability. sustainability, 16(20), 9018. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16209018 https://doi.org/10.24036/0201321883-0-00 https://doi.org/10.1111/ijsa.12255 https://www.emerald.com/insight/search?q=yajun%20zhang https://www.emerald.com/insight/search?q=jingjing%20wang https://www.emerald.com/insight/search?q=junwei%20zhang https://www.emerald.com/insight/search?q=yongqi%20wang https://www.emerald.com/insight/search?q=muhammad%20naseer%20akhtar https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/issn/1066-2243 https://doi.org/10.1108/intr-09-2022-0700 https://doi.org/10.3390/su16209018 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 21 (2), august 2024, 118-133 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas validity of the dark triad dirty dozen (dtdd) test-indonesian version lalita devi1, lina natalya1, ide bagus siaputra1*, peter karl jonason2,3 1faculty of psychology, universitas surabaya, indonesia 2institute of psychology, university of cardinal stefan wyszyński, poland 3department of general psychology, university of padua, italy corresponding author: std@staff.ubaya.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction according to paulhus and williams (2002), dark personality refers to a cluster of traits associated with behavior considered contrary to social norms or socially aversive. in their study, they used the term "dark triad" to represent three behavioral indicators that can be grouped under dark personality, namely (1) subclinical psychopathy, (2) subclinical narcissism, and (3) machiavellianism. subclinical psychopathy involves a lack of empathy, immoral behavior, callousness, and an inability to feel guilty about antisocial actions (jonason & webster, 2010). narcissism entails excessive self-focus, a need for recognition, and a tendency to feel superior to others (jonason & webster, 2010). meanwhile, machiavellianism involves manipulative tactics such as control, deception, and flattery, as well as a tendency to manipulate others for personal gain (jonason & webster, 2010). since first introduced by paulhus and williams (2002), the concept of the dark triad has become the focus of increasingly intensive research, as evidenced by recent studies (furnham et al., article info abst ract article history received january 21, 2024 revised july 22, 2024 accepted july 27, 2024 this study addresses the need for a culturally adapted and validated measurement tool for assessing dark triad traits in the indonesian population. the dark triad, consisting of narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopathy, are associated with various undesirable social and behavioral outcomes worldwide. our research objective was to validate the dark triad dirty dozen scale within the indonesian setting, using a multi-stage methodology, including principal component analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, reliability testing, and invariance testing. a sample of 429 indonesian undergraduate students (17-23 years old) completed the adapted dark triad dirty dozen scale, revealing strong psychometric properties, including validity by confirming a three-factor structure consistent with the theoretical framework, with model fit indices meeting established criteria (rmsea = 0.054; gfi = 0.932; agfi = 0.890; cfi = 0.971; nfi = 0.914; tli = 0.959) and high reliability (α ≥ 0.7). there is also measurement invariance across men and women in dtdd. in conclusion, the adapted dark triad dirty dozen scale is a valid and reliable means to assess dark triad traits in indonesia, contributing to a deeper understanding of personality traits and their implications in this unique cultural context. keywords confirmatory factor analysis dark triad dirty dozen measurement invariance principal component analysis validation mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 119 devi et al. (validity of the dark triad dirty dozen (dtdd) test-indonesian version) 2013; muris et al., 2017; miller et al., 2019), both in attempts to understand its negative implications (e.g. curtis et al., 2022; esteves et al., 2021; zhao et al., 2016) as well as other aspects related to it (e.g. birkás et al., 2018; lee et al., 2013). based on the searches carried out, it was discovered that in a study conducted by nguyen et al. (2021) with 447 employee samples, 15.9% exhibited high levels of the dark triad (malevolent). other results were also found in a study conducted in indonesia, where 2.7% of individuals from a sample of 75 civil servants (pns) were identified with high levels of the dark triad, despite the majority of the sample (73.3%) falling into the low category (putri et al., 2021). in contrast, different results were found in another study in indonesia conducted by banowati and nugraha (2022), revealing that 85% of 200 social media users aged 18-25 exhibited very high levels of the dark triad traits. this raises concerns about potential negative consequences resulting from deviant behavior associated with this personality trait. deviant behaviors linked to the dark triad traits include corruption (putri et al., 2021; zhao et al., 2016), deception (harrison et al., 2016), academic dishonesty (curtis et al., 2022; esteves et al., 2021), cyberbullying (banowati & nugraha, 2022; safaria et al., 2020), as well as counterproductive work behavior (o’boyle et al., 2012). therefore, it is crucial to employ accurate measurements of these traits to identify the personality characteristics of individuals precisely, aiding in the investigation of potential negative consequences that may arise from these personality traits. several studies on the dark triad traits also explore common factors influencing the interaction between the three personality traits of the dark triad. jonason and luévano (2013) suggest that the factor structure of the dark triad traits has a complex relationship, illustrating the concept of a bifactor. their review highlights a common factor that causes overlap among psychopathy, narcissism, and machiavellianism. similar findings are echoed in research by mclarnon and tarraf (2017), stating that the dark triad traits is a complex and closely related personality phenomenon, making the identification of common factors crucial in understanding the relationship between these three personality traits. common characteristics identified in previous research include callousness (jones & figueredo, 2013; paulhus, 2014), manipulativeness (jones & figueredo, 2013), low agreeableness (jakobwitz & egan, 2006), or low levels of honesty-humility (lee & ashton, 2005). these findings raise questions about whether the dark triad traits can be assessed as a single factor or as three distinct yet interrelated aspects (psychopathy, narcissism, and machiavellianism) (mclarnon & tarraf, 2017). therefore, understanding the existence of common factors becomes relevant in validating measures of the dark triad traits. the concept of the dark triad traits has been measured in several studies in indonesia using the short dark triad (sd3) developed by jones and paulhus (2014). meanwhile, there is a shorter measurement tool from jonason and webster (2010) known as the dark triad "dirty dozen" (dtdd), consisting of a total of 12 items compared to sd3, which comprises a total of 27 items. the use of a shorter measurement tool can offer benefits in terms of time and respondent energy efficiency (jonason & webster, 2010). however, it is essential to note that this efficiency must be accompanied by high validity standards (smith et al., 2000). a brief measurement tool should be able to capture all parts of the construct without omitting essential components of the measured construct (maples et al., 2014). therefore, before suggesting the use of a shorter measurement tool to assess the dark triad, its validity needs to be tested first to ensure its accurate application in indonesian samples. dtdd also demonstrates superiority in terms of its structure, appearing to be more stable across various languages and cultural contexts compared to sd3 (rogoza et al., 2021). furthermore, dtdd itself has been validated in several languages, including polish (czarna et al., 2016), turkish (özsoy et al., 2017), french-canadian (savard et al., 2017), bengali humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 120 devi et al. (validity of the dark triad dirty dozen (dtdd) test-indonesian version) (ahmed et al., 2020), and korean (cho et al., 2022). this makes the dtdd measurement tool more practical for research and field use that requires a quick and accurate assessment of the dark triad. the validity of dtdd in indonesia is crucial, considering the collective culture of indonesian society compared to previous validation research dominated by countries with a more individualistic culture. because culture can shape the meaning of a construct, the validation of the dtdd scale must be conducted before its use in different cultures (ma et al., 2021). in this context, this dark personality measurement tool's validation efforts ensure measurement accuracy and aim to understand the concept within the unique socio-cultural dynamics of indonesia. based on previous research, the validation of the dtdd scale has reported differing factor structure results. some validation studies conducted using confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) found results consistent with the initial structure, where the best model was a three-factor correlated model (e.g., dinić et al., 2018; el keshky, 2022; pineda et al., 2020). on the other hand, different results were found in other studies where the best model was a bifactor model with three factors (e.g., czarna et al., 2016; jonason & luévano, 2013; savard et al., 2017). additionally, cho et al. (2022) found another differing result, with the best model being a bifactor model with two factors, where psychopathy and machiavellianism were combined into the first factor and narcissism as the second factor. these results leads to differing perspectives regarding scoring. specifically, there are two conflicting perspectives: the unification approach, where the dark triad traits are mapped onto a single common factor, and the separatist approach, which views the three dark triad traits as separate factors (mclarnon & tarraf, 2021). therefore, testing the appropriate factor structure for use in indonesian samples is crucial to ensure scoring the dark triad traits as either three interrelated sub-scales or as a single scale. these different findings provide room for refinement and further understanding of the internal structure of the dark triad. therefore, this validation study aims to determine the appropriate factor structure for the dtdd in the indonesian sample and ensure consistent measurement. this ensures the tool can be used to identify dark personality characteristics accurately and precisely to aid in researching potential negative consequences associated with this personality trait. additionally, this study also aims to estimate the reliability of the scale and evaluate measurement invariance based on gender to ensure the dtdd can measure the dark triad equally and accurately without gender bias. as for the determination of norms, it is also a crucial aspect in the context of dark personality assessment in indonesia. appropriate norms will provide clear guidelines for interpreting assessment results. with norms, assessments become more contextual and relevant, allowing for the optimal use of the dtdd measurement tool in analyzing dark personality in indonesia. in conclusion, this research endeavors to deepen our understanding of the dark triad within the indonesian cultural framework, extending beyond psychometric properties and scoring. this study seeks to illuminate the nuances of dark triad traits within the indonesian context, offering insights that could help to better understanding of these traits on individuals and society as a whole. method research design this study is divided into two stages. the first stage involves testing the validity of dtdd using sources of validity evidence from principal component analysis (pca) and internal consistency. the subsequent stage aims to ensure the validity of dtdd by employing humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 121 devi et al. (validity of the dark triad dirty dozen (dtdd) test-indonesian version) confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) and assessing internal consistency. data collection methods involve non-random sampling techniques, specifically accidental sampling. this sampling technique is chosen to ensures diverse sample, thus leading to a more comprehensive assessment of its validity. participants willing to be involved are requested to complete an informed consent form and a questionnaire through google form. in determining the sample size, the researcher follows the rule of thumb guidelines to determine the minimum sample size required for a particular analytical model. the rule of thumb used in determining the sample size suggests ten times the number of items in the measurement tool being validated (bujang et al., 2022). this study employs the dark triad dirty dozen (dtdd) measurement tool developed by jonason and webster (2010), consisting of a total of 12 items. therefore, the researcher determines the target sample size for the study to be a minimum of 120 individuals. participants study 1 participants in this study consisted of 268 students aged 17-23 years (m = 20.19, sd = 1.15), comprising 90 men (33.58%), 173 women (64.55%), and five individuals who chose not to disclose their gender (1.87%). the evidence sources used included evidence based on internal structure using principal component analysis (pca) to examine the grouping of dtdd items, along with reliability analysis to test the internal consistency of dtdd. the time frame for study 1 was around july 2022-january 2023. study 2 participants in this study were 161 students aged 17-23 years (m = 19.36, sd = 1.05), consisting of 44 men (27.32%), 112 women (69.56%), and five individuals who chose not to disclose their gender (3.10%). the evidence sources used included evidence based on internal structure with confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) to confirm the factor model with the best fit and reliability analysis to test internal consistency. the time frame for study 2 is around june 2023 until august 2023. instruments the measurement tool used in this study is the dark triad dirty dozen (dtdd), which has been adapted into bahasa indonesia (afifah et al., 2023). dtdd was developed by jonason and webster (2010) to measure psychopathy, narcissism, and machiavellianism. dtdd comprises a total of 12 items, with four items for each dimension. the response scale uses a likert scale ranging from one (strongly disagree) to six (strongly agree). jonason and webster (2010) reported high reliability for the dtdd scale as follows: dt = 0.86, m = 0.79, p = 0.77, and n = 0.84. similarly, afifah et al. (2023) found favorable reliability estimates for the dtdd-indonesian version: m = 0.768, p = 0.759, and n = 0.866. table 1 blueprint dark triad dirty dozen scale indonesian version dimension item number total examples of translated items (in bahasa indonesia) machiavellianism 1, 2, 3, 4 4 saya menggunakan pujian untuk memenuhi keinginan saya. psychopathy 5, 6, 7, 8 4 saya cenderung tidak berperasaan atau tidak peka. narcissism 9, 10, 11, 12 4 saya cenderung mencari gengsi atau status. total 12 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 122 devi et al. (validity of the dark triad dirty dozen (dtdd) test-indonesian version) meanwhile, behavioral indicators for each aspect of the indonesian version of dtdd are as follows: table 2 behavioral indicators of dtdd indonesian version dimension definition behavioral indicators machiavellianism tendency to use other people to fulfill personal desires controlling deceptive flattering exploiting others psychopathy tendency to be not empathetic/behaving anti-socially lack of remorse low morals callous apathetic narcissism tendency to feel entitled want to be admired want to be noticed want to be appreciated want special treatment data analysis based on the standards outlined in the standards for educational and psychological testing american educational research association (aera et al., 2014), five sources of evidence can be used to assess the validity of a psychological test instrument. these sources include evidence based on test content, relationships with other variables, internal structure, response processes, and test consequences. the importance of each validity evidence source varies depending on factors such as the measured construct, the intended use of the test scores, and the assessed population (reynolds & livingston, 2014). in this study, the validation testing is conducted using evidence based on internal structure to ensure the most appropriate design for the dtdd instrument, which can accurately and consistently measure dark personality in the indonesian population. factor analysis is one method used to examine a test's internal structure to identify the number of factors or dimensions that constitute a test (reynolds & livingston, 2014). there are two types of fact or analysis: exploratory factor analysis (efa) and confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) (reynolds & livingston, 2014). efa is used to explore the representation of items in several latent constructs (shadiqi, 2023). on the other hand, cfa is used to confirm the alignment of items with the components/dimensions/factors that have been designed (natalya & purwanto, 2018). both types of factor analysis can be used together as a source of internal structure evidence by examining whether the actual structure from the data is consistent with the hypothesized structure (brown, 2015). this study uses both efa with principal component analysis (pca) and cfa simultaneously to verify whether all items of the indonesian version of dtdd have been accurately grouped using double-check analysis (natalya & purwanto, 2018). cfa is a statistical analysis method within structural equation modeling (sem) used to verify the number of factors and item grouping while examining the pattern of item-factor relationships (factor loadings) (brown, 2015). in cfa, several statistical criteria, known as model-fit indices or goodness-of-fit indices, are employed to evaluate the fit between the actual factor structure and the hypothesized factor structure (reynolds & livingston, 2014): humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 123 devi et al. (validity of the dark triad dirty dozen (dtdd) test-indonesian version) table 3 cut off value for the goodness of fit indices fit indices cut off value enough good p-value of χ2 ≥ 0.01 (hu & bentler, 1999) > 0.05 (hu & bentler, 1999) tli ≥ 0.95 (schermelleh-engel et al., 2003) ≥ 0.97 (schermelleh-engel et al., 2003) nfi > 0.90 (natalya & purwanto, 2018) ≥ 0.95 (schermelleh-engel et al., 2003) cfi > 0.90 (natalya & purwanto, 2018) > 0.95 (hu & bentler, 1999) gfi ≥ 0.90 (natalya & purwanto, 2018) ≥ 0.95 (schermelleh-engel et al., 2003) agfi ≥ 0.85 (natalya & purwanto, 2018) ≥ 0.90 (schermelleh-engel et al., 2003) rmsea < 0.10 (hu & bentler, 1999) < 0.05 (hu & bentler, 1999) in addition to assessing model accuracy, a valid measurement should also have good discriminant validity (natalya & purwanto, 2018). composite reliability (cr) and average variance extracted (ave) are two criteria commonly used to support evidence of internal structure validity (netemeyer et al., 2003). a good cr value is above or equal to 0.7 (cr ≥ 0.7) (hair et al., 2014). meanwhile, for ave, a good value is above or equal to 0.5 (ave ≥ 0.5) (fornell & larcker, 1981). in addition to factor analysis, reliability testing is necessary to support validity testing (hinton et al., 2014). reliability testing aims to examine the internal consistency of a measurement instrument. a measurement tool is considered reliable if its measurements are stable and consistent (reynolds & livingston, 2014). generally, a measurement tool is deemed to have satisfactory internal consistency if it has a cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient of ≥ 0.70 (hinton et al., 2014). the purpose of measurement invariance testing is to ensure that there is no potential measurement bias that may arise due to differences between groups, thus ensuring that the analysis results are reliable and have a strong scientific foundation (chen, 2007). in general, measurement invariance testing involves configural invariance (equality of the number of factors and item composition between groups), metric invariance (equality of factor loadings for each item between groups), and scalar invariance (equality of factor loadings and intercepts for each item between groups) (muttaqin & ripa, 2021). multi-group analysis is conducted following the guidelines proposed by chen (2007), where differences in cfi coefficients below -0.005 (≤ -0.005) and differences in rmsea coefficients below 0.010 (≤ 0.010) can be considered as indicators that measurement invariance is acceptable. results study 1 the validity testing began with conducting pca to observe the grouping of the 12 items of the indonesian version of dtdd. the pca results proposed three factors based on the latent root criterion, a priori criterion, percentage of variance explained criterion, and scree test criterion. all dtdd items had factor loadings above 0.4, and each item was grouped according to its respective dimension, except for item m3, which showed cross-loading with items in the narcissism dimension. however, the factor loading value of item m3 in the machiavellianism dimension was still higher than its factor loading value in the narcissism dimension (fl machiavellianism = 0.507 > fl narcissism = 0.473). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 124 devi et al. (validity of the dark triad dirty dozen (dtdd) test-indonesian version) table 4 factor loading results of the indonesian version of dtdd items dimension item component cr ave narcissism maciavellianism psychopathy narcissism n1 0.808 0.828 0.549 n2 0.805 n4 0.722 n3 0.610 machiavellianism m1 0.812 0.798 0.503 m2 0.755 m4 0.725 m3 0.473 0.507 psychopathy p3 0.756 0.687 0.363 p2 0.650 p1 0.482 p4 0.477 study 2 the cfa results for the indonesian version of dtdd are shown in the figure 1, figure 2 and figure 3. a summary of the results can be seen in table 5. figure 1 three factor correlated model figure 2 second order model humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 125 devi et al. (validity of the dark triad dirty dozen (dtdd) test-indonesian version) figure 3 bifactor model table 5 confirmatory factor analysis result of dtdd indonesian version model p-value of χ2 tli nfi cfi gfi agfi rmsea three-factor correlated model 0.020 0.959 0.914 0.971 0.932 0.890 0.054 second order model 0.020 0.959 0.914 0.971 0.932 0.890 0.054 bifactor model 0.008 0.945 0.923 0.968 0.943 0.885 0.062 note: χ2 = chi-square, tli = tucker–lewis index, nfi = normed fit index, cfi = comparative fit index, gfi = goodness of fit index, agfi = adjusted goodness of fit, srmr = standardized root mean square residual, rmsea = root mean square error of approximation. the cfa testing was conducted on three models: the three-factor correlated model, the hierarchical model, and the bifactor model. modification indices (mi) were then used to improve the model fit. the testing results for the first model, the three-factor correlated model, showed reasonably adequate results based on the goodness-of-fit criteria. although overall, all three models had marginal fit indices, the bifactor model did not meet the acceptance criteria for two fit indices, tli, and p-value of χ2, which are among the absolute fit measures (khairi et al., 2021). the bifactor model is not recommended for use based on overall fit indices and specific factor loadings. the presence of a negative correlation (-.604) and a small correlation (.000) suggests the existence of unique factors that remain unexplained. overall, the three-factor correlated model and the second-order model had better goodness-of-fit values compared to the bifactor model. therefore, it can be recommended that the hierarchical model is more optimal in explaining the internal structure of the indonesian version of dtdd. in addition to achieving results that meet the acceptance criteria for the main fit indices, which indicates good model accuracy and internal structural validity, it conceptually provides a clearer explanation of the shared factor across the three traits (machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism). table 6 reliability analysis result no dimension study 1 (n=268) study 2 (n=161) number of items 𝛼 𝛼 1 dtdd (total) 0.736 0.863 12 2 machiavellianism 0.716 0.762 4 3 psychopathy 0.430 0.721 4 4 narcissism 0.760 0.868 4 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 126 devi et al. (validity of the dark triad dirty dozen (dtdd) test-indonesian version) the reliability testing results for data from study 1 (n = 268) indicate that overall, the dtdd items have good internal consistency with a cronbach's alpha value above 0.7 (𝛼 = 0.736). however, when evaluated separately, from the three dimensions of dtdd, the psychopathy dimension in study 1 does not have good internal consistency with a cronbach's alpha value below 0.7 (𝛼 = 0.430). this means that based on the reliability testing in study 1, the items in the psychopathy dimension have less than optimal internal consistency and require further review. on the other hand, the reliability testing results for data from study 2 (n = 161) show that overall, and for each dimension, dtdd has cronbach's alpha that meet the criteria for being considered reliable. although the first study indicated less satisfactory reliability levels, the internal consistency values in the second study suggest that changes in subject groups can have a significant impact on the reliability of the measurement instrument. therefore, it can be concluded that the dtdd items have sufficiently reliable internal consistency overall. table 7 gender measurement invariance testing of the indonesian version of dtdd model fit indices model comparison df p-value of χ2 cfi rmsea δcfi δrmsea three factor correlation model configural invariance 96 0.001 0.934 0.058 metric invariance 105 0.001 0.934 0.056 0.000 -0.002 scalar invariance 114 0.001 0.930 0.055 -0.004 -0.001 second order model configural invariance 96 0.001 0.934 0.058 metric invariance 105 0.001 0.934 0.056 0.000 -0.002 scalar invariance 118 0.001 0.929 0.054 -0.005 -0.002 bifactor model configural invariance 78 0.042 0.970 0.044 metric invariance 98 0.021 0.960 0.045 -0.010 0.001 scalar invariance 107 0.032 0.962 0.042 0.002 -0.003 from the results of the multi-group analysis presented in table 7, it appears that there are differences in the cfi coefficients below -0.005 (≤ -0.005) and differences in the rmsea coefficients below 0.010 (≤ 0.010) in the testing of metric and scalar invariance of the dtdd measurement instrument. these results indicate that there is measurement invariance in dtdd based on the respondents' gender. in other words, the factor structure, factor loadings, and intercepts for each dtdd item do not show significant differences between male and female respondent groups. this finding confirms that dtdd can be reliable and consistent in measuring the dark triad, both in male and female respondents, making the results considered valid for the indonesian population. to complement the indonesian version of the dtdd scale, in this study, the researchers established norms. with this information, scale users can interpret the implications of their scores with the reference group established. however, it is important to note that these norms are specific to the population used as the sample, namely indonesian university students. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 127 devi et al. (validity of the dark triad dirty dozen (dtdd) test-indonesian version) table 8 dtdd norms indonesian version category ideal norm (total) ideal norm (dimension) group norm total (t) machiavellianism (m) psychopathy (p) narcissism (n) very low < 22 < 7.33 ≤ 17 ≤ 4 ≤ 3 ≤ 4 low 22 31 7.33 – 10.66 18 – 26 5 8 4 – 6 5 – 9 quite low 32 41 10.67 – 13.99 27 – 35 9 12 7 – 9 10 – 13 quite high 42 51 14.00 – 17.32 36 – 45 13 16 10 – 13 14 – 18 high 52 62 17.33 – 20.66 46 – 54 17 – 20 14 – 16 19 – 22 very high ≥ 63 ≥ 20.67 ≥ 55 ≥ 21 ≥ 17 ≥ 23 note: mean t = 35.904; sd t= 9.128; mean m = 12.515; sd m = 4.021; mean p = 9.814; sd p = 3.442; mean n = 13,576; sd n = 4.525 discussion this study examined the validity of the indonesian version of the dtdd measurement instrument through evidence of internal structure using pca and cfa, supported by reliability testing using cronbach's alpha. the research began by examining the item grouping based on pca analysis, and the results were then confirmed through cfa by testing three models (correlation, hierarchy, and bifactor). based on the results of pca, the 12 items of the indonesian version of dtdd showed good grouping according to the initial design dimensions, which are three dimensions with four items each. one item from the machiavellianism dimension (m3) cross-loaded into the narcissism dimension. cross-loading is likely to occur as the dark triad is a collection of three overlapping dimensions (paulhus & williams, 2002). nevertheless, the factor loading value for item m3 is still higher in the machiavellianism dimension than in the narcissism dimension, so the researcher decided to retain the item. thus, it can be concluded that the 12 items of the indonesian version of dtdd can be grouped into three dimensions as per the initial design. next, the cfa results were used to confirm the proposed factor structure from pca, which is three factors with four items each according to the a priori design. cfa testing results showed that the three-factor correlated model and hierarchical model had similar goodness-of-fit values, and both met the cut-off values for each index. while the bifactor model also showed good model fit, it was not as good as the correlation and hierarchy models. this result is similar to the findings of pineda et al. (2020); dinić et al. (2018); and el keshky (2022), who found the correlation model to be the best for dtdd. in addition, the multi-group analysis revealed that the indonesian version of dtdd shows measurement invariance by testing metric and scalar invariance. this finding indicates that there is no difference between the number of factors, item composition, and factor loadings between male and female respondent samples (chen, 2007). from the cfa results, a negative correlation of -0.284 was found between the error variance of item m3 and p3 in the three-factor correlation model and hierarchical model. this correlation result may reflect differences in the social strategies applied by individuals who show higher levels in one dimension compared to another (jones & mueller, 2022). the machiavellianism dimension is often associated with more strategic, manipulative, and goaloriented social strategies (jones & paulhus, 2011). in contrast, the psychopathy dimension tends to describe more impulsive, lack of self-control, and antisocial behavior (jones & paulhus, 2011). therefore, individuals with higher scores in the machiavellianism dimension may tend to use more focused social strategies, while those showing higher levels in the psychopathy dimension may engage in more impulsive actions in social interactions humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 128 devi et al. (validity of the dark triad dirty dozen (dtdd) test-indonesian version) (furnham et al., 2013). these differences in social strategies can explain the negative correlation found between items in the machiavellianism dimension and items in the psychopathy dimension. based on previous research, it has been found that the three dimensions of the dark triad often overlap, indicating a complex relationship between these dimensions (paulhus & williams, 2002; jones & paulhus, 2014). paulhus & williams (2002) as the first who introduce the concept also indicates in their definition that dark triad is three distinct but overlapping construct of socially aversive traits. correlating errors in sem requires a solid theoretical justification, suggesting that certain aspects of the constructs are related and might share unique variance (perry et al., 2015; landis et al., 2009). harrington (2009) also stated that measurement errors can be the result of similar phrases in the item. this seem to be the case for item m2 “i have used deceit or lied to get my way” and m3 “i have use flattery to get my way.” previous research indicating overlap among the dimensions of the dark triad serves as the theoretical justification for correlating errors between items. this approach ensures that the error correlation aligns with both theoretical underpinnings and empirical evidence obtained from the data, maintaining the integrity of the model. the reliability testing results from study 1 and study 2 showed different outcomes where the internal consistency values for the psychopathy dimension were less reliable in the first study but reliable in the second study. the psychopathy dimension had less internal consistency due to cronbach's alpha values not meeting the reliability. however, low internal consistency can be caused by the limited number of items on the scale (schweizer, 2011), with some previous studies also finding lower internal consistency values in the psychopathy dimension (e.g., dinić et al., 2018; el keshky, 2022; jonason & webster, 2010). each dimension of dtdd consists of only four items, which can result in relatively low internal consistency when analyzed per dimension compared to the overall internal consistency value (jonason & webster, 2010). cronbach's alpha is a coefficient of internal consistency closely related to the number of items analyzed. the greater the number of items analyzed within a measurement tool or dimension, the likelihood is that the cronbach's alpha coefficient will increase (reynolds & livingston, 2014). furthermore, the creation of a shorter scale aims to allow the instrument to measure all aspects of a construct with non-redundant items (jonason & webster, 2010). this results in a measurement tool with a limited number of items and tends to be diverse, so the correlation values between items on a shorter scale tend to be low (rammstedt & beierlein, 2014). therefore, lower internal consistency than a longer scale is not a problem if the validity of the scale in terms of content coverage can be maintained (rammstedt & beierlein, 2014). thus, it can be concluded that the indonesian version of dtdd can consistently measure dark triad tendencies. moreover, based on the findings from cr and ave analysis supporting evidence of internal structure validity, the cr values were above 0.7 for the machiavellianism and narcissism dimensions (cr ≥ 0.70). similarly, only the machiavellianism and narcissism dimensions had ave values above 0.5. according to fornell & larcker (1981), an ave value below 0.5 indicates a higher level of average error than the variance captured by the construct. however, if the ave value is close to 0.5 and other validity criteria are met, the ave value alone is not enough to indicate a problem. all aspects of dtdd also had cr values in the range of 0.60 0.70, which is acceptable according to (hair et al., 2014). this indicates that all aspects of dtdd are consistent enough. because overall cfa testing results showed a good model fit for the correlation model according to the initial design and pca results, it can be said that the indonesian version of dtdd is valid. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 129 devi et al. (validity of the dark triad dirty dozen (dtdd) test-indonesian version) the implications of this research at the theoretical level are that the indonesian version of dtdd can be considered a valid and reliable measurement tool for assessing the dark triad. practically, these findings provide a solid foundation for the implementation and interpretation of dtdd in the indonesian context. therefore, this research not only contributes to understanding the dark triad concept but also offers useful guidance for practitioners and researchers in accurately applying and interpreting the dtdd scale in the indonesian population. however, it is crucial to acknowledge a limitation concerning the need for additional sources of validity evidence. while this study provides strong evidence supporting the internal structure validity of the indonesian dtdd, future research could benefit from incorporating other sources of validity evidence such as evidence based on test content and correlation with other variables to further validate the scale's effectiveness in capturing dark triad traits. conclusion the results obtained indicate that the indonesian version of dtdd can be used to measure the dark triad validly and reliably. the first study showed that dtdd could accurately measure the three dimensions, namely machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism, with item grouping according to the initial design. this result was also confirmed in the second study using cfa, which showed the three-factor model as the most suitable models for the indonesian version of dtdd. this finding is consistent with previous research that found the three-factor correlated model to be the best for dtdd. based on the findings of this study, it is known that the indonesian version of dtdd has good and adequate internal structure validity evidence. furthermore, the results of gender measurement invariance testing also confirmed that the dtdd measurement tool is not gender biased in the context of the indonesian population. this indicates that the indonesian version of dtdd can be used fairly and accurately to measure the levels of the dark triad in individuals without distinguishing their gender. in addition, the factor structure testing also provides a strong foundation for deciding the appropriate scoring method for dtdd. based on the results of pca and cfa, it can be ensured that dtdd scoring can be done following the proposed three-factor hierarchy. this process helps validate that the three aspects of the dark triad, including machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism, are not only interrelated but can also be considered as a single dimension summarizing the complexity of the dark triad. thus, scoring dtdd can be done by looking at scores per dimension for a more specific understanding of the aspects of the dark triad, while the total score provides a holistic overview of the overall tendency of the dark triad in individuals. therefore, this research provides a comprehensive understanding of the appropriate scoring method for the dtdd scale. acknowledgment we would like to express my sincere appreciation to universitas surabaya for granting permission to conduct the research. heartfelt thanks to the participants who generously contributed their time to complete the survey. thank you all for your crucial roles in the success of this research. declarations author contribution. ld, ln, and ibs collectively contributed to the conception and execution of this research study. ld played a role in proposing the initial research idea, humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 130 devi et al. (validity of the dark triad dirty dozen (dtdd) test-indonesian version) conducting extensive literature reviews, preparing the measurement tools, overseeing data collection, conducting data analysis, and drafting the initial version of the research article. ln and ibs, serving as research supervisors, provided valuable guidance throughout the research process, offering insights into refining the research topic, scrutinizing measurement tools, conducting verification checks, reviewing language, and contributing to the writing process. pkj provided valuable input on the methodology and validation aspects of the study and also contributed to the review and editing of the manuscript. funding statement. the authors themselves funded this research. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references afifah, a. s. a. n., lumintu, a., pangeran, g. a., sibuea, m. f. m., zahra, s. r., shindied, t. k., & natalya, l. 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(2016). does the dark triad of personality predict corrupt intention? the mediating role of belief in good luck. frontiers in psychology, 7(2), 71–72. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00608 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0092-6566(02)00505-6 https://doi.org/10.1080/1091367x.2014.952370 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-9888-5 https://doi.org/10.12928/jehcp.v10i2.20649 https://doi.org/10.1027/1614-0001/a000141 https://doi.org/10.1177/1073191120922611 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.06.044 https://doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.12784 https://doi.org/10.1027/1015-5759/a000056 https://doi.org/10.1037/1040-3590.12.1.102 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00608 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 21 (2), august 2024, 189-202 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas http://doi.org/ 10.26555/humanitas.v21i2.874 the influence of ai awareness dimension on sustainable employability: study from gen x employees in jakarta netania emilisa1*, sarah rizkika ifa muna2, nico lukito3, lidia wahyuni4, dietce apriani5 1,2,3,4 faculty of economics and bussiness, trisakti university, jakarta, indonesia 5 bussiness economics, university of lincoln, lincoln, new zealand corresponding author: netania@trisakti.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction the industrial revolution 4.0 era encourages digitalization in operational functions in various sectors, from manufacturing to services. in this case, companies need to implement sustainable employability to ensure that employees will remain motivated to work, adapt, and improve performance and competence per the company's needs. sustainable employability refers to the ability of employees to provide added value to an organization, now and in the future, and to experience this added value themselves in the process (irfan et al., 2023). sustainable employability could be influenced by the digitalization and automation trends in each company. current digitalization and automation trends include increased use of data, connectivity, human-machine interaction, artificial intelligence (ai), and improvements in robotics (mckinsey&company, 2021). the current use of automation systems certainly adds to existing business dynamics, starting from changes in work arrangements and new challenges. when companies start to change the working arrangement and implement a new working tool which is artificial intelligence (ai), employees need to adapt to survive and article info abst ract article history received june 24, 2024 revised august 16, 2024 accepted august 27, 2024 this study aimed to analyze the influence of the ai awareness dimension, namely challenge and hindrance appraisal toward ai, on sustainable employability through job crafting mediation variables in gen x employees in jakarta. in this study, hypothesis testing and data collection were carried out cross-sectionally. the data were collected primarily by distributing questionnaires to 272 gen x employees in jakarta. the sample collection method used the purposive sampling method. the data processing techniques included validity tests, reliability tests, and structural equation modeling (sem). the results of the study showed that there was a positive influence caused by challenge appraisal toward ai and job crafting on sustainable employability. meanwhile, hindrance appraisal toward ai triggered a negative influence on sustainable employability. the company and employees were expected to collaborate in implementing ai in the work environment to support their work sustainably. keywords challenge appraisal toward ai gen x hindrance appraisal toward ai job crafting sustainable employability mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas http://doi.org/%2010.26555/humanitas.v21i2.874 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 190 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) netania emilisa et al. (the influence of ai awareness dimension on sustainable employability:..) maximize the use of ai to make their work easier. later, this will trigger changes in employees' orders or job descriptions, encouraging them to be more productive and adding value to their work processes. thus, these challenges become a reference for sustainable employability in the company (alnamrouti et al., 2022). likewise, gen x spent the 1980s as a teenager. the ability possessed by gen x initially, when gen x entered the world of work, they were not used to communicating using digital media and technology. research conducted by venkatesh et al. (2003) found that age is more significant in influencing workers. in contrast, older workers tend to be less willing/accepting to adopt new information technology. this is a challenge for companies that still employ a lot of gen x, where currently, the widespread use of ai will affect the work effectiveness of gen. in the workplace, ai has the potential to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, liberating employees to concentrate on more strategic and creative work. integrating ai in companies is anticipated to contribute significantly to achieving company goals, from enhancing the effectiveness of quality management and supply chains to bolstering asset management, including managing human resources (irfan et al., 2023). however, the adoption of ai in companies is not without its challenges. it necessitates a shift in mindset and a readiness to confront the obstacles and challenges that employees may perceive. ai awareness, or employees' comprehension of how ai can influence their future job prospects, becomes pivotal (he, c et al., 2023). a study conducted by he, c et al. (2023) on employees in the service industry stated that when the company they work for, employees will react differently. one of them is challenge appraisal toward ai, which is a challenge employees feel in implementing ai in the work environment, which should be encouraged by motivating employees. thus, employees will assess ai as a positive challenge, such as considering ai as an opportunity to achieve goals and a place to increase competence. besides, hindrance appraisal towards ai is a perceived obstacle when adopting ai. this refers to employees' perceptions that ai will suppress their abilities and that there is no room to improve their competencies (bakker & demerouti, 2017). companies will take steps to adapt the scope of employee work to respond to changes in company dynamics by incorporating ai into the work environment. job crafting is a company's endeavour to redesign or reshape the scope of employee work (emilisa et al., 2020). with job crafting, employees can discover new approaches to work and adapt to using ai in their company. moreover, this change will stimulate employees to choose the most efficient way of doing their work (alnamrouti et al., 2022). this will foster initiative and increase competency for employees not only within the scope of their work. employees can broaden their exploration of the scope and function of work through the new order of using ai (chen et al., 2023). in implementing job crafting, the company adjusts the scope of existing work to current needs, which aligns with the ai adoption that has been implemented. furthermore, the company strives to retain employees by fostering employability and creating new jobs. this will lead to sustainable employability in the company, with the mediation of job crafting and ai application. a study conducted by irfan et al. (2023) on health service employees stated that employees perceived the company's job crafting as motivating to continue working, increasing work engagement, and optimizing job fit for each employee. thus, the efforts will lead to sustainable employability in the company, even in the face of changing conditions, such as ai (he, g et al., 2023). sustainable employability refers to an employee's humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 191 netania emilisa et al. (the influence of ai awareness dimension on sustainable employability:..) capacity to function on the job and in the labor market. for instance, in their current jobs, employees will have a career path and a willingness to work until retirement (irfan et al., 2022). he, c et al. (2023) explain ai awareness is employees' perception of technology; this leads to the possibility of ai influencing their job prospects in the future, starting from the challenges and obstacles they feel. it can be seen after companies adopt ai as a tool for their work. in addition, ai awareness also leads to new learning, perception, and cognition, reducing errors and increasing efficiency, speed, and accuracy for organizations (he, c et al., 2023). companies that adopt ai will trigger ai awareness, which will contribute to better employee participation in company activities and sustainable employability. (kumar et al., 2023). on the other hand, ai awareness refers to the company's awareness of current technological advances, which bring positive currents to the company's effectiveness and efficiency. thus, companies will adopt ai with the speed of data analysis, work automation, and potential as a supporting tool for their employees (chatterjee et al., 2023). ai awareness has two dimensions: first, challenge-hindrance appraisals toward artificial intelligence, challenging job demands and encouraging job creation by increasing employee motivation. employees will assess ai as a challenge and an opportunity to improve individual competencies. therefore, employees will be motivated to seek proactive strategies to overcome the challenging demands of ai. second, hindrance appraisals toward artificial intelligence. the threat employees receive regarding adopting ai by companies is due to changes in the work structure, such as job descriptions. additionally, employees will need more stability in their positions in the company as companies seek advanced technology to replace human capabilities. based on a study by zuma (2020), job crafting is a proactive response to changes in company dynamics that lead to changes in tasks, relationships, and cognitive perceptions to redesign jobs. on the other hand, job crafting is also defined as cultivating positive meaning and identity in an employee's work. this process will encourage employee contribution and motivation in the work environment (emilisa et al., 2020), explaining that job crafting has three dimensions: first, task crafting empowers employees to add or reduce responsibilities from their official job description. for instance, the freedom to work independently, choose preferred projects, ask questions without hesitation, trust colleagues, and communicate openly with others all contribute to a sense of control and value in their work, enhancing employee retention. secondly, relationship crafting is a collaborative process that involves changing existing work paradigms through communication and engagement. this can be seen using different communication channels with various company parts, diverse value offerings, and employee learning opportunities. this approach fosters a dynamic work environment and cultivates a sense of teamwork and camaraderie, facilitating the achievement of desired goals. finally, cognitive crafting refers to a changing employee mindset towards their work, including perspectives regarding routine work, scope, work relationships, and views on the current job description. sustainable employability is the extent of an employee's ability and motivation to continue working productively now and in the (irfan et al., 2023). apart from that, neupane et al. (2022) research explains that sustainable employability is an aspect of employees ranging from health, general fatigue, emotional exhaustion, work ability, work involvement, work relationships, and personal conditions. (household), job satisfaction, and employee absenteeism. according to research by itam and swetha (2022), sustainable employability 192 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) netania emilisa et al. (the influence of ai awareness dimension on sustainable employability:..) is the aspect of job performance, job satisfaction, and employee loyalty. according to van dam et al., (2017), the factors that influence sustainable employability are as follows: first employability refers to an individual's ability to perform adequately in current and future jobs, within and outside the organization. although the chances of retaining or obtaining employment may also depend on labor market characteristics, it is generally recognized that individual characteristics, such as abilities, skills, and knowledge, contribute to employability and labor market participation; secondly, work engagement. work engagement is not just a state of positive attitudes and behavior employees show regarding their work. it is a powerful driver of productivity and well-being. this state, characterized by enthusiasm, dedication, and focus, can lead to employees mobilizing personal resources, enjoying better health, delivering better work performance, and even delaying retirement. the potential benefits of work engagement are significant and should not be underestimated. finally, affective commitment refers to the degree to which an employee identifies with, is involved in, and is attached to an organization. employees with effective, solid commitment will perform better, be absent less often, and not change jobs compared to less committed employees. research by sundaresan and zhang (2022) also supports challenge appraisal toward ai, which triggers employee job crafting. this research explains that ai can drastically change the nature of work and business processes and motivate employee engagement. as a result, job crafting is a redesign of work rules and procedures to facilitate better use of ai by employees. so, having a challenging appraisal toward ai as a job requirement will significantly positively affect job crafting, leading to a more optimistic work environment. based on the explanation above, the following hypothesis is proposed: h1: challenge appraisal toward ai has a positive effect on job crafting based on research conducted by he, c et al. (2023) state that when faced with inhibiting demands, employees need to expend extra energy and resources to meet these demands, thereby reducing proactive behavior in cognitive perception for job redesign. thus, employees who perceive hindrance appraisal toward ai will show low self-esteem, not concentrate on doing their work, and oppose job crafting. therefore, hindrance appraisal toward ai will provide a negative direction towards implementing job crafting, raising concerns about the potential adverse effects on job performance. based on the explanation above, the following hypothesis is proposed: h2: hindrance appraisal toward ai has a negative effect on job crafting sustainable employability, defined as an individual's ability and motivation to sustain work, is a crucial aspect of our discussion. it involves continuously enhancing work engagement, accumulating job resources, improving person-job fit, coping with job demands, and optimizing work. in this context, job crafting emerges as a valuable tool that enables employees to understand their roles better and be better prepared to work effectively over an extended period (irfan et al., 2023). therefore, job crafting is expected to play a positive role in fostering sustainable employability. based on the explanation above, the following hypothesis is proposed: h3: job crafting has a positive effect on sustainable employability in addition, technological advances and the adoption of ai in companies will lead to employee efficiency. companies will need human resources who can work continuously to optimize productivity with fewer personnel. in this case, job crafting, a proactive, independent, and socially innovative job redesign process, will lead to sustainable humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 193 netania emilisa et al. (the influence of ai awareness dimension on sustainable employability:..) employability (irfan et al., 2022). based on the explanation above, the following hypothesis is proposed: h4: challenge appraisal toward ai has a positive effect on sustainable employability research conducted by yue (2023) revealed that hindrance appraisal toward ai swallow’s employee job opportunities. in this case, employees will feel they need to have the chance to work for a long time. employees will feel pessimistic about their capabilities because ai will replace them. thus, it will trigger low sustainable employability. based on the explanation above, the following hypothesis is proposed: h5: hindrance appraisal toward ai has a negative effect on sustainable employability the research conducted by irfan et al. (2022) contributes significantly to the field by highlighting companies' increasing dependence on ai and technology, which is driving rapid changes in work structures. the approach to work design, work relationships, and the systems used in work is crucial in this context. when challenge appraisal toward ai becomes a positive medium, it can lead to optimal change (job crafting), which helps achieve sustainable employability. this research's academic value lies in its comprehensive analysis of the influence of ai awareness dimensions on sustainable employability mediated by job crafting. based on the explanation above, the following hypothesis is proposed: h6: challenge appraisal toward ai has a positive effect on sustainable employability, which job crafting mediates the obstacles employees feel are not only based on job opportunities but also on the access and skills they must have in the future. employees will give up on their jobs if they cannot pursue the skills needed by the industry today, which incidentally uses ai. meanwhile, the formation of job crafting to adjust job needs could be more optimal (hussain et al., 2023). therefore, when the perceived hindrance appraisal toward ai is large enough, sustainable employability cannot be created even though it is mediated by job crafting.based on the explanation above, the following hypothesis is proposed: h7: hindrance appraisal toward ai has a negative effect on sustainable employability, which job crafting mediates based on the description above, the influence of the ai awareness dimension on sustainable employability mediated by job crafting is presented in figure 1, related to the formation of a conceptual framework, which is as follows: figure 1 conceptual framework research conducted by he, c et al. (2023) suggest that implementing ai in companies will encourage job crafting, significantly impacting service performance in service companies. this research focused on an analysis carried out on several employees working in the service industry. apart from that, research by irfan et al. (2023) also, job crafting 194 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) netania emilisa et al. (the influence of ai awareness dimension on sustainable employability:..) positively impacts sustainable employability, especially in an era of uncertainty. these findings were obtained by analyzing employees who work in the education and health sectors. meanwhile, this research's primary concern is identifying the dimensions of ai awareness that influence sustainable employability by mediating job crafting among gen x. method design the research was conducted using cross-sectional study; data was collected once to find the influence between variables. data was collected using the survey research method, namely distributing questionnaires. the unit of analysis used in this research is the individual, focused on gen x employees in jakarta. respondents the unit of analysis used in this research is the individual, focused on gen x employees in jakarta. the sample used was 272 respondents. in terms of the features of respondents, men accounted for 29%, and women accounted for 71%. the respondents' ages were mainly between 40 and 50 years old. the years of working experience ranged from 11 to 20 years. meanwhile, based on the industry profile, it is dominated by the consultant industry at 38.6%. measurements the relevant variable measurement scales used in this study are from mature scales used in previous studies. furthermore, an online questionnaire was used as a medium to obtain data relevant to the objectives of this study. the validity test results on the variable indicators of all items have a loading factor of 0.35. each statement item is declared valid and measurable. all indicators in the research variable are reliable because they have a cronbach alpha ≥ 0.60. ai awareness ai awareness was assessed using established scales from previous studies. the scale consists of two dimensions: challenge appraisal toward ai and hindrance appraisal toward ai. participants responded using a likert-type format (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree), with higher scores indicating greater discrepancy. four items for challenge appraisal toward ai (cronbach’s alpha [α] = 0.712) and three items for hindrance appraisal toward ai (α = 0.764) were adapted from he, c et al., (2023). job crafting job crafting was assessed using mature scales used in previous studies, developed by emilisa et al. (2020). this scale consists of 13 items. participants responded using a likerttype format (1 = strongly disagree to 5= strongly agree), with higher scores indicating greater discrepancy. the authors reported a cronbach α of 0,717. sustainable employability the statement indicators used in the questionnaire for sustainable employability consisted of 10 items adapted from irfan et al. (2023). participants responded using a likert-type format (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree), with higher scores indicating greater discrepancy. the authors reported a cronbach α of 0,860. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 195 netania emilisa et al. (the influence of ai awareness dimension on sustainable employability:..) data analysis the data processing techniques used included validity testing, reliability testing, and structural equation modeling (sem) using spss and amos software. spss was used to prepare and analyze the study's data to determine the significance of the proposed connections between constructs. first, we conducted a structural model to check the model's fit. second, we tested the hypothesized structural associations using structural equation modeling (sem). we ran a series of direct and indirect path models to determine the indirect effects. to obtain the results of the influence of mediating variables, we used the sobel test with free statistical calculation software for the sobel test and amos. studies have shown that the ai awareness dimension influenced the sustainable employability of gen x employees in dki jakarta. there are differences in applying ai awareness in different enterprises, and there are bound to be differences in employees’ work attitudes and behavior. therefore, this study took the ai awareness dimension as an independent variable. results the results of descriptive statistics from the variable dimensions of ai awareness, job crafting, and sustainable employability show that the average for the challenge appraisal toward ai is 4.15. this condition proves that gen x employees feel that ai provides a positive challenge for them. the average hindrance appraisal toward ai is 1.75, and these results confirm that gen x employees do not feel ai hinders their work. the average result of job crafting is 4.07, which means that gen x employees feel that job crafting in the company is related to changes in the order of duties to the design of their work. the average score for sustainable employability obtained was 3.96. these results indicate that gen x employees feel their current jobs are sustainable and employable. table 1, related to the the goodness of fit test, which is as follows: table 1 goodness of fit test result category measurement value cut-off value decision absolut fit measure chi-square 1968.687 low poor fit p-value 0.000 ≥ 0.05 poor fit rmsea 0.120 ≤ 0.08 poor fit gfi 0.667 ≥ 0.90 poor fit incremental fit measure nfi 0.556 ≥ 0.90 poor fit rfi 0.516 ≥ 0.90 poor fit ifi 0.611 ≥ 0.90 poor fit tli 0.572 ≥ 0.90 poor fit cfi 0.608 ≥ 0.90 poor fit parsimonious fit measure agfi 0.612 ≤ gfi goodness of fit cmin/df 4.934 lower limit 1, upper limit 5 goodness of fit after conducting the goodness of fit test, the model was feasible for hypothesis testing. this study uses structural equation modeling (sem) to test the hypothesis. all models were tested through path analysis using amos software. table 2 shows the results of the path analysis of the structural model. as shown in table 2, all hypotheses were supported. based on table 2, ai challenge appraisal has a positive effect on job crafting (β = 0.587, p < 0.05), while ai hindrance appraisal has a negative effect on job crafting (β = -0.138, p < 0.05). similarly, both job crafting (β = 0.818, p < 0.05) and challenge appraisal toward ai (β = 0.302, p < 0.05) have a positive effect on sustainable 196 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) netania emilisa et al. (the influence of ai awareness dimension on sustainable employability:..) employability. meanwhile, the effect of hindrance appraisal toward ai on sustainable employability was negative (β = -0.153, p < 0.05). table 2 the path analysis of the structural model hypothesis estimate ρ-value decision challenge appraisal toward ai → job crafting 0.587 0.000 supported hindrance appraisal toward ai → job crafting -0.138 0.005 supported job crafting → sustainable employability 0.818 0.000 supported challenge appraisal toward ai → sustainable employability 0.302 0.019 supported hindrance appraisal toward ai → sustainable employability -0.153 0.034 supported this study uses the sobel test to determine whether the influence of the independent variable on the dependent variable, after including the mediator in the model, is significant and whether the mediation effect is statistically significant. the parameter values were based on the variables' standard estimations. the results revealed that the mediating effect of job crafting in the challenge appraisal toward ai on sustainable employability was significant. meanwhile, hindrance appraisal toward ai has a negative effect on sustainable employability mediated by job crafting. table 3, related to the results of the sobel test using the online sobel calculator, is as follows: table 3 sobel test result hypothesis estimate ρ-value decision challenge appraisal toward ai → job crafting → sustainable employability 0.463 0.000 supported hindrance appraisal toward ai → job crafting → sustainable employability -0.260 0.012 supported discussion in the first hypothesis test, it can be concluded that there is a significant positive influence between challenge appraisal toward ai and job crafting. this shows that gen x employees in jakarta feel that the challenge of appraisal toward ai is a challenge that brings a positive direction to their work. in its application, ai is considered a medium to improve the competence of employees. through the ai appraisal challenge, employees get new experiences that lead to developing strategies for doing work. a new approach is taken to optimize their work through job crafting. in his role as a gen x employee, it is necessary to redesign the work according to the current needs of the industry. one function strongly supported by the role of challenge appraisal toward ai is the talent acquisition process. the existence of the ai appraisal challenge can allow them to explore new ways to be more proactive in finding the best talent for their company through databases and ai search features. this transformation of new tasks and approaches leads to job crafting tailored to company needs, making work more effective and efficient (pillai & sivathanu, 2020). therefore, if gen x employees feel that appraisal toward ai is a challenge, it will trigger job crafting. job crafting will help gen x employees find new approaches, reorganize, and be more proactive in their work, which is entering the digital era. this research is supported by previous research by he, g et al., (2023), which stated that the use of ai in the work environment will increase in the digitalization era. this will trigger changes to the conceptualization of work now and in the future. therefore, if the company adopts ai, humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 197 netania emilisa et al. (the influence of ai awareness dimension on sustainable employability:..) employees will strive to adapt and be motivated to do job crafting. in addition, research by he, c et al., (2023) also confirm that the appraisal challenge toward ai drives job crafting in a job role that is used as a supporting tool. this will help employees further enrich their learning methods, working methods, and productivity. the rapid use of ai in the work environment is interpreted as a positive thing by gen x employees in jakarta. challenge appraisal toward ai is a challenge that motivates them to continue to be proactive in working as a trigger for job crafting so that their work becomes optimal. so, the existence of an ai appraisal challenge felt by gen x employees will lead to job crafting. in the second hypothesis test, it was found that there was a significant negative influence caused by hindrance appraisal toward ai on job crafting. this study found that gen x employees in jakarta feel that hindrance appraisal toward ai does not hinder any achievement in their current job; moreover, it prevents them from mastering challenging aspects of the job. so, they do not find it difficult with job crafting, starting from redrafting work designs, introducing new tasks, and the existence of an additional system in work, namely ai. this research is supported by previous research conducted by he, c et al., (2023) state that if ai is implemented in work, it cannot trigger employees to develop, and employees will find it challenging to realize job crafting to normalize ai in the work environment. however, if the implementation of ai is not an obstacle, employees can still optimize their work through job crafting. in addition, research by tuffaha and perello-marin (2022) also explains the same thing. if hindrance appraisal toward ai does not indicate obstacles to work, then employees can perform job crafting optimally. hindrance appraisal toward ai for gen x employees who work in jakarta is not considered an obstacle or a limitation in their work. in the era of digitalization, gen x employees are increasingly aware that the function of ai is one of the company strategies in carrying out work. for example, in carrying out the talent acquisition function, hr can optimize the use of ai and find new ways to attract and fulfill the best talent for their company to strengthen employer branding. their task is increasingly accustomed to the emergence of job crafting that forms new strategies and references to their work (xiao et al., 2023). therefore, gen x employees in jakarta feel that ai can provide space for them to master new aspects of their work, which can trigger job crafting and increase their effectiveness and efficiency. the third hypothesis test showed a significant positive influence between job crafting and sustainable employability. job crafting, a process of redesigning proactive, independent, and socially innovative jobs, leads to sustainable employability. in this case, it is known that gen x employees feel that a new scheme to improve their work level helps achieve sustainable employability. one is redesigning the work, choosing additional jobs according to interests, and rethinking the goals to be achieved. for example, gen x employees integrate ai features into their job descriptions, ranging from recruitment to job evaluations (xiao et al., 2023). therefore, the employee becomes more proactive in their current work and projects it to remain sustainable. sustainable employability is related to their belief in career opportunities, opportunities to work until retirement age, and a forum to continue to perform roles and improve competencies triggered by job crafting. previous research by sartori et al. (2023), also explains that companies are paying attention to sustainable employability in line with the constant changes in the work environment. when employees are willing to do job crafting, it will encourage the creation of sustainable employability. this research is also strengthened by the findings of irfan et al. (2022), who stated that job crafting in the current employee's job will contribute to future strategies to prepare for their jobs. this encourages a proactive, independent, and socially innovative attitude that will lead to sustainable employability. so, in this study, it is proven that gen x employees in jakarta feel that there is job crafting, namely by redesigning jobs that include job descriptions, work relationships, and skills needed by hr, which will lead them to sustainable employability. testing the fourth hypothesis, proving that there is a significant favorable influence of challenge appraisal toward ai on sustainable employability. in this case, gen x employees 198 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) netania emilisa et al. (the influence of ai awareness dimension on sustainable employability:..) feel that the existence of ai in the work environment encourages them to continue to be productive. ai is seen as a tool that can help improve their competence, from making their work more accessible to becoming more creative in doing their work. the aspects employees receive due to ai will help them prepare for future job opportunities. so, the perception of challenge appraisal toward ai will undoubtedly lead to a positive direction toward sustainable employability. even though companies adopt ai, sustainable employability will still emerge due to employees' perception that the appraisal challenge toward ai will not erode their work. sustainable employability emerges in the form of promising career opportunities following the competencies of current employees, the ability to multitask, and the willingness to work for an extended period. in a study conducted by alnamrouti et al. (2022), it was also stated that the existence of ai is one of the reasons employees are creative in doing their work so that their work can be done sustainably. when employees can take advantage of the opportunity to apply ai optimally, it will undoubtedly bring sustainable employability to their work. in addition, research by yue (2023) presents findings that employees with a challenging appraisal of the ai view can adapt well and continue their work for an extended period. then, it is strengthened with a research instrument on the challenge appraisal toward ai variables, which states that employees are motivated to perform new tasks related to ai implementation. this will support the improvement of competence and change the scope of their work. therefore, this study proves that gen x employees in jakarta feel that the challenge appraisal toward ai can motivate them to be productive and creative and create their work partners to achieve sustainable employability, such as their opportunity to work until retirement age. the fifth hypothesis test gave the result that there was a significant negative influence of hindrance appraisal towards ai on sustainable employability. gen x employees in jakarta feel this; they consider ai not an obstacle to achieving goals at work. in addition, ai is also not a barrier to mastering complex aspects of work. gen x employees in jakarta also do not face the limitations caused by hindrance appraisal toward ai; they still believe that implementing ai can provide opportunities to continue to grow at work. so, gen x employees believe that with this perception, they will still be able to work optimally and maintain their jobs. research by donald et al. (2020) also supports that the existence of a work system convention that was originally manual and then digital certainly brings changes to employees. employees who cannot meet these demands will tend to give up on their jobs. thus, the challenges felt will impact the decline in sustainable employee employability. however, changing employees' perception of these demands into motivation will increase their sustainable employability. research conducted by böhmer and schinnenburg (2023) shows that employee who does not feel that there is a hindrance appraisal toward ai will maximize the potential for automation in their work, resulting in sustainable employability. this reflects this study, which shows that gen x employees in dki jakarta do not feel the existence of hindrance appraisal toward ai in their work so that they can bring sustainable employability to their work. gen x employees in dki jakarta feel more productive and work optimally with the help of ai to create their current and future job opportunities. the sixth hypothesis test found a significant positive influence of challenge appraisal toward ai on sustainable employability through job crafting. it is known that the challenge appraisal toward ai is an essential aspect in the formation of sustainable employability. based on testing, it was found that gen x employees in dki jakarta are dedicated to adapting to accumulate experience and competencies to interact optimally with ai. this is intended as an effort to work productively for an extended period. the role of job crafting in terms of reformulating work according to employee needs is undoubtedly a catalyst to realize sustainable employability. research by irfan et al. (2022), emphasizes that companies increasingly rely on ai and technology, driving rapid changes in work structures. when the ai appraisal challenge becomes a positive medium, it will lead to optimal change (job crafting), which will help fulfill sustainable employability. in addition, sharma et al. (2022) revealed that the challenge appraisal toward ai in employees implies a change in the work humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 199 netania emilisa et al. (the influence of ai awareness dimension on sustainable employability:..) order that ultimately creates sustainable employability. this aligns with the perception that gen x employees in jakarta believe that the ai appraisal challenge brings a positive direction to their work; from reducing repetitive work, ai technology motivates employees to create more flexible and independent jobs. therefore, this perception will create sustainable employability in employees, which is strengthened by the role of job crafting in perfecting new approaches to work. in the seventh hypothesis test, a significant negative influence produced by hindrance appraisal toward ai negatively affected sustainable employability through job crafting in gen x employees in jakarta. in this case, employees perceive that the company's adoption of ai aims to make their work easier. this is also supported by the existence of ai capacity that can encourage the achievement of employee goals at work, from improving competence and mastering challenging aspects of work to realizing job opportunities sustainably. for example, hr, of course, is essential to adapting to the needs of the currently aggressive industry and adopting ai as a supporting tool. so, the low perception of gen x employees towards hindrance appraisal toward ai will encourage sustainable employability in employees. in this case, job crafting will act as a catalyst that strengthens the adaptation process and new approaches of employees to jobs that ai has automated, leading to employee opportunities to work sustainably or sustainably. this is supported by research by he, c et al. (2023; hussain et al., 2023), state that there is a process of changing the work order because ai automation becomes difficult if ai is considered an obstacle to the careers of current and future employees. finally, sustainable employability cannot be realized with this perception even though job crafting efforts have been made. moreover, vice versa, if employees do not consider ai as an obstacle, of course, they will intensify the use of ai, optimize the discovery of new alternatives through job crafting, and finally achieve sustainable employability. this is also associated with a research instrument on the sustainable employability variable, which confirms that gen x employees are willing to continue working until retirement age. the statement illustrates that applying ai as a new system will allow employees to work sustainably. thus, gen x employees in jakarta do not feel a hindrance to ai in their work and do not have the assumption that ai is a threat that will prevent them from mastering difficult jobs for now and in the future. therefore, this perception will create sustainable employability in employees, which is strengthened by the role of job crafting in perfecting new approaches to work. companies are expected to be able to implement ai awareness in the work environment sustainably. this is related to a challenge appraisal toward ai, which triggers employees to increase competence, enrich their experience, and work optimally. companies can also gradually carry out the digital transformation process and implement ai. this aims to make employees better prepared to face hindrance appraisal toward ai, which allows for new dynamics that employees will face. the limitation of this study's research is that it was only conducted on gen x employees in jakarta and focused on the dimensional variables of ai awareness, job crafting, and sustainable employability. it is hoped that further research can cover more diverse areas and professions and add other variables. by expanding the scope of future research to include a wider variety of demographic groups and professional sectors could provide a more comprehensive understanding of how ai awareness impacts job crafting and sustainable employability across different contexts. conclusion based on the research analysis and discussion results, it is concluded that the ai awareness dimension influences sustainable employability, which is mediated by job crafting among gen x employees in jakarta. challenge appraisal toward ai shows that gen x employees in 200 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) netania emilisa et al. (the influence of ai awareness dimension on sustainable employability:..) jakarta think that implementing ai helps them increase competence, be proactive, and get job opportunities. hindrance's appraisal of ai shows that gen x employees in jakarta feel supported by the implementation of ai. job crafting shows that gen x employees in jakarta have implemented new approaches to work. finally, it can increase the sustainable employability of gen x employees. apart from that, job crafting also mediates increasing sustainable employability by challenging appraisal toward ai and avoiding appraisal toward ai. declarations author contribution. the first author presented the idea, analyzed the data, wrote the manuscript, and finalized it. the second, third, and fourth authors collected and inputted the data from participants, data processing, and discussed the results. the fifth author developed the theory and data analysis. funding statement. no institutions or grants have funded this research. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references alnamrouti, a., rjoub, h., & ozgit, h. 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(2020). the effects of job crafting on employee retention: the mediating role of proactive personality. in international journal of business and management review, 8(6), 24-42. https://doi.org/10.1108/pr-03-2023-0198 https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-142-5_37 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 22 (1), february 2025, 13-30 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas 10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.835 family functioning and post-traumatic growth among disaster survivors: the mediation role of hope intan masruroh setiawan, diana setiyawati faculty of psychology, gadjah mada university, yogyakarta, indonesia corresponding author: intanmasrurohsetiawan@mail.ugm.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction indonesia is one of the countries prone to disasters. one of the disasters that often occurs in indonesia is volcanic eruptions. this is due to indonesia's geographical location in the ring of fire or the most active tectonic plate convergence zone in the world. one of the major impact volcanic eruption disasters is the occurrence of pyroclastic flows from mount semeru in lumajang regency, east java province, on december 4, 2021. the eruption of mount semeru has resulted in 61 fatalities, 4,423 evacuees, 1,107 affected houses, and dozens of damaged public facilities (bnpb, 2022; bpbd kabupaten lumajang, 2021). additionally, the eruption has also impacted the agriculture and livestock sectors, which are the main livelihoods of the people around mount semeru. furthermore, a total of 1.951 households of mount semeru eruption survivors were relocated to permanent housing due to their residences being located in eruption-prone areas (bpbd kabupaten lumajang, 2021). this has caused the survivors to adapt to a new environment, including seeking alternative sources of income to sustain their livelihoods. article info abstract article history received: june 4, 2024 revised: october 17, 2024 accepted: november 6, 2024 post-traumatic growth enables disaster survivors to continue functioning in their post-disaster lives optimally, and enables them to be better equipped to face difficulties in the future. this research aims to test the role of hope in mediating the relationship between family functioning and post-traumatic growth in survivors of the mount semeru eruption disaster. the participants in this research were 180 people aged 18-60 years who were survivors of the mount semeru eruption disaster in 2021. the instruments used were the post-traumatic growth inventory-expanded (ptgi-x), family adaptability and cohesion evaluation scale iv (facesiv), and adult hope scale (ahs). simple mediation analysis was used to analyze the data. the results show that hope partially mediates the relationship between family functioning and posttraumatic growth in survivors of the mount semeru eruption disaster. it means that family functioning can influence posttraumatic growth directly and indirectly through hope as a mediator. this finding can provide input for stakeholders regarding the development of holistic interventions for disaster survivors, both at the individual level related to their hopes and at the relational level related to their family functioning. keywords posttraumatic growth family functioning hope disaster survivor mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.835 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 14 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) intan masruroh setiawan et al. (family functioning and post-traumatic growth among disaster survivors:….) the eruption of mount semeru is a traumatic event for its survivors. traumatic events are specific occurrences characterized by a strong negative attitude, causing distress or disruption in individuals (dell’osso et al., 2022). in this case, experiencing a natural disaster firsthand is one of the traumatic experiences because the adverse events related to natural disasters are beyond the ability of individuals and communities to cope with (hackbarth et al., 2012). furthermore, the physical losses, material possessions, and the necessity for relocation contribute to the cumulative exposure of traumatic events experienced by survivors, accumulative from several adverse events simultaneously over time. this is consistent with several previous studies stating that post-disaster relocation can be a traumatic experience and trigger additional stress for survivors (fussell & lowe, 2014; kadri et al., 2022; uscher-pines & student, 2009). as a traumatic event, the eruption of mount semeru can have negative impacts on the mental well-being of its survivors. the various pressures and sudden environmental changes caused by the disaster can lead to various mental health issues or psychological distress in survivors, such as anxiety and depression (dhillon & sasidharan, 2021; gissurardóttir et al., 2019; kokai et al., 2004; uscher-pines & student, 2009). eruption disaster survivors also often experience the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, such as feeling sad as if reliving the eruption event, easily remembering the eruption event even though they do not want to remember it, and feeling anxious when the mount experiences increased volcanic activity (ernawati et al., 2020). however, survivors can also experience positive changes after experiencing a disaster, such as becoming more efficient in managing and utilizing time with family and having stronger beliefs in the power of god (khatimah, 2022). these positive changes are commonly referred to as post-traumatic growth. post-traumatic growth is defined as positive psychological changes experienced by individuals after facing traumatic events, such as natural disasters (tedeschi & calhoun, 2004; joseph & linley, 2006). post-traumatic growth refers to a transformative process that allows individuals to develop a more positive self-concept, redefine goals, have deeper interpersonal relationships, cultivate a greater appreciation for life, and have a stronger spiritual life (calhoun & tedeschi, 2006). in this regard, post-traumatic growth is a condition in which individuals exhibit higher levels of functioning than before experiencing a traumatic event. in the context of disasters, post-traumatic growth is important to study because it explains the positive self-development of individuals as a result of their struggle to adapt and cope with the difficulties arising from disasters (graziano et al., 2023; malhotra & chebiyyam, 2016). a meta-analysis study of 26 studies conducted by xiaoli et al. (2019) found that approximately 52.58% of individuals have moderate to high levels of post-traumatic growth after traumatic experiences. this is consistent with malhotra dan chebiyyam (2016) who explains that 40-70% of survivors experience positive impacts from the trauma they have experienced. in the context of natural disasters, several studies have found that individuals can experience post-traumatic growth after experiencing disasters such as fires, tornadoes, tsunamis, and earthquakes (felix et al., 2015; siqveland et al., 2015; yuan et al., 2021; zhang et al., 2020). in this regard, having a new life path is considered a key point in post-traumatic growth among disaster survivors, such as improving the quality of relationships with others and engaging in better life activities (peters et al., 2021; graziano et al., 2023). additionally, uscher-pines and student (2009) found that survivors who experience post-disaster relocation also feel a stronger sense of community bonding and receive more support and assistance related to daily activities. post-traumatic growth can have positive implications for survivors in their postdisaster lives. in this regard, post-traumatic growth is correlated with lower levels of humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 15 intan masruroh setiawan et al. (family functioning and post-traumatic growth among disaster survivors:….) depression (helgeson et al., 2006) and better quality of life (kyutoku et al., 2021). when individuals develop meaning and create new and valuable perspectives regarding their lives, they tend to have better psychological well-being (joseph, 2012). in navigating post-disaster life, post-traumatic growth also serves as a resource for survivors to view the world in a more balanced way after the disaster, where positive and negative experiences are integrated (siqveland et al., 2015). this allows survivors to continue functioning in their daily activities and even encourages their abilities and capacities to move towards improvement (calhoun & tedeschi, 2006). furthermore, post-traumatic growth enables survivors to be better equipped to face difficulties in the future (tedeschi et al., 2018). given the benefits of post-traumatic growth for survivors in navigating their postdisaster lives, it is important to understand the factors that affect this growth. one external factor that plays a role is the family, as the family is part of the microsystem and the closest source of support to the individual (bronfenbrenner & morris, 2006). in this regard, family members tend to share experiences and provide support to each other when they encounter difficulties (tingvold et al., 2012). the presence of family support during crises is one manifestation of family functioning (feeney & collins, 2015). family functioning is the ability of a family to fulfill its basic functions effectively, which include providing an environment for all family members to develop optimally, both physically, psychologically, and socially (dai & wang, 2015; epstein et al., 1978). lei and kantor (2021) stated that family functioning encompasses how family members interact, react, and treat each other. in crisis situations such as disasters, well-functioning families will continue to strive to meet the needs of their family members (li et al., 2021). this can be proven through interactions such as family support as part of their efforts to adapt to arising difficulties. additionally, the balance of family cohesion and flexibility supported by effective communication among family members also indicates a well-functioning family (olson, 2000; olson et al., 1989). well-functioning families can be a driving factor for post-traumatic growth in individuals. this is because of their role as a source of support that facilitates the affective and cognitive processes within individuals to reconstruct a new belief system that can integrate trauma-related information toward growth (joseph & linley, 2006; sun et al., 2023; tedeschi & calhoun, 2004). in well-functioning families, there is also substantial interaction that can bring about positive changes in individuals after experiencing difficulties or traumatic events (mancini, 2019). furthermore, well-functioning families can alleviate stress and depression in individuals and encourage them to actively use emotion regulation strategies, which ultimately can create more positive emotional experiences (feng et al., 2022). moreover, hullmann et al. (2014) also emphasize the importance of examining family functioning as one of the factors that can contribute to post-traumatic growth. previous studies also indicate a positive correlation between family functioning and post-traumatic growth. functioning exhibited through family flexibility and communication has been shown to have a significant correlation with post-traumatic growth in survivors of the tsunami disaster (augustine, 2014). qin et al. (2021) also found that more effective problem-solving strategies within families are positively associated with post-traumatic growth in parents of children with autism spectrum disorder. furthermore, teixeira and pereira (2013) in their study on cancer survivors found that family cohesion, flexibility, and communication correlate positively with post-traumatic growth. this is because families capable of changing roles and rules within the family system in a healthy manner are likely to demonstrate better overall health functioning even in difficult situations. based on several studies, it can be understood that family functioning and posttraumatic growth have a positive correlation. however, the internal mechanisms of the relationship between these two variables have not been extensively researched, especially 16 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) intan masruroh setiawan et al. (family functioning and post-traumatic growth among disaster survivors:….) among natural disaster survivors. this is also in line with the findings of khatimah (2022) that there might be other variables serving as mediators in the relationship between family functioning and post-traumatic growth. regarding this matter, several other factors also correlate significantly with post-traumatic growth. previous researchers have explained that internal factors can serve as predictors of post-traumatic growth in individuals. one important internal factor that has a significant positive correlation with post-traumatic growth is hope (confino et al., 2023; wang et al., 2021; zhou & wu, 2018). snyder et al. (1991, 2003) explained that hope is a cognitive set consisting of an individual's beliefs regarding their capacity to determine goals, develop strategies to achieve those goals (pathways thinking) and maintain motivation to utilize those strategies (agency thinking). hope serves as one of the psychological resources that can affect post-traumatic growth. in crisis situations, hope plays a protective role, enabling individuals to quickly rise and take further steps to rebuild their lives (counted et al., 2022; snyder et al., 2003), while also serving as a fundamental resource to support growth (colla et al., 2022). furthermore, when facing challenges in the process of achieving their goals, individuals with high levels of hope tend to have positive self-talk, persevere in overcoming setbacks, and view setbacks as opportunities for growth (pan et al., 2021; snyder, 2002). hullmann et al. (2014) explain that hope can affect an individual's reactions to events in their lives. when facing difficulties or challenges, such as in disaster situations, individuals with high levels of hope will continue to seek strategies to achieve their goals or find alternative goals as the best decision. conversely, individuals with low levels of hope are more likely to give up on achieving their goals when faced with difficult situations, which can lead to maladaptive psychological adjustment. scheier and carver (2001) also state that hope can redirect an individual's focus from negative events or emotional states. in the context of disasters, hope can assist survivors in adapting and overcoming the challenges they face to move forward with their lives post-disaster. additionally, having hope also aids individuals in employing active coping strategies to face traumatic events and reconstruct their understanding of themselves, others, and the surrounding world, ultimately leading to growth (germann et al., 2015; zhou & wu, 2018). several studies also indicate that hope can predict post-traumatic growth. zhou and wu (2018) in their research on adolescent earthquake survivors found that hope can have a direct and positive impact on post-traumatic growth, as well as serve as a driver of posttraumatic growth through cognitive acceptance and reassessment. furthermore, in war refugees, hope as a resource for adaptation has also been shown to correlate positively with post-traumatic growth (ai et al., 2007). moreover, hope has been found to act as a mediator of post-traumatic growth in covid-19 patients (laslo-roth et al., 2022) and earthquake survivors (zhou et al., 2018). in this regard, individuals' perception of their ability to achieve positive outcomes as their goals can serve as a significant motivation for individuals to strive to overcome the impacts of the traumatic events they face, and even further foster growth. individuals' hopefulness can also be affected by their relationships with their closest ones, such as family. snyder (2002) explains that individuals can develop attachments through quality interactions within their families. this attachment is necessary for individuals to develop ways of strategizing and taking action to achieve goals (shorey et al., 2003). additionally, individuals can further develop a positive and hopeful personality through interactions within a well-functioning family (beavers & hampson, 2000; feldman & snyder, 2005). in disaster situations, individuals within families that function well, characterized by a balance of cohesion and flexibility, also tend to maintain or develop hope to continue their lives. this is consistent with research findings that individuals have higher levels of hope when they have high levels of family cohesion (feldman et al., 2018). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 17 intan masruroh setiawan et al. (family functioning and post-traumatic growth among disaster survivors:….) additionally, when individuals perceive higher levels of family functioning, they also tend to have higher levels of hope (peng et al., 2023; zarei & fooladvand, 2022). this study adopts the theoretical framework of the post-traumatic growth model (tedeschi & calhoun, 2004) and the thriving through relationship model (feeney & collins, 2015). the post-traumatic growth model emphasizes the cognitive-emotional processes triggered by exposure to traumatic or highly stressful events. in this regard, constructive cognitive processes are assumed to play a key role in post-traumatic growth, which can also be affected by external factors (tedeschi & calhoun, 2004). meanwhile, the thriving through relationship model (feeney & collins, 2015) emphasizes the importance of close relationships that function well (such as within the family) as fundamental to thriving because they enable individuals to successfully navigate difficulties. feeney and collins (2015) explain that close others such as family can serve as a source of strength (sos) that protects and empowers individuals in challenging circumstances, helping them to grow, develop, and achieve well-being. in this regard, family functioning acting as an sos can reassure the development of individuals' internal resources, such as hope, which ultimately can lead to growth after experiencing traumatic events. based on the explanation above, it can be understood that post-traumatic growth is crucial for survivors of the mount semeru eruption to navigate their lives after the disaster. in this context, family functioning can be one of the factors affecting this post-traumatic growth, with hope serving as a mediating variable. research on the mechanism of the relationship between post-traumatic growth, family functioning, and hope has been limited, especially in the context of disaster survivors in indonesia. previous studies on posttraumatic growth have focused on personality traits (karanci et al., 2012; owens, 2016; mattson et al., 2018), coping strategies (henson et al., 2021; knauer et al., 2022), and social support (ning et al., 2023; sun et al., 2023) in fostering post-traumatic growth. additionally, there is still a need for exploration regarding cognitive mechanisms (luu, 2022; tedeschi & calhoun, 2018), as well as the relationship between external and internal factors in individuals that can encourage post-traumatic growth (augustine, 2014; feeney & collins, 2015). therefore, this study aims to investigate the role of hope in mediating the relationship between family functioning and post-traumatic growth among survivors of the mount semeru eruption disaster. the hypothesis of this study is that hope mediates the relationship between family functioning and post-traumatic growth. through well-functioning families, it is hoped that survivors can adapt to existing difficulties and develop hope in their postdisaster lives. with the hope they possess, survivors can envision a positive future, leading to the development of post-traumatic growth. this research is expected to provide initial input for the development of intervention programs related to post-traumatic growth, which is still lacking among disaster survivors in indonesia. additionally, theoretically, this research is also expected to contribute to the scientific literature on family functioning, hope, and post-traumatic growth among disaster survivors in indonesia. method participants the participants in this study were 180 survivors of the 2021 mount semeru eruption who were residing in permanent relocation shelters. these shelters are located in sumbermujur village, candipuro district, lumajang regency, east java province. participants were selected through purposive sampling, which involves sampling based on specific characteristics relevant to the research objectives (gravetter & forzano, 2020). the criteria 18 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) intan masruroh setiawan et al. (family functioning and post-traumatic growth among disaster survivors:….) for participants in this study are a) survivors of the 2021 mount semeru volcanic eruption; b) aged between 18 and 60 years old; and c) directly experienced the eruption event (being at the impacted location during the eruption and/or witnessing/hearing the eruption of mount semeru). table 1 participants demographic data (n=180) demographic frequency percentage gender male 74 41.1 % female 106 58.9 % age 18 29 years 39 21.7 % 30 45 years 95 52.8 % 46 60 years 46 25.6 % last education not graduated elementary school 15 8.3 % elementary school 104 57.8 % junior high school 28 15.6 % high school 25 13.9 % diploma 1 0.6 % bachelor's degree 3 1.7 % other 4 2.2 % occupation sand miner 7 3.9 % farmer 48 26.7 % merchant 20 11.1 % housewife 54 30 % unemployed 20 11.1 % others 31 17.2 % job change experienced 53 29.4 % not experienced 127 70.6 % marital status single 10 5.6 % married (no children) 4 2.2 % married (with children) 152 84.4 % previously married 14 7.8 % procedures data collection was conducted from january 29th to february 1st, 2024, after obtaining ethical clearance approval from the research ethics committee of the faculty of psychology, universitas gadjah mada, and permission from the village government of sumbermujur, candipuro district, lumajang regency, east java province. data collection was done offline at the sumbermujur permanent residence by requesting participants' willingness to complete the questionnaire after obtaining their consent to participate in the study through informed consent. instruments post-traumatic growth. to measure the post-traumatic growth experienced by participants, the researchers used the post-traumatic growth inventory-expanded (ptgi-x) scale developed by tedeschi et al. (2017) and adapted by rahmaningsih (2019). the scale was humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 19 intan masruroh setiawan et al. (family functioning and post-traumatic growth among disaster survivors:….) modified by the researchers to fit the research context by changing the main instruction ("after experiencing the eruption disaster"). the ptgi-x scale consists of 25 items covering five dimensions: personal strength, new possibilities, relating to others, appreciation of life, and spiritual and existential change. the ptgi-x scale had response options ranging from 0 (i did not experience any change in this regard) to 5 (i experienced a very large change in this regard). based on the pilot test conducted, this scale had a reliability coefficient alpha (α) of 0.94, with the total item correlation values ranging from 0.41 to 0.75, indicating that all items had good discriminant power. family functioning. the family adaptability and cohesion evaluation scale iv (facesiv) was used in this study based on the circumplex model of marital and family systems by olson (2000). the faces-iv scale has been adapted into indonesian by yeyentimalla (2019). the scale used in this study consists of 24 items covering dimensions of cohesion, flexibility, and communication. the response options for the faces-iv scale in this study were modified to six response options ranging from 1 (very inappropriate) to 6 (very appropriate). based on the pilot test conducted, this scale had a reliability coefficient alpha (α) of 0.92, with the total item correlation values ranging from 0.33 to 0.77, indicating that all items had good discriminant power. hope. hope in this study was measured using the adult hope scale (ahs) developed by snyder et al. (1991) and adapted by novrianto and menaldi (2022). the ahs scale consists of 12 items covering two components, namely agency and pathways. in this case, four items constitute the agency subscale, four items constitute the pathways subscale, and the remaining four items serve as fillers intended to divert attention. the response options for the ahs scale in this study were modified to six response options ranging from 1 (very inappropriate) to 6 (very appropriate). based on the pilot test conducted, this scale had a reliability coefficient alpha (α) of 0.73, with the total item correlation values ranging from 0.30 to 0.63, indicating that all items had good discriminant power. data analysis the data analysis technique in this study was simple mediation analysis. mediation analysis is a statistical method aimed at testing the interaction between independent variables on the dependent variable through a mediator variable (hayes, 2018). this analysis was used to test the mediating role of hope in the relationship between family functioning and post-traumatic growth among survivors of the mount semeru eruption disaster. the entire process of mediation analysis was conducted using the statistical analysis software spss version 25.0. results the hypothesis testing of this study was conducted using process analysis by hayes (2018) based on the significance of the indirect effect using the bootstrapping method. the results of hypothesis testing can be seen in figure 1. based on figure 1, it is evident that family functioning has a significant effect on hope (β=0.25; p<0.001), and hope has a significant effect on post-traumatic growth (β=0.84; p<0.001). the total effect of family functioning on post-traumatic growth also shows significant results (β=0.67; p<0.001). meanwhile, the bootstrap confidence interval does not pass through 0, indicating that the indirect effect is statistically significant (β=0.21; 95% ci (0.07-0.33)). this means that family functioning affects post-traumatic growth in survivors by increasing hope. the results of the mediation analysis indicate that hope plays a mediating role in the relationship between family functioning and post-traumatic growth. thus, it can be concluded that the hypothesis in this study is accepted. as for the direct effect between family functioning and post-traumatic growth without involving the mediator variable, it still 20 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) intan masruroh setiawan et al. (family functioning and post-traumatic growth among disaster survivors:….) indirect effect  = 0.21, 95%ci(0.07-0.33) a  = 0.25, p<0.001 b  = 0.84, p<0.001 c  = 0.67, p<0.001 shows significant results (β=0.46; p<0.001), indicating that the mediating role of hope in this study is partial mediation. figure 1 relationship between family functioning, hope, and post-traumatic growth the analysis results indicate the r2 values, indicating how much the variables in the research model affect post-traumatic growth and hope. the r2 value for post-traumatic growth as the dependent variable is 0.5067, meaning that 50.67% of the variance in posttraumatic growth can be explained by family functioning and hope. meanwhile, the r2 value for the hope variable is 0.5002, indicating that 50.02% of the variance in hope can be explained by family functioning. as for the r2 value for the total effect of family functioning on post-traumatic growth, it is 0.4603, suggesting that 46.03% of the variance in posttraumatic growth can be explained by family functioning. discussion this study aims to examine the role of hope as a mediator in the relationship between family functioning and post-traumatic growth among survivors of the mount semeru eruption disaster. the results indicate that the indirect effect of family functioning on post-traumatic growth through hope is significant. this means that hope can mediate the relationship between these two variables, thus the hypothesis of this study is accepted. the role of hope as a mediator is consistent with previous research indicating that hope can mediate posttraumatic growth in individuals (laslo-roth et al., 2022; zhou et al., 2018). hope plays a crucial role, not only in explaining the relationship between family functioning and posttraumatic growth but also as a protective factor for mental health, making it crucial during challenging transition periods (colla et al., 2022). hope can have relevant effects in promoting growth and managing challenges (shorey et al., 2007), such as its role in psychological adjustment when individuals experience difficulties or traumatic events (liu et al., 2017). this study shows that hope acts as a mediator in the relationship between family functioning and post-traumatic growth, with 50.67% of the variation in post-traumatic growth explained by family functioning and hope. in the context of the mount semeru eruption disaster, the survivors experienced significant life changes due to the losses suffered as a result of the disaster. furthermore, the survivors had to be relocated or move to new residences, which affected their livelihoods and required them to adjust to various daily activities in the new environment. in this context, a well-functioning family can provide both hope posttraumatic growth family functioning humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 21 intan masruroh setiawan et al. (family functioning and post-traumatic growth among disaster survivors:….) instrumental and emotional support to meet the needs of its members even in crises (li et al., 2021). for example, family members who support each other and can adapt to the changes they experience will enable survivors to feel stable and reassess their life goals. this reassessment allows them to develop steps to achieve these goals for their future survival. this means that survivors can develop hope, or the perception of their ability to create pathways to achieve their goals, along with the belief in their capacity to follow these pathways to reach their goals (snyder et al., 2003). hope can affect how survivors react to the post-disaster crisis situations they face. this aligns with laslo-roth et al. (2022) who explain that hope has a particular value during periods of stress because it emphasizes future expectations and goals, while also activating personal and interpersonal resources as pathways to thinking. furthermore, agency thinking in hope, which relates to an individual's perceived ability to use methods to achieve desired goals, can trigger cognitive reappraisal and help individuals transform the meaning of traumatic events into a more positive perspective, thereby helping growth (feldman & snyder, 2005; zhou et al., 2018). in this context, individuals with high levels of hope tend to persist in achieving their goals despite difficulties, or they determine alternative goals as the best decision (hullmann et al., 2014). for example, survivors of the mount semeru eruption with high levels of hope will strive to achieve their goals despite the challenges posed by the impact on their livelihoods or will determine alternatives as the best course of action. this could be demonstrated by changing professions or continuing their work with consequences such as a longer commute. this also indicates that hope can encourage individuals to engage in active coping strategies, thereby facilitating post-traumatic growth (germann et al., 2015). the results of this study show partial mediation, as family functioning continues to have a significant direct effect on post-traumatic growth even when the variable of hope is controlled. additionally, 46.03% of the total variation in post-traumatic growth can be explained by family functioning, indicating that family functioning has a substantial impact on post-traumatic growth. these results align with previous research that found significant correlations between family cohesion, flexibility, communication, and post-traumatic growth (augustine, 2014; teixeira & pereira, 2013). furthermore, these results indicate that post-traumatic growth in survivors of the mount semeru eruption is also relational, as it can be influenced by the quality of relationships with those around them after the disaster. this is consistent with the assertion by augustine (2014) that in post-disaster situations, an individual's ability to function optimally also depends on external factors such as family, friendships, availability of job opportunities, and the ability to participate in social activities. thus, it can be understood that the positive changes in survivors after experiencing a disaster are influenced not only by personal factors but also by relational external factors such as family functioning. in survivors of the mount semeru eruption, it can be understood that family becomes a crucial factor for survivors to overcome the challenges or difficulties arising from the eruption disaster. one reason is that survivors are placed in permanent housing randomly and lose their social networks in their previous place of residence, so the main source of support for them after relocation is their family. this is consistent with the theory of the post-traumatic growth model (tedeschi & calhoun, 2004), which emphasizes the significant role of external factors in the process of post-traumatic growth formation. disaster events challenge survivors' beliefs or perspectives on their lives, leading survivors to engage in rumination or reflection automatically. the presence of a well-functioning family can help survivors cope with this. in families that function well, there is a healthy communication pattern that allows individuals within it to express themselves (olson et al., 2019). this self22 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) intan masruroh setiawan et al. (family functioning and post-traumatic growth among disaster survivors:….) disclosure is crucial for encouraging post-traumatic growth in crisis situations such as disasters because it allows survivors to share their feelings and thoughts, ultimately leading to a positive reinterpretation of the traumatic events experienced (tedeschi & calhoun, 2004; putri, 2023). additionally, disaster events can also affect family functioning by increasing attachment among family members (lingaard et al., 2009), indicating positive changes in interactions between survivors and their families, which is also an indication of post-traumatic growth (tedeschi et al., 2018). the finding that post-traumatic growth in survivors of the mount semeru eruption is also relational and simultaneously confirms the thriving through relationship model (feeney & collins, 2015). in challenging circumstances, the family's function as a source of strength (sos) emphasizes support as a safe haven that provides a sense of safety and protection, as well as alleviating the burden experienced by individuals during difficulties (collins & feeney, 2000). sos fulfills these functions by acknowledging the need for dependence from individuals, providing emotional comfort, offering assistance or support to alleviate burdens, and providing a comfortable environment for the expression of negative emotions in difficult situations (feeney & collins, 2015). this is in line with the family's ability to fulfill its function in meeting individual needs through cohesion, flexibility, and good communication (olson et al., 2019). the thriving through relationship model explains that well-functioning social relationships such as families providing sos support can contribute to the development of internal resources in individuals experiencing traumatic events (feeney & collins, 2015). the presence of sos support functions can encourage survivors to challenge themselves to grow, rediscover their purpose in life, and seize every opportunity to achieve their goals. furthermore, these functions can enhance survivors' hope by building and expanding their resources even in crisis situations (snyder et al., 1991) which can then lead to growth (germann et al., 2015; zhou & wu, 2018). thus, this research also confirms the model empirically by indicating that family functioning can affect post-traumatic growth, both directly and indirectly through hope as a mediator. the results of this study indicate that survivors cannot endure post-disaster crises alone but also require support from those around them to grow together. this underscores the importance of social cohesion, which is indeed one of the critical protective factors in collectivist societies, capable of preventing mental health issues and strengthening resilience among survivors in post-disaster situations (sobhaninia, 2024). these findings offer a new perspective on addressing psychological issues among disaster survivors, which have traditionally been predominantly focused on the individual level. moreover, post-disaster recovery efforts in indonesia generally have a family-based approach, yet often lack practical psychological aspects, instead primarily concentrating on physical or economic aspects. thus, the results of this study can provide insights into the importance of psychological interventions for disaster survivors, not only at the individual level but also at the relational level concerning the family conditions of the survivors. this study has several limitations. first, family functioning in this study refers to participants' perceptions as individuals within their families, without considering the actual functioning of their families based on the perceptions of all family members. second, this research was specifically conducted on survivors of the mount semeru eruption disaster, so caution is needed when generalizing the research findings to other individuals who have experienced traumatic events. third, this study did not control for the level of exposure to traumatic events, which may potentially affect the dynamics of post-traumatic growth experienced by participants. future research could consider using qualitative methods to provide deeper insights into the dynamics of post-traumatic growth, family functioning, and humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 23 intan masruroh setiawan et al. (family functioning and post-traumatic growth among disaster survivors:….) hope among disaster survivors. additionally, data collection could involve paired family members (e.g., spouses) to understand the interdependence within family members through dyadic analysis, allowing for a more objective understanding of family functioning. further research could also involve participants in different disaster contexts. moreover, the level of exposure to traumatic events experienced by participants could be incorporated to understand the dynamics of post-traumatic growth more comprehensively. the results of this research can provide benefits for survivors of the mount semeru eruption disaster to grow from their traumatic experiences. this can be achieved by enhancing hope through pathways thinking and agency thinking. this research also highlights the importance of family functioning, which significantly influences the posttraumatic recovery process of survivors. this shows the importance of interventions for disaster survivors that not only focus on individual management but also relational aspects by involving the family. furthermore, family-based post-disaster recovery efforts are expected to not only focus on physical or economic aspects, but also on psychological aspects related to family cohesion, flexibility, and communication. in this regard, the results of this research can provide input for stakeholders regarding the development of holistic interventions for survivors of the mount semeru eruption disaster, both at the individual level related to their hopes and at the relational level related to their family functioning. conclusion this study aimed to examine the mediating role of hope in the relationship between family functioning and post-traumatic growth among survivors of the mount semeru eruption disaster. the analysis results indicate that hope can mediate the role of family functioning in post-traumatic growth among survivors. this mediating role is partial, meaning that family functioning can affect post-traumatic growth both directly and indirectly through hope as a mediator. the results of this study also indicate that post-traumatic growth among survivors of the mount semeru eruption disaster is not only individual but also relational, as it involves the important role of family functioning. declarations author contribution. first author contributed to designing the research, collecting and analyzing data, and writing the manuscript. second author contributed to supervising the research design, reviewing the data analysis and the discussion of the results. funding statement. this research was supported by scholarship program from indonesia endowment fund for education agency (lpdp) to the author. conflict of interest. no potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors in this manuscript. references adesina, s. a., amole, i. o., durodola, a. o., awotunde, o. t., olaolorun, d. a., adeniran, a., & odeigah, l. o. 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(2018). self-esteem and hope mediate the relations between social support and post-traumatic stress disorder and growth in adolescents following the ya’an earthquake. anxiety, stress and coping, 31(1), 32–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/10615806.2017.1374376 https://etd.repository.ugm.ac.id/penelitian/detail/177760 https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.22673 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12905-022-02103-3 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12905-022-02103-3 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajp.2020.102309 https://doi.org/10.1017/prp.2018.14 https://doi.org/10.1080/10615806.2017.1374376 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 21 (1), august 2025, 169-180 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1031 adaptation and validation of the indonesia version social media engagement scale for adolescent ratri pratiwi, ainurizan ridho rahmatulloh, rahimmatussalisa faculty of psychology, universitas mercu buana yogyakarta, indonesia corresponding author: ratri.pratiwi@mercubuana-yogya.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction indonesia is the third largest country in the asia-pacific region with active social media users, with 191.4 million people in 2022 and 68.9% social media penetration (nurhayati-wolff, 2023). in addition, indonesia is also the second country that has the longest time after the philippines, which spends about 3 hours and 20 minutes per day using social media (nurhayati-wolff, 2023). social media cannot be separated from the lives of modern humans. the emergence of social media makes it easier for modern humans to connect with each other. through social media such as facebook, twitter, instagram, snapchat, tiktok, individuals can share information in the form of photos, videos and writings. the easy and fast exchange of information makes individuals more attached to these platforms until it becomes a lifestyle to share information about life and a place to get social recognition. a survey conducted by the indonesian internet providers association (apjii, 2022) on 7,568 indonesians shows 98.03% of respondents use the internet to access social media compared to other websites. articl e inf o abstract article history received: 10 september 2024 revised: 13 june 2025 accepted: 13 july 2025 the rise of social media has reshaped how people, especially adolescents, communicate and express themselves. accurate assessment of social media engagement quality is critical for understanding its psychological, social, and behavioral effects, highlighting the need for psychometrically sound measurement tools. this study aims to adapt and test the psychometric properties of the indonesian version of the smea scale. the study involved 851 participants aged 12–21 years. content validity was assessed using aiken’s v index based on ratings from 25 expert judges. construct validity was evaluated through confirmatory factor analysis (cfa), and reliability was tested using cronbach’s alpha. results showed aiken’s v values ranged from 0.67 to 0.91, indicating good content validity. cfa supported the model’s goodness of fit, confirming construct validity. the instrument demonstrated high internal consistency, with a cronbach’s alpha of 0.83. these findings indicate that the indonesian version of the smea is a valid and reliable tool for assessing adolescents' social media engagement. its application can support evidence-based interventions to foster healthy social media use and digital literacy. keywords adaptation indonesian version measurement scale social media social media engagement mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1031 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 170 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ratri pratiwi et.al (adaptation and validation of the indonesia version social media engagement scale for…) these internet users spend an average of 1-5 hours a day accessing social media. indonesia is ranked as the 4th largest social media user in the world with 237 million active social media users. based on a survey (apjii, 2022), the teenage age group of 13-18 years in indonesia is the most active user of social media. social media has become a central part of adolescents' daily routines, shaping the way they connect, communicate, and form identities (ofcom, 2018). while platforms such as facebook, instagram, tiktok, and snapchat offer opportunities for interaction and selfexpression, increasing evidence links social media use among adolescents to various psychological and behavioural issues. recent research shows that the use of social media by adolescents has associations with psychological problems such as depression (rahmatulloh & retnowati, 2021; twenge, et al, 2018), body dissatisfaction (jiotsa et al., 2021), alcohol consumption (alhabash et al., 2022) and cyberbullying behaviours (garett et al., 2016). these findings suggest that it is not only the time spent on social media that matters, but also how adolescents engage with these platforms. to gain a deeper understanding of the psychological and behavioural impacts of social media, researchers must look beyond quantitative metrics such as frequency or duration. the concept of social media engagement, which captures the quality of users' interaction with digital platforms, offers a more comprehensive framework. social media engagement refers to the quality of user experience with technology characterised by feedback, interactivity, sensory appeal, perceived control, aesthetics, awareness, interest, and influence (o'brien & toms, 2008). mccay-peet, and quan-haase (2016) define social media engagement as the quality of user experience with web-based technologies that allow users to interact with, create, and share content with individuals and organisations in their social networks. engagement is a multidimensional concept that focuses not only on behaviour, but also cognition and affective (hollebeek, 2021). in the context of social media, engagement is the quality of social media use, not just the quantity. previous research (orben & przybylski, 2019) shows that the main factor influencing adolescents' comprehensive use of social media is engagement on social media, not just the time spent using social media. dessart (2017) states that social media engagement consists of three contract dimensions, which consist of affective, cognitive and behavioural dimensions. the concept of social media engagement is a strong construct that captures the complexity of users in participating in social media (dessart et al., 2015). various instruments have been developed to measure social media use, including the social media motivations scale (smm-s) (pedruzzi et al., 2021), social networking activity intensity scale (li et al., 2016), social networking addiction scale (snas) (shahnawaz, & rehman, 2020) and the multidimensional facebook intensity scale (mfis) (orosz et al., 2016). these measuring instruments have several limitations, namely only measuring the initial purpose of using social media, focusing too much on objective behaviour, only measuring the intensity of social media use, only measuring the use of social media at an excessive intensity, and only measuring the use of one type of social media. the scale is suitable for measuring specific social media use and suitable for accurately measuring time of social media use. however, many of these tools do not account for the full spectrum of user experience, particularly the affective and cognitive dimensions of engagement. to address these gaps, ni et al. (2020) developed the social media engagement assessment (smea), which consists of affective engagement, behavioural engagement, and cognitive engagement. affective aspects are emotional dimensions related to positive or negative emotions towards objects or problems. the cognitive aspect refers to the understanding and comments on certain objects or problems that can present individual perceptions in the mind. the behavioural aspect refers to the daily habitual activities involved in the object or issue, which can subconsciously pervade an individual's daily life. despite the utility of the smea, the scale has not yet been adapted for use in the indonesian context. cultural adaptation is crucial as social media behaviors are shaped by cultural norms, values, humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 171 pratiwi et.al (adaptation and validation of the indonesia version social media engagement scale for…) and communication patterns. indonesia, as a collectivist society (himawan, 2024), emphasises social harmony (lestari et al., 2013) and group affiliation that can significantly influence how adolescents engage with social media. understanding social media engagement will be very useful in understanding humans in the cyber world and the impact that may arise from social media behaviour. conducting this research is essential for adapting a valid and reliable measurement tool for social media engagement, which is crucial for understanding human behaviour in the cyber world. a robust instrument allows researchers to accurately assess how individuals interact with social media, providing insights into engagement patterns and their psychological, social, and behavioural implications. by offering a standardised method for measurement, this study can uncover the impact of social media on various aspects of life, including mental health, relationships, and digital citizenship. research on specific measurement tools that measure social media engagement is still very limited in indonesia. adaptation of social media engagement measurement tools is needed in the indonesian cultural context. scale adaptation in a cultural context will help produce measuring instruments that have robust psychometric properties (ambuehl & inauen, 2022). this study provides significant contributions by adapting a culturally valid and reliable tool to measure social media engagement among adolescents in indonesia. it enhances the understanding of engagement patterns specific to this demographic and offers a standardised instrument that can inform future research in similar contexts. the findings also support practical applications, such as guiding interventions and policies to promote digital literacy and address potential negative impacts of social media use, particularly among adolescents. thus, the purpose of this study is to determine the validity and reliability of the social media engagement scale for adolescents in indonesia. method participants table 1 participants' demographic data (n=851) number percentage gender male 280 32.9% female 571 67.1% age 12-15 years 244 28.7% 16-18 years 227 26.7% 19-21 years 380 44.7% education level diploma/ bachelor's 445 52.3% senior high school 169 19.9% junior high school 236 27.7% elementary school 1 0.1% duration of using social media in a day < 3 hours 220 25.9% 4-6 hours 204 24% 7-9 hours 184 21.6% 10-12 hours 117 13.7% > 12 hours 126 14.8% 172 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ratri pratiwi et.al (adaptation and validation of the indonesia version social media engagement scale for…) the study involved 851 participants aged between 12 years to 21 years (m = 17.53; sd = 2.25). of the total samples, 67.1% were females, and 32.9% were males. based on the level of education, 0.1% were in elementary school, 27.7% in junior high school, 19.9% in senior high school, and 52.3% were pursuing or had completed a diploma or bachelor's degree. regarding daily social media use, 25.9% of participants reported using it for less than 3 hours; 24% for 4–6 hours; 21.6% for 7–9 hours; 13.7% for 10–12 hours; and 14.8% for more than 12 hours. table 1 provides detailed demographic information about the participants instruments this study used the 11 items of social media engagement scales for adolescents (smes-a) developed by ni et al. (2020). affective engagement refers to the feelings that arise in individuals towards existing objects or issues; behavioural engagement refers to a daily activity that involves a certain object; while the cognitive engagement refers to individual's understanding of an object or issue that appears in his perception. the smes-a comprises three factors: affective engagement (4 items), behavioral engagement (4 items), and cognitive engagement (3 items). responses are rated on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (very unsuitable) to 5 (very suitable). the original smes-a had cronbach alpha reliability coefficients of 0.71 to 0.80, and construct validity by confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) found that the three-factor model of the smes-a had a satisfactory fit ni et al. (2020). the social media engagement scales for adolescents (smes-a) has never been adapted and tested for validity and reliability in other countries. adaptation process the adaptation of the smes-a followed the guidelines of beaton et al. (2000). in the first step, the original scale was forward-translated into indonesian by two colleagues with undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in psychology, both fluent in english and with overseas academic experience in english-speaking countries. in the second step, the researcher synthesized the forward translations. the third step involved back-translation of the indonesian version into the original language by the same professionals from the first step, followed by comparison with the original scale. the fourth step consisted of expert review, involving measurement specialists and linguists, to evaluate the translated version. in the fifth step, a pilot test was conducted with five participants to assess the linguistic clarity and readability of the scale items. data collection data was collected by compiling a scale into an online form (i.e., google form) which was distributed through social media and face-to-face directly to schools. the study employed purposive sampling, a non-probability sampling method involving the deliberate selection of participants based on specific criteria aligned with the research objectives (paramita et al., 2021). the sample consisted of adolescents aged 12 to 21 who were active social media users. participants were drawn from 27 provinces across indonesia, including north sumatra, riau islands, bengkulu, jambi, west sumatra, lampung, south sumatra, dki jakarta, di yogyakarta, west java, central java, east java, west kalimantan, central kalimantan, south kalimantan, east kalimantan, south sulawesi, southeast sulawesi, central sulawesi, north sulawesi, maluku, north maluku, east nusa tenggara (ntt), west nusa tenggara (ntb), papua, west papua, and bali. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 173 pratiwi et.al (adaptation and validation of the indonesia version social media engagement scale for…) validity and reliability analysis content validity was assessed through expert judgment using the aiken’s v method. a total of 25 experts—holding bachelor's and master's degrees in psychology, with experience in psychological scale development and familiarity with the study context—evaluated the scale items. construct validity was examined using confirmatory factor analysis (cfa), conducted through jasp software. confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) in this study was conducted using the maximum likelihood estimation method. prior to cfa, data suitability was assessed using the kaiser-meyer-olkin (kmo) measure and bartlett’s test of sphericity. a kmo value above 0.5 indicates adequate sampling adequacy, while values below 0.5 suggest that the data may not be appropriate for factor analysis. a significant result in bartlett’s test of sphericity (i.e., a low p-value) indicates that the item correlation matrix differs from an identity matrix, supporting the suitability of the data for factor analysis. conversely, a non-significant result (high p-value) suggests that inter-item correlations may be insufficient for factor extraction. reliability was assessed through internal consistency using both cronbach’s alpha and mcdonald’s omega. employing both methods provides a more comprehensive evaluation: cronbach’s alpha offers a practical estimate of item homogeneity (tavakol & dennick, 2011), while mcdonald’s omega yields a more precise reliability estimate without assuming equal factor loadings (dunn et al., 2014; mcneish, 2018). the use of both indices aligns with current methodological recommendations to improve the robustness of reliability assessments (cortez & nussbeck, 2021). results table 2 translate english – indonesia no smea original smea indonesian version a1 using social media is my daily habit menggunakan media sosial merupakan kebiasaan saya sehari-hari a2 i browse social media whenever i have time saya menjelajahi media sosial kapanpun saya ada waktu a3 even if it’s late, i’ll take a look at social media before sleep meskipun sudah larut, saya akan melihat-lihat media sosial sebelum tidur a4 i often use social media to relax in habit saya sering menggunakan media sosial untuk bersantai dari rutinitas b1 i get fulfilled from the attention and comments of others on social media saya mendapatkan kepuasan dari perhatian dan komentar orang lain di media sosial b2 the support and encouragement of others on social media is very important to me dukungan dan semangat dari orang lain di media sosial sangat penting buat saya b3 using social media, i am satisfied with the relationship between myself and my friends. menggunakan media sosial membuat saya merasa puas dengan hubungan saya dan teman-teman saya b4 compare to the real world, social media makes me feel more comfortable. dibandingkan dengan dunia nyata, media sosial membuat saya lebih nyaman c1 i feel bored when i can’t use social media saya merasa bosan ketika tidak bisa menggunakan media sosial c2 compare to the real world, i am happier when i socialize on social media dibandingkan dengan dunia nyata, saya lebih bahagia ketika bersosialisasi di media sosial c3 i feel anxious when i can’t use social media saya merasa cemas ketika tidak bisa menggunakan media sosial 174 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ratri pratiwi et.al (adaptation and validation of the indonesia version social media engagement scale for…) the results of the adaptation process that has been carried out by following the adaptation steps of beaton et al. (2000). table 2 provides an explanation of the original smea scale and the results of the smea adaptation in indonesian. following adaption, the smes-a scale was tested for content validity using aiken's v approach. the expert evaluation provided aiken's v indices ranging from 0.67 to 0.91, which are regarded valid according to the criteria stated by aiken (1985). psychometric properties the reliability analysis of the 11 smes-a items, conducted using cronbach’s alpha, produced item discrimination indices between 0.39 and 0.62, resulting in an overall cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.83. the omega study for mcdonald’s revealed coefficient values of 0.818 for the affective factor, 0.62 for the behavioral factor, and 0.60 for the cognitive factor, resulting in a total omega coefficient of 0.80. these results indicate that the indonesian version of the smes-a demonstrates satisfactory internal consistency. see table 3. table 3 reliability test results mcdonald omega (ω) cronbach alpha (α) affective 0.81 0.81 behavioral 0.62 0.68 cognitive 0.60 0.69 total 0.80 0.83 suggested cutoff ≥ 0.07 ≥ 0.07 the kaiser-meyer-olkin (kmo) test showed a value of 0.83 (kmo> 0.50) and bartlett's test of chi-square <0.001, indicating that the data were suitable for factor analysis. meanwhile, the confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) of the indonesian version of the smes-a revealed factor loadings ranging from 0.54 to 0.68 for the affective factor, 0.42 to 0.56 for the behavioral factor, and 0.36 to 0.77 for the cognitive factor. most items demonstrated acceptable loadings above 0.40. despite item c2's factor loading of 0.361, which is somewhat beneath the widely recognized criterion, it was included since its presence did not significantly undermine the overall measurement quality of the scale. see table 4. table 4 factor loading of the indonesian version of smea factor indicator std. estimate affective a1 0.67 a2 0.68 a3 0.67 a4 0.54 behavioral b1 0.51 b2 0.56 b3 0.53 b4 0.42 cognitive c1 0.77 c2 0.36 c3 0.59 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 175 pratiwi et.al (adaptation and validation of the indonesia version social media engagement scale for…) the goodness-of-fit analysis for the indonesian version of the smes-a, as presented in table 5, indicated that most fit indices met the acceptable criteria, with the exception of the chi-square test. although the chi-square was significant—suggesting a discrepancy between the observed data and the theoretical model—it is known to be highly sensitive to sample size and should be interpreted with caution. the model demonstrated acceptable fit based on alternative indices: rmsea = 0.07 (≤ 0.08), gfi = 0.99 (≥ 0.90), srmr = 0.05 (< 0.08), cfi = 0.93 (≥ 0.90), and tli = 0.91 (≥ 0.90). these results support the conclusion that the model demonstrates a good overall fit. table 5 goodness of fit of the indonesian version of smes-a estimation criteria result description chi-square p > 0.05 p < 0.001 not fit rmsea < 0.08 0.07 good fit goodness of fit index (gfi) ≥ 0.90 0.99 good fit srmr < 0.08 0.05 good fit cfi ≥ 0.90 0.93 good fit tli ≥ 0.90 0.91 good fit discussion this study aims to adapt social media engagement scales for adolescents to the indonesian cultural context and assess the psychometry property of the scale. the results showed that the indonesian version of the smes-a demonstrates adequate content validity. this suggests that the scale items are considered relevant and representative of the construct of social media engagement among adolescents. according to azwar (2019), strong content validity reflects the extent to which the instrument adequately covers the domain it intends to measure, ensuring that the scale captures the essential dimensions of the engagement construct within the indonesian cultural context. this indicates that the scale is not only valid but also culturally appropriate for measuring social media engagement among indonesian adolescent. the results also showed that the total cronbach’s alpha was 0.83, while the total mcdonald’s omega was 0.80, indicating a good level of internal consistency across items. specifically, for the affective factor, α = 0.81 and ω = 0.81; for the behavioral factor, α = 0.68 and ω = 0.62; and for the cognitive factor, α = 0.69 and ω = 0.60. according to nunnally and bernstein (1994), a reliability coefficient of 0.70 or higher is generally considered acceptable for early-stage research, while values closer to 0.80 or above are preferable for established scales. hair et al. (2014) also posited that reliability values between 0.60 and 0.70 are still acceptable in certain situations. in this context, the affective dimension clearly meets acceptable reliability standards in both coefficients. however, the behavioral and cognitive dimensions approach the minimum acceptable threshold, suggesting that future refinement or item revision may improve their internal consistency. the indonesian version of the smes-a demonstrates satisfactory internal consistency overall, particularly in the affective domain. the behavioral and cognitive domains, although marginal, remain within an acceptable range for preliminary validation studies. the social media engagement scales for adolescents from ni et al. (2020) with the context of adolescents in china was found to be adaptable to the indonesian context. the researchers made a model modification by allowing a residual covariance between items b4 and c2 due to their high residual covariance values, which indicated a mismatch between 176 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ratri pratiwi et.al (adaptation and validation of the indonesia version social media engagement scale for…) the hypothesized model and the observed data. this modification involved correlating the error terms of b4 and c2 to improve model fit, based on the theoretical justification that both items share similar wording and represent overlapping aspects of the cognitive dimension. according to brown (2015) and kline (2016), correlating residuals in confirmatory factor analysis is acceptable when item content is similar, as this similarity can produce shared variance not fully captured by the latent construct. this adjustment was made to enhance the model fit indices without compromising construct validity. after the adjustment, the model demonstrated good fit: rmsea = 0.07 (≤ 0.08), gfi = 0.99 (≥ 0.90), srmr = 0.05 (≤ 0.08), cfi = 0.93 (≥ 0.90), and tli = 0.91 (≥ 0.90). these results are consistent with goodness-offit criteria established by hair et al. (2010, 2014), hooper et al. (2008), brown (2006), and wijanto (2006), indicating that the model achieved acceptable fit and supports the construct validity of the indonesian version of the smes-a. this suggests that the scale's factor structure remains stable even after cross-cultural adaptation, and the measured constructs— affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement—are conceptually meaningful in the indonesian adolescent context. achieving acceptable model fit reinforces the validity of using this instrument to assess social media engagement in a culturally different population, demonstrating both theoretical consistency and empirical adequacy in contrast, wisessathorn et al. (2022), in developing the thai-social media engagement scale (t-smes) based on engagement theory and social media behavior among thai adolescents, identified a different factor structure. their exploratory factor analysis yielded three dimensions—feel at ease and not missing out, make it a habit, and sense of being attracted to and connected to others—which predominantly reflect affective and behavioral components. although their scale was grounded in engagement theory, the cognitive dimension was not distinctly represented. this differs from both the present study and ni et al.’s (2020) findings, in which affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement were consistently retained as core constructs. these differences may reflect cultural or contextual variations in how adolescents experience and interpret engagement with social media platforms. the practical implications of these findings are that the smea can be a valid instrument that can be used to support evidence-based interventions to promote healthy social media use and digital literacy. by providing objective and quantitative data on social media engagement patterns, this tool enables educators, counselors, and public health officials to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of social media. consequently, stakeholders are able to develop customized intervention programs to address specific problematic behaviors identified by the scale, such as compulsive use or excessive emotional investment. this study has several limitations that should be acknowledged. although the findings demonstrated adequate content validity and internal consistency, the reliability values for the behavioral and cognitive dimensions were at the lower acceptable threshold, suggesting that some items may not fully capture the constructs of social media engagement in the indonesian cultural context. in addition, the present study did not assess criterion-related validity, so it remains unclear how well the scale correlates with external measures theoretically related to social media engagement. this study primarily emphasized content validity, internal consistency, and confirmatory factor analysis. however, additional evidence such as temporal stability (test-retest reliability) and measurement invariance across groups would further strengthen the robustness of the instrument. future studies are recommended to conduct further refinement or revision of items, particularly within the behavioral and cognitive dimensions, to improve reliability. subsequent research should also include criterion-related validity testing by examining the correlations between this scale and other established measures of social media use, wellbeing, or related constructs. in addition, conducting measurement invariance analyses across groups (e.g., gender, education level, or frequency of social media use) as well as test-retest humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 177 pratiwi et.al (adaptation and validation of the indonesia version social media engagement scale for…) reliability would provide stronger evidence of temporal consistency and construct equivalence. conclusion based on the findings of this study, it can be concluded that the indonesian version of the social media engagement assessment (smea) scale demonstrates strong psychometric properties, with satisfactory validity and reliability. confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) supports a three-factor structure (affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement), which offers the best model fit in representing the construct of social media engagement among indonesian adolescents. the results showed that the smes-a adapted to the indonesian context can be considered a valid and reliable tool by researchers and practitioners. the primary strength of this study is its substantial sample size and the inclusion of participants from diverse regions across indonesia. this validated version of the smea scale provides a reliable and culturally appropriate tool for future research on social media engagement in the indonesian context. it is expected to facilitate more accurate assessments and support the development of targeted interventions and digital literacy programs. acknowledgment the author gratefully acknowledges all contributors, especially the participants, and the supporting institutions involved in this research. declarations author contribution. the first author contributed to designing the study, collecting data, and analysing data. the second author contributed to writing the manuscript draft, collecting data and finalising the manuscript. the third author contributed to collecting data and writing the manuscript. funding statement. this research was conducted with universitas mercu buana yogyakarta's funding support conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references aiken, l. r. 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(2022). factor structure and interpretation on the thai-social media engagement scale (t-smes). heliyon, 8(7), e09985. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e09985 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e09985 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 21 (2), august 2024, 100-117 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://10.26555/humanitas.v21i2.637 the psychometric properties of interpersonal support evaluation listshort form (isel-16) on college students septian wahyu rahmanto faculty of psychology, universitas muhammadiyah surakarta, indonesia corresponding author: swr620@ums.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction social support encompasses a range of resources provided through interpersonal relationships. it is refers to the assistance individuals receive from their social networks (cohen & hoberman, 1983). another scholar, uchino (2004) defines it as the comfort, care, or assistance available from others, while gottlieb and bergen (2010) describe it as social resources offered by non-professionals within both formal support groups and informal settings. the american psychological association (2018) characterizes social support as providing assistance or comfort to others, typically to help them manage biological, psychological, or social stress. collectively, these definitions highlight that social support serves as a crucial resource in interpersonal relationships, aiding individuals in coping with stress. research has consistently demonstrated the positive impact of social support on coping strategies. for instance, social support is associated with higher levels of gratitude, which can lead to positive life evaluations (yunanto, 2020). it also encourages the adoption of article info abst ract article history received december 30, 2023 revised august 20, 2024 accepted august 24, 2024 the interpersonal support evaluation list (isel) is an instrument for assessing perceived social support. it exists in both full and short forms, with the short version (isel-16) offering practical advantages in terms of efficiency for assessments and research. to date, there is no adapted version of the isel-16 available in indonesian. this study aimed to adapt and validate the isel-16 for use in indonesia through psychometric analysis. the adaptation process followed itc guidelines, including obtaining permission, conducting back-to-back translations, evaluating language comparability and interpretability, and testing the instrument on a sample population. 292 active students were recruited using quota sampling. validity and reliability were assessed using confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) in amos 23. results indicated that the isel-16 exhibits a good model fit with four factors: appraisal, tangible assets, belonging, and self-esteem. the findings confirm that the indonesian version of the isel-16 is a valid and reliable measure of perceived students’ social support. theoretically, the adaptation reinforces the four-dimensional structure of social support previously established. practically, it can be used to predict stress-related outcomes, such as crisis-related and academic stress, and is recommended for timeand resource-constrained research scenarios as well as for classical tests or exploratory studies. keywords adaptation scale interpersonal support isel-16 perceived social support mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://10.0.103.187/humanitas.v21i2.637 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 101 rahmanto (the psychometric properties of interpersonal support evaluation list-short form (isel-16) on college students) appropriate coping strategies (widyasrini & lestari, 2020) and positively influences selfesteem (lestari & fajar, 2020). among individuals aged 15-25, higher perceived social support correlates with a greater tendency to engage in active coping strategies, as opposed to negative coping strategies (mai et al., 2021). conversely, the lack of social support is linked to adverse outcomes, including negative emotions, health issues, and symptoms of mental disorders. research has shown that social support negatively correlates with stress (ramania et al., 2019), depression (grey et al., 2020; qing & li, 2021), loneliness (zhang & dong, 2022), poor sleep quality (grey et al., 2020; guo et al., 2022). therefore, understanding individual perceptions of social support is essential for predicting their capacity to manage crises or stressors. in educational settings, social support serves as a protective factor for students during times of crisis. for example, during the covid-19 pandemic, higher levels of perceived social support were associated with lower anxiety levels and reduced impacts of the pandemic among participants aged 15-25 (mai et al., 2021). social support also mitigates the negative effects of other significant life stressors, such as divorce, bereavement, chronic illness, pregnancy, job loss, and excessive workload (buchwald, 2017). thus, social support provides substantial health and mental health benefits during periods of high stress. perceived social support during the early stages of university life is particularly beneficial for students' overall well-being and mental health (adyani et al., 2019; coborendón et al., 2020). college students with higher levels of social support are reported to have lower stress levels (mclean et al., 2022). furthermore, cage et al. (2021) found that perceptions of social support positively influence students' mental health during transitional periods in university life, such as entering college, adapting to new academic years, and preparing to leave the university environment. various instruments have been developed to measure social support, with the interpersonal support evaluation list (isel) being particularly prominent due to its comprehensive representation of social support dimensions. nick et al. (2018) identified four subtypes of social support—self-esteem or emotional support, social companionship, informational support, and instrumental support—that align closely with the subtypes proposed by (cohen & wills, 1985). table 1 provides a comparison of available instruments for assessing perceptions of social support. table 1 development of an instrument for perceptions of social support no. instruments dimension psychometric evidence 1 social support questionnaire (ssq) (sarason et al., 1983) two parts: a list of people they can contact and rely on in certain situations and how satisfied they are with that social support the internal reliability alpha coefficient α=0.97 2 perceived social support inventory (procidano & heller, 1983) support, information, and feedback the internal reliability alpha coefficient α=0.90 3 interpersonal support evaluation list (cohen & hoberman, 1983) appraisal, tangible, belonging, dan self-esteem total scale reliability isel48 α=0.77 (appraisal α=0.77, tangible α=0.71, belonging α=0.75, dan selfesteem α =0.60) 4 multidimensional scale of perceived social support (zimet et al., 1988) multidimensional measurement of perceived social support from three main sources, family, friends, and significant other total scale reliability α=0.88. significant other α=0.91; family α=0.87; and friends α=0.85 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 102 rahmanto (the psychometric properties of interpersonal support evaluation list-short form (isel-16) on college students) table 1 (continued) no. instruments dimension psychometric evidence 5 interview schedule for social interaction (undén & orth-gomér, 1989) availability of social integration (avsi); adequacy of social integration (adsi); availability of attachment (avat); adequacy of attachment (adat) reliabilitas: avsi (α=0.77), adsi (α=0.86), avat (α=0.80), and adat (α=0.94) 6 social support scale (peeters et al., 1995) instrumental support, intimate support, dan rewarding companionship reliability of instrumental α=0.80; intimate α=0.77; and rewarding α =0.76 the isel, originally developed by cohen and hoberman (1983) with an initial total of 48 items. , is widely used to measure perceptions of social support. the isel-48, the full version of the scale, consists of four dimensions: appraisal (perceived availability of someone to talk to), tangible (availability of material assistance), self-esteem (favorable selfcomparison), and belonging (availability of people to engage with). the total scale reliability for isel-48 is 0.77, with subscale reliabilities ranging from 0.60 to 0.77. isel has been used in research in various settings in indonesia. the use of isel in various settings, for example, in health settings with tuberculosis patient participants (saraswati & purwandari, 2023); in forensic settings with child prisoner participants (sukma & panjaitan, 2019); in educational settings with participants from undergraduate nursing study program students (aeni et al., 2023) and student members of student and student associations (akerina & wibowo, 2022); and in workplace settings with contract employee participant (atmaja & chusairi, 2022). despite its broad applicability, the short version of isel (isel-16), which maintains the four-dimensional structure, has not been adapted or validated in the indonesian context. the isel-16, a shortened version used in large epidemiological studies such as the atherosclerosis risk in communities (aric) study, includes social, psychological, and health assessment instruments (aric investigators, 1989). the isel-sf was administered to 14,348 participants at visit two inspections in 1990-1993 (payne et al., 2012). the shorter instrument was selected from the original isel instrument to reduce the survey time burden and practical management considerations for aric study participants. the isel-sf consists of 16 items taken from the full isel scale. the items selected were those with the highest factor loadings in each of the four subscales from the original analysis of the complete isel instrument (brookings & bolton, 1988). given the importance of assessing social support efficiently, the isel-16 offers a valuable tool for settings where time and resources are limited. no studies have empirically evaluated the psychometric properties of the isel-16 in the indonesian context, creating a critical gap in the availability of validated tools for assessing perceptions of social support in this population. addressing this gap is essential, particularly for applications in educational and crisis settings, where efficient and reliable assessments of social support are needed. this study seeks to adapt and validate the isel-16 for use in indonesia, drawing on previous psychometric evidence established with european american and african american participants (payne et al., 2012). this research aims to provide a validated, efficient scale that enhances the assessment of social support, thereby contributing to the broader field of psychometrics. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 103 rahmanto (the psychometric properties of interpersonal support evaluation list-short form (isel-16) on college students) method participants the study involved active students enrolled in diploma and bachelor programs across various majors in central java. the total student population in this region is 644,683 (pusdatin kemenristekdikti, 2019). based on isaac and michael's table (sugiyono, 2011), a sample size of 270 students was determined as appropriate for this population. a convenience sampling technique was employed due to its practicality, allowing researchers to access participants easily (golzar et al., 2022). participants were recruited through known contacts who had access to potential subjects and were reached via whatsapp and instagram. the data collection process utilized online questionnaires shared through these platforms. a total of 292 students participated, aged between 17 and 29 years (m = 20.33, sd = 1.61). participant ages were categorized into two groups based on santrock (2019) theory adolescence (17-21 years) and early adulthood (22-29 years). table 2 provides detailed demographic information about the respondents. table 2 participant demographic data category frequency (n=292) percentage gender man woman 43 249 14.7% 85.3% age 17-21 22-29 230 62 78.8% 21.2% campus cluster su (state university) pu (private university) cu (civil service university) 122 160 10 41.8% 54.8% 3.4% educational level diploma bachelor 90 202 69.2% 30.8% instrument the interpersonal support evaluation list (isel-16) was used to assess participants' perceptions of social support (payne et al., 2012). isel-16 used in this study (payne et al., 2012) is an abbreviated version of isel 48 developed by (cohen & hoberman, 1983), comprises 16 items and demonstrates a cronbach’s alpha value of 0.83. isel-16 evaluates four domains: appraisal, tangible assets, belonging, and self-esteem (brookings & bolton, 1988; cohen & hoberman, 1983; payne et al., 2012). each item is rated on a 4-point likert scale: 0 = "definitely not appropriate," 1 = "likely not appropriate," 2 = "likely appropriate," and 3 = "definitely appropriate." table 3 outlines the measurement scale and indicators used in the analysis before conducting the confirmatory factor analysis (cfa). isel-16 consists of 4 factors with 16 items before cfa analysis. table 3 shows the blueprint of the measurement scale and explanation of indicators (cohen & hoberman, 1983; cohen & wills, 1985; nick et al., 2018; payne et al., 2012). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 104 rahmanto (the psychometric properties of interpersonal support evaluation list-short form (isel-16) on college students) table 3 blueprint of isel-16 before cfa factors indicators original items* appraisal (ap) perceived willingness to discuss personal concerns or interests. assistance in offering advice, sharing information or perspectives, and giving advice. there really is no one who can give me an objective view of how i’m handling my problems (uf) when i need suggestions on how to deal with a personal problem, i know someone i can turn to (f) there is really no one i can trust to give me good financial advice (uf) there is at least one person i know whose advice i really trust (f) tangible assets (ta) perceptions of the availability of material assistance. examples include assistance with needed services, completing required tasks, and assistance with material resources. 6 (uf) if i were sick and needed someone (friend, family member, or acquaintance) to take me to the doctor, i would have trouble finding someone (uf) if i were sick, i could easily find someone to help me with my daily chores (f) if i had to go out of town for a few weeks, it would be difficult to find someone who would look after my house or apartment (the plants, pets, garden, etc.) (uf) it would be difficult to find someone who would lend me their car for a few hours (uf) belonging (be) perceived availability to interact socially. doing something or spending time with other people or expressions of inclusiveness. when i feel lonely, there are several people i can talk to (f) i often meet or talk with family or friends (f) i feel like i am not always included by my circle of friends (uf) i don’t often get invited to do things with others (uf) self-esteem (se) the perceived availability of others is in the form of positive feedback, with which the individual feels he is being compared well so that the individual can compare himself positively with others. most of my friends are more interesting than i am (uf) most of my friends are more successful at making changes in their lives than i am (uf) i am more satisfied with my life than most people are with theirs (f) i have a hard time keeping pace with my friends (uf) note: *f=favourable, uf=unfavourable procedure the adaptation process followed the international test commission (itc) guidelines for translating and adapting tests (itc, 2017). the stages included: (1) obtaining permission from the isel-16 developer, thomas h. mosley, via email; (2) ensuring adaptation considers linguistic, psychological, and cultural differences by selecting translators with relevant expertise; (3) forward translation (ft) was conducted by three independent translators, who were academics in psychology with experience living in countries where the instrument's original language is spoken. the first two translators independently translated the instrument, and the third translator synthesized their versions into a final ft; (4) back translation (bt) involved three independent translators with qualifications in academia or professional experience, with english language certification and familiarity with the instrument's original language. the translators performed the bt independently, with the final bt being reviewed by an expert panel; (5) the final bt was reviewed by three english language experts to ensure linguistic comparabilityand interpretative equivalence (sperber, 2004); and (6) conducting a largescale field test to gather psychometric evidence. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 105 rahmanto (the psychometric properties of interpersonal support evaluation list-short form (isel-16) on college students) data analysis psychometric evidence was evaluated using confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) to assess the internal structure. cfa was conducted to confirm the theoretical measurement model, examining how well the observed variables represented the underlying constructs (hair et al., 2014). the model fit was evaluated using single equation modeling and global fit indices, including the root mean square error of approximation (rmsea), goodness of fit index (gfi), comparative fit index (cfi), tucker-lewis index (tli), and parsimonious normal fit index (pnfi). these indices provide a comprehensive assessment of absolute fit, incremental fit, and parsimony fit (ingarianti et al., 2019). criteria for a good fit included gfi and cfi values greater than 0.9 and rmsea values less than 0.08 (schoot et al., 2012; schreiber et al., 2006; kline, 2023). tli and pnfi range from 0 to 1, but models with a good fit have values closer to 1 (hair et al., 2014; schumacker & lomax, 2010). the cfa was performed using amos 23 software. reliability was assessed using cronbach's alpha and construct reliability (cr). cronbach’s alpha values between 0.70 and 0.90 indicate high reliability (cohen et al., 2013; hinton et al., 2004), with values above 0.70 considered acceptable (bland & altman, 1997). reliability tests were conducted using ibm spss version 25. construct reliability was calculated using the formula involving factor loadings and measurement error (ghozali & fuad, 2005): construct reliability = (∑standardized loading)² (∑standardized loading)2 + (∑measurement error) results in the initial stage, the researcher asked permission from the isel-16 developer, thomas h. mosley, via email (tmosley@umc.edu) to adapt isel-16. the researcher received a reply to use the isel-16 instrument. in the second stage, the researcher looked for a forwardtranslation (ft) translator and ft synthesis as well as a back-translation (bt) translator and bt synthesis according to the specified criteria. the results of the ft translator search show the researcher got two ft translators, namely akp as ft1 (a psychology academic with an ielts score of 8 and experience living in australia and england) and sr as ft2 (an academic, toefl score of 100, and experience living in the united states). ft synthesis was carried out by a psychology academic who had experience living in england. the results of the search for bt translators, the researcher got two translators, namely afs as bt1 (toefl score 80, institution universiti sains malaysia, and experience living in australia and malaysia) and ga as bt2 (toefl score 110, institution international institute of social studies, erasmus university rotterdam, and experience living in singapore and the netherlands). the bt synthesis translator is rk, who has an ielts score of 8.9 and has experience living in australia, the united states, england, and new zealand. the bt synthesis results are reviewed by three experts in english, each with a toefl/ielts score and experience living in the united states, england, and australia. the third stage is the forward translation (ft) process. the translation results of forward translation (ft) on several items were translated differently by the ft1 translator and the ft2 translator. for example, the original item “how to deal with a personal problem” is translated as “cara mengatasi permasalahan personal” and “jalan keluar masalah pribadi saya”. the synthesis discussion decided to use the sentence “bagaimana menyelesaikan masalah pribadi saya” so that it is not different from the original item. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 106 rahmanto (the psychometric properties of interpersonal support evaluation list-short form (isel-16) on college students) original item “i would have trouble finding someone” was translated by both ft translators and placed at the beginning of the sentence, although there is no difference, but the synthesis discussion placed it at the end of the sentence like the original item. the original item “most of my friends” is translated as “sebagian besar teman” and “kebanyakan teman”, but the word “kebanyakan” is more appropriate because it is in accordance with the indonesian dictionary (kbbi). table 4 forward translation synthesis item number original item ft1 translator ft2 translator ft synthesis ap1 there really is no one who can give me an objective view of how i’m handling my problems. tidak ada seorang pun yang dapat memberikan pandangan objektif mengenai bagaimana saya mengatasi masalah. tidak ada seorang pun yang dapat memberikan pandangan objektif tentang bagaimana saya mengatasi masalah. tidak ada seorang pun yang dapat memberikan pandangan objektif tentang bagaimana saya mengatasi masalah. ap2 when i need suggestions on how to deal with a personal problem, i know someone i can turn to. ketika saya membutuhkan saran mengenai cara mengatasi permasalahan personal, saya tahu siapa yang dapat saya hubungi. ketika saya membutuhkan saran tentang jalan keluar masalah pribadi saya, saya tahu siapa yang harus saya hubungi. ketika saya membutuhkan saran tentang bagaimana menyelesaikan masalah pribadi saya, saya tahu siapa yang harus saya hubungi. ta1 if i were sick and needed someone (friend, family member, or acquaintance) to take me to the doctor, i would have trouble finding someone. jika saya sakit, saya akan kesulitan untuk menemukan seseorang (teman, anggota keluarga, atau kenalan) yang bisa membawa saya ke dokter. jika saya sakit, saya akan kesulitan menemukan orang lain (teman, anggota keluarga, atau kenalan) yang bisa membawa saya ke dokter. jika saya sakit dan memerlukan orang lain (teman, anggota keluarga, atau kenalan) untuk mengantarkan saya ke dokter, saya kesulitan untuk menemukannya ta2 if i were sick, i could easily find someone to help me with my daily chores. jika saya sakit, saya dapat dengan mudah menemukan seseorang yang dapat membantu saya melakukan tugas sehari-hari. jika saya sakit, saya dapat dengan mudah menemukan seseorang untuk membantu saya melakukan tugas sehari-hari. jika saya sakit, dengan mudah saya dapat menemukan seseorang untuk membantu saya melakukan tugas sehari-hari. be1 when i feel lonely, there are several people i can talk to. ketika saya merasa kesepian, terdapat beberapa orang yang bisa saya ajak bicara. jika saya merasa kesepian, ada beberapa orang yang bisa saya ajak bicara. jika saya merasa kesepian, ada beberapa orang yang bisa saya ajak bicara. be2 i often meet or talk with family or friends. saya sering bertemu atau berbicara dengan keluarga atau teman. saya sering bertemu atau berbicara dengan keluarga atau teman. saya sering bertemu atau berbicara dengan keluarga atau teman. se1 most of my friends are more interesting than i am. sebagian besar teman saya lebih menarik dibandingkan saya. kebanyakan teman saya lebih menarik daripada saya. kebanyakan teman saya lebih menarik daripada saya. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 107 rahmanto (the psychometric properties of interpersonal support evaluation list-short form (isel-16) on college students) table 4 (continued) item number original item ft1 translator ft2 translator ft synthesis se2 most of my friends are more successful at making changes in their lives than i am. sebagian besar teman saya lebih sukses dalam melakukan perubahan dalam hidup mereka dibandingkan saya. sebagian besar teman saya lebih sukses membuat perubahan dalam hidup mereka ketimbang saya. sebagian besar teman saya lebih sukses dalam melakukan perubahan dalam hidup mereka dibandingkan saya. the fourth stage is the back translation (bt) translation process. the results of the ft synthesis process are translated back into english (back translation). translators bt1 and bt2 translate the back translation (bt) results, which translator bt3 then reviews. the results of the back translation (bt) synthesis are relatively the same between translators bt1 and bt2, so the bt synthesis translator also does not experience any obstacles. an example of bt results can be seen in table 4. table 5 back translation synthesis item number ft synthesis bt1 translator bt2 translator bt synthesis ap3 tidak ada seorang pun yang dapat saya percaya untuk memberikan nasihat yang baik terkait keuangan. there is no one i can trust to give good financial advice i cannot trust anyone to give a good financial advice there is no one i can trust to give good financial advice ap4 setidaknya ada satu orang yang saya kenal yang nasihatnya dapat saya percaya. i know at least one person whose advice i can trust i know at least one person whose advice i can trust i know at least one person whose advice i can trust ta3 jika saya harus keluar kota selama beberapa minggu, saya akan kesulitan untuk menemukan seseorang untuk menjaga rumah atau apartemen saya (seperti mengurus tanaman, hewan peliharaan, taman, dll). if i were to go out of town for weeks, it will be hard for me to to find someone to look after my house or apartment (such as tend the plants, pets, garden, etc) if i have to go out of town for several weeks, it will be difficult for me to find someone to look for my house or apartment (i.e. taking care of my plants, pets, garden, etc.) if i have to be out of town for a few weeks, it will be difficult for me to find someone to look after my house or apartment (such as taking care of plants, pets, gardens, etc.) ta4 akan sulit bagi saya untuk menemukan seseorang yang mau meminjamkan mobilnya kepada saya selama beberapa jam. it will be difficult for me to to find someone who could lend me their car for a few hours it will be difficult for me to find someone willing to lend me h/er car for several hours it would be difficult for me to find someone who would lend me their car for a few hours be3 saya merasa tidak selalu dimasukkan dalam lingkaran teman-teman saya. sometimes i feel excluded from my friendship circles sometimes i feel excluded from my friendship circles sometimes i feel excluded from my friendship circles be4 saya jarang dilibatkan untuk melakukan sesuatu dengan orang lain. i'm rarely involved in doing things with other people i am rarely involved to do something with other people i am rarely involved to do something with other people humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 108 rahmanto (the psychometric properties of interpersonal support evaluation list-short form (isel-16) on college students) table 5 (continued) item number ft synthesis bt1 translator bt2 translator bt synthesis se3 saya lebih puas dengan kehidupan saya daripada kebanyakan orang dengan kehidupan mereka. i am more satisfied with my life than others with theirs i am more satisfied with my life than others with theirs i am more satisfied with my life than most people with theirs se4 saya kesulitan mengimbangi temanteman saya. i find it hard to keep up with my friends i find it hard to balance my friends i have a hard time keeping up with my friends the fifth stage is the process of reviewing the bt synthesis results. the bt synthesis results were compared with the original version of isel-16 in english by reviewing language comparability and interpretability similarity. in this process, the bt synthesis items were then reviewed by the isel-16 instrument developers and experts in the field of english. the average value of language comparability ranged from 1 to 2.67, and the average value of interpretability similarity ranged from 1 to 3, based on sperber (2004), the value is stated as acceptable. the sixth stage is psychometric testing on a large sample. the results of a large-scale study with 292 respondents showed that the be dimension had the highest average (7.68) in general for all categories, followed by the ta (5.92), ap (4.23), and se (4.20) dimensions (see table 5). the same pattern also occurs in sub-categories, where the be dimension has the highest average among all sub-categories, such as in the gender sub-category, namely men and women, the age sub-category, namely teenagers and early adults, etc. the ap dimension has the lowest average for male participants, while the se dimension has the lowest average for female participants. in adolescent participants, the ap dimension had the lowest average, while in early-adulthood participants, the initial se dimension had the lowest average. table 6 mean (m) and standard deviations (sd) of the isel-16 category ap ta be se m (sd) m (sd) m (sd) m (sd) all 4.23 (1.54) 5.92 (2.10) 7.68 (2.64) 4.20 (2.02) gender man woman 3.62 (1.36) 4.34 (1.55) 5.88 (2.04) 5.92 (2.11) 7.25 (2.47) 7.75 (2.67) 4.07 (1.84) 4.22 (2.05) age 17-21 (adolescent) 22-29 (early-adulthood) 4.30 (1.47) 4.00 (1.76) 5.84 (2.04) 6.19 (2.28) 7.74 (2.62) 7.46 (2.76) 4.32 (2.06) 3.77 (1.78) campus cluster su (state university) pu (private university) cu (civil service university) 4.22 (1.54) 4.23 (1.57) 4.50 (1.08) 5.91 (2.04) 5.89 (2.15) 6.40 (2.01) 7.63 (2.45) 7.68 (2.77) 8.30 (3.12) 4.34 (1.94) 4.06 (2.06) 4.70 (2.21) educational level diploma bachelor 4.35 (1.53) 4.18 (1.54) 5.84 (2.18) 5.95 (2.06) 7.77 (2.51) 7.64 (2.71) 4.51 (2.01) 4.06 (2.01) the results of the initial cfa analysis before modification (figure 1.) showed that there were items with factor loadings (fl) values below 0.5, so these items had to be deleted (hair et al., 2014). the items are ap1 and ap3 (appraisal), ta2 (tangible assets), and se3 (self-esteem). items with an fl value close to 0.5 are not deleted first, namely ap4 items humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 109 rahmanto (the psychometric properties of interpersonal support evaluation list-short form (isel-16) on college students) with consideration; if rounded up, the result is 0.5. the parameters for the accuracy of the isel-16 model, namely rmsea, gfi, cfi, and tli, and only pnfi was fit (0.577). after that, a second cfa analysis was carried out, namely modification by deleting items with fl <0.5. the result is an fl value of 0.5, except for the ta1 item. the ta1 item was not deleted because fl with a value of ±0.30 to ±0.40 was considered to meet the minimum level for structural interpretation (hair et al., 2014). the parameters for the accuracy of the isel-16 model are also not fit, namely rmsea, gfi, cfi, tli, and only pnfi fit (0.597). however, the result is fit if the gfi and cfi values are rounded. figure 1 figure 2 model cfa before modification model cfa final the researcher then carried out a third cfa analysis, namely carrying out covariance (correlation) between errors according to the suggested modifications (modification indices), namely at e9<->e10, e11<->e12, and e13<->e16. after the third cfa analysis, the isel-16 fit model accuracy parameters are fit, namely rmsea=0.077, gfi=0.937, cfi=0.917, tli=0.879, and pnfi=0.599 (figure 2, table 6). table 7 parameter fit fit categories parameters fit output criteria notes absolute fit root means square error of approximation (rmsea) 0.077 ≤0.08 fit goodness of fit index (gfi) 0.937 ≥0.9 fit incremental fit comparative fit index (cfi) 0.917 ≥0.9 fit tucker-lewis index (tli) 0.879 0-1 fit parsimony fit parsimonious normal fit index (pnfi) 0.599 0-1 fit calculate estimated reliability in general with cronbach's alpha and for each manifest variable using construct reliability (cr). cronbach's alpha value for all items is α = 0.81 (table 7). the manifest variables have their respective cr values as follows: ap = 0.66; ta = 0.63; be = 0.73; se = 0.74 (table 8). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 110 rahmanto (the psychometric properties of interpersonal support evaluation list-short form (isel-16) on college students) table 8 total reliability estimation estimate cronbach’s (α) average interitem correlation point estimate 0.81 0.27 95% ci lower bound 0.78 0.23 95% ci upper bound 0.84 0.32 table 9 construct reliability (cr) variables and indicators *fl fl² error **cr appraisal ap2 0.82 0.67 0.33 0.66 ap4 0.57 0.32 0.68 total 1.39 0.99 1.01 tangible assets ta1 0.49 0.24 0.76 0.63 ta3 0.68 0.46 0.54 ta4 0.64 0.41 0.59 total 1.81 1.11 1.89 belonging be1 0.55 0.3 0.7 0.73 be2 0.54 0.29 0.71 be3 0.7 0.49 0.51 be4 0.76 0.58 0.42 total 2.55 1.66 2.34 self-esteem se1 0.74 0.55 0.45 0.74 se2 0.73 0.53 0.47 se4 0.62 0.38 0.62 total 2.09 1.46 1.54 note: *fl= factor loading, **cr= construct reliability isel-16 consists of 4 factors with 12 items after cfa analysis. table 7 shows the blueprint of the measurement scale. table 10 blueprint of isel-16 after final cfa factors items* appraisal (ap) 8 (f), 15 (f) tangible assets (ta) 6 (uf), 11 (uf), 14 (uf) belonging (be) 2 (f), 3 (f), 4 (uf), 9 (uf) self-esteem (se) 1 (uf), 10 (uf), 16 (uf) note: *f=favourable, uf=unfavourable discussion this study aims to adapt the indonesian version of the isel-16 instrument (short form) to be used in indonesia. the indonesian version of the isel-16 factor structure test found that humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 111 rahmanto (the psychometric properties of interpersonal support evaluation list-short form (isel-16) on college students) the four-factor hierarchical model had model fit and factor loading. the fit value shows that the proposed model is suitable, meaning that the isel-16 measurement, whose structure is supported by these four dimensions, is valid according to empirical data (azwar, 2019). these results align with previous research supporting a four-factor structure for the isel-16 (chen et al.,2020; payne et al., 2012; porricelli et al., 2024; ranjbaran et al., 2015). research by chen et al. (2020) also supports a factor structure with four dimensions, and the isel-16 instrument with four factors is also supported in several studies . while the isel-16 demonstrated a good overall model fit, four items (ap1, ap3, ta2, and se3) had factor loadings below the recommended threshold of 0.5 and were therefore excluded. the appraisal (ap) dimension now comprises only two indicators. according to hair et al. (2014) a minimum of three indicators per factor is preferable for comprehensive coverage of the construct. although this represents a limitation of the current study kline (2016) suggests that a model with at least two indicators per factor can still be considered identified if it includes multiple factors. this finding contrasts with payne et al. (2012), where each manifest variable included four indicators. researchers conduct covariance (correlation) between errors according to modification indices. sometimes, some measurement errors of one indicator are partially correlated with measurement errors of other indicators, the possible causes being the presence of items that have similar wording and response bias caused by participants' agreement with the attitude statement, regardless of the content of the statement (brown, 2015). covariance between errors can be done as long as they are in the same dimension. the covariance between errors is intended to improve the model's fit (uyun et al., 2021). internal consistency analysis using cronbach's alpha and construct reliability (cr) showed an overall reliability coefficient of α = 0.813, indicating consistent reflections of social support perceptions across items. this value is comparable to the original instrument's α = 0.83 (payne et al., 2012). furthermore, the cr value for each manifest variable (indicator) is ap = 0.66; ta = 0.63; be = 0.73; se = 0.74. cr values above 0.7 are indicated by the dimensions of belonging (cr=0.73) and self-esteem (cr=0.74). cr indicates internal consistency, meaning all measures represent the same latent construct. the rule of thumb for reliability estimation is 0.7 or higher, thus indicating good reliability (hair et al., 2014). two dimensions, the appraisal dimension (cr = 0.66) and the tangible assets dimension (ta = 0.63), have crs below 0.7. however, a value of 0.6 to 0.7 is acceptable, provided that the indicators of the other construct validity models are good (hair et al., 2014). issues related to translation, literacy, and cultural differences, such as the representation of functional social support, were observed as potential factors influencing lower reliability (merz et al., 2014). for example, ap1 “tidak ada seorang pun yang dapat memberikan pandangan objektif tentang bagaimana saya mengatasi masalah,” and ap3 “tidak ada seorang pun yang dapat saya percaya untuk memberikan nasihat yang baik terkait keuangan.” these two items did not adequately represent perceptions of social support in the context of indonesian students, so they were removed from the instrument. the ap1 and ap3 factors were removed, resulting in a minimal number of items, namely two items, which allows for a low ap construct reliability value of cr=0.66. the various results of psychometric properties show that local cultural influences and research samples greatly influence the adaptation of the instrument and are related to the cultural and socio-cultural context in which they live so that the response is also inseparable from local cultural influences (rahmawati et al., 2022). nevertheless, the psychometric results can provide initial evidence that the isel-16 overall social support score can be applied to indonesian society with student samples. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 112 rahmanto (the psychometric properties of interpersonal support evaluation list-short form (isel-16) on college students) the be dimension generally has the highest average (7.68) for all categories, while the se dimension has the lowest average (4.20). this is in contrast to the theory of "social supports as buffers of life change stress" by (cohen & hoberman, 1983), the need for positive feedback (self-esteem) is the best predictor of overall life stress levels, while appraisal and tangible assets contribute little to the explanation of variations in life stress (ghesquiere et al., 2017). these findings also explain that the covid-19 pandemic, which is a stress trigger, has produced a need to overcome problems, which is best met through togetherness support or social interaction (be). age-related trends show that social support for interaction (be) is highest among students aged 17-21(adolescents) and 22-29 (early adulthood), aligning with romeo et al. (2024) findings on the importance of emotional support in academic settings. maluendaalbornoz et al. (2023) also emphasized that first-year students who feel more support from peers and lecturers, where this support also makes them feel a greater sense of belonging to their educational community, will contribute to students showing cognitive progress (more effort and intellectual engagement), affective (enjoyment, positive attitudes, etc.), and behavior (participation, compliance, etc.). differences in perceptions of social support between genders also emerged, and some were consistent with previous research. the differences in subscales show that women and men prefer to get support from parties willing to interact socially (be) and prefer support from parties with the necessary resources (ta). this finding is different from the research of payne et al. (2012), who found that women prefer support from individuals who provide both trust and social interaction, while men value support related to self-esteem and tangible assets. these differences underscore the need for tailored support interventions. although this study contributes to evaluating the psychometric properties of the indonesian version of the isel-16, there are several limitations. first, several items (ap1, ap3, ta2, and se3) are still not appropriate to the participants' context so that future research can modify the four items according to the participants' context. second, this research does not contain convergent validity, which is evidence-based on relationships with other variables, namely the relationship between instruments and other theoretically related constructs (foster & cone, 1995; groth-marnat, 2009) such as the social support scale (lestari et al., 2023), grief complicated (ghesquiere et al., 2017), social network integration, perceived stress, anxiety, depression, and life engagement (merz et al., 2014). third, the imbalance in the number of male and female participants calls for future research to address this issue. conclusion the adaptation of the isel-16 for indonesian students successfully demonstrates that the instrument measures students' perceptions of social support across four dimensions: appraisal (ap), tangible assets (ta), belonging (be), and self-esteem (se). confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) confirms that these dimensions exhibit good construct validity with adequate factor loadings and fit parameters. reliability analysis, including cronbach's alpha and construct reliability (cr), supports the instrument's robustness, with values indicating satisfactory reliability. theoretical implications of this adaptation include enhancing the psychometric evidence for the isel-16 and refining the understanding of social support dimensions within the indonesian context. practically, the adapted isel-16 provides valuable insights for education, psychology, and higher education policy, facilitating the development of targeted interventions and support programs tailored to students' needs. additionally, the indonesian isel-16 is a recommended instrument for research in humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 113 rahmanto (the psychometric properties of interpersonal support evaluation list-short form (isel-16) on college students) conditions where costs and time are limited. future research should explore convergent validity to further validate the indonesian isel-16 and consider modifications to better align with the participants' context. expanding research to include diverse and broader samples beyond students is also recommended to strengthen the instrument's applicability and generalizability. acknowledgment the author would like to thank the participants in this research declarations author contribution. swr, as the single author, established the research topic, collected data, analyzed data samples, produced the report, and editing. funding statement. this research used independent funding. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. if readers need information regarding the isel-16 instrument, they can contact the researcher via email. references adyani, l., suzanna, e., safuwan, & muryali. 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(1988). the multidimensional scale of perceived social support. journal of personality assessment, 52(1), 30–41. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa52012 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 22 (2), august 2025, 115-126 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1327 work readiness among vocational high school students: learning agility and perceived social support zakira adila jari, pratista arya satwika department of psychology, universitas sebelas maret, surakarta, indonesia corresponding author: pratista@staff.uns.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction vocational high school (smk) in its capacity as one of the components of the national education system has a priority in developing students' abilities. these abilities, such as being able to work in certain fields through the provision of relevant provisions and specific skills (andrianus, 2020), make smk the right institutions to prepare individuals who are ready to enter the world of work. this is because the learning process in smk involves increasing knowledge, skills, attitudes, and competencies that are useful for students to maintain competitiveness among the many individuals seeking employment. however, graduates from smks are not fully able to keep up with the demands of the world of work (santika et al., 2023). data obtained from the central bureau of statistics (bps) shows that the open unemployment rate (tpt) for smk graduates has consistently been the highest in indonesia compared to other education levels in the last three years. although there is a article info abstract article history received: 6 march 2025 revised: 6 august 2025 accepted: 12 august 2025 in indonesia, the highest percentage of the open unemployment rate (tpt) comes from graduates of vocational high schools (smk), reaching 9.01%. one of the main causes is the lack of work readiness. to address this issue, exploring factors that can contribute to improving students' readiness to enter the workforce is crucial. therefore, this study investigated the role of learning agility and perceived social support in work readiness among vocational high school students. the participants were 93 grade xi students majoring in office management of vocational high school in surakarta selected using simple random sampling technique. the scales used were the work readiness scale (α = 0.95), the learning agility scale (α = 0.92), and the multidimensional scale of perceived social support (α = 0.92). data were analysed using the multiple regression model. the results showed that learning agility can partially predict students' work readiness, but perceived social support does not significantly predict students' work readiness. meanwhile, combined, learning agility and perceived social support contribute 33.7% to work readiness. these findings suggest a need for schools to design learning programs that not only focus on technical skills but also train students to become resilient, flexible, and adaptive learners. keywords learning agility perceived social support vocational high school students work readiness mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1327 mailto:pratista@staff.uns.ac.id https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 116 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) zakira adila jali et.al (work readiness among vocational high school students: learning agility and.. ) downward trend in the tpt for smk graduates from 9.42% in august 2022 to 9.01% in august 2024, and the latest data as of february 2025 is recorded at 8%, smk graduates still account for the highest unemployment rate. in fact, the smk education system is supposed to prepare students through the provision of skills and experience related to the field of work that is expected to be entered directly after graduation (istiqamah & jalal, 2020; tentama et al., 2024). having a job should provide social status, allow individuals to socialize, and create a sense of purpose and meaning in life (jabbar & fatima, 2024). these components will play an important role in psychological growth, as well as the improvement of an individual's psychological well-being (jabbar & fatima, 2024). therefore, the high unemployment rate needs to be an important concern because it endangers the mental health of individuals, which includes depression, anxiety, mood disorders, suicidal behavior, and various other psychological disorders (jabbar & fatima, 2024; virgolino et al., 2022). in addition, the impact of unemployment is not only felt by the individual concerned, but also affects the economic stability and welfare of society as a whole (mitra & attiq, 2024). various factors can cause the high unemployment rate among smk graduates, one of which is the lack of work readiness in students (ridwan & dwiyanti, 2024; sudarsono, 2022). employability is a key issue affecting graduate unemployment in developing or developed countries, as employability leads to graduates' abilities and skills that are continuously trained before entering the industrial world (boat et al., 2021; indrawati et al., 2023; prikshat et al., 2020). work readiness impacts the growth of students' career identity (doederlein, 2024), increases their confidence in decision making (makki et al., 2023), and serves as a predictor of performance in the workplace (aryani & widodo, 2020; gyanwali et al., 2023; jiang et al., 2024; rodzalan & jasman, 2022). work readiness is defined as the extent to which individuals are perceived to have attitudes or attributes that make them ready for success in the work environment (caballero & walker, 2010). students are considered to have work readiness if they have abilities that include attitudes, knowledge, and skills in their fields (fitriany et al., 2023). work readiness is needed because it is used to predict individual potential regarding future performance and careers (caballero & walker, 2010). in addition, work readiness is also important for individuals to enter the work environment. this is because industries or organizations need individuals who are competent and have the ability to follow the culture and rhythm of organizational work (qomariyah et al., 2022). work readiness can be influenced by internal and external factors (peersia et al., 2024). several variables can affect students' work readiness, including quality knowledge, interpersonal communication skills, and the ability to process one's personality and make the right decisions (indrawati et al., 2023). in addition, research has also found that work practice or internship experience (azky & mulyana, 2024; ihsan, 2018; istiqamah & jalal, 2020), information individuals have about the field of work (ihsan, 2018), learning agility (qomariyah et al., 2022), self-potential (ihsan, 2018; istiqamah & jalal, 2020), talents and interests (ihsan, 2018), and perceived social support (ma et al., 2024) are able to influence individual work readiness. work readiness is a key outcome of successful career development. social cognitive career theory (scct) is the dominant theoretical framework for guiding career interventions and helping students navigate the career exploration stage. in its theory, scct aims to explain how professional and academic interests are formed, how career choices are implemented, and how career performance outcomes are obtained (zola et al., 2022). in this study, the authors use the scct theoretical framework to explain what determinants are able humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 117 zakira adila jali et.al (work readiness among vocational high school students: learning agility and..) to influence the work readiness of vocational students. in the scct concept, internal factors and external factors can influence how students have work readiness. how students have the readiness to respond to, and apply the understanding and knowledge they have (indirasari & mulyana, 2024) can be shaped by their willingness and ability to learn from experience and then apply that learning to perform successfully in new situations and conditions (lombardo & eichinger, 2000). this willingness is often referred to as learning agility. previous studies conducted by qomariyah et al. (2022) showed that learning agility training is effective in improving work readiness in individuals who have graduated from vocational high schools (smk) and undergraduate. furthermore, qomariyah et al. (2022) explained that learning agility is an ability that can predict individual potential, such as how they can adjust quickly, communicate, and make difficult decisions. people who have learning agility not only have competencies related to thinking skills, but also more broadly related to the ability to think, adapt, and act in unstable situations that are useful in work readiness. the existence of learning agility will also make individuals have a high sense of curiosity and have a good tolerance for ambiguity, and good vision and innovation (gravett & caldwell, 2018). in addition to internal factors such as learning agility, external factors such as social support are also factors that influence individual work readiness (azky & mulyana, 2024; tentama & riskiyana, 2020). social support refers to an individual's belief about the existence of support from family, friends, and other people who are important in their life (wu et al., 2022). social support generally includes two components, namely perceived social support and received social support. perceived social support reflects the availability and adequacy of social relationships that individuals perceive and refers to perceptions and appraisals of support that come from family, friends, and significant others (wu et al., 2022). the focus of this study is on perceived social support because the perceived availability of social support is more important than the actual support individuals receive (setiasih & jayanti, 2018). this is because if support information is not considered or perceived as a source of support, then the information will not be used by individuals. previous research has found that perceived social support has a positive effect on career adaptability (fachri et al., 2022; rençber & paşaoğlu baş, 2023), where career adaptability can later have a significant effect on job readiness (lakshmi & elmartha, 2022). a direct correlation between social support to students' work readiness was also identified (tentama & riskiyana, 2020). in addition, social support in this case functions as a social network that can provide information and services related to individual career development needs and facilitate individuals during the job search process, as well as psychological resources needed in overcoming stress and perceptions of the possibility of individuals not getting a job (tentama & riskiyana, 2020). furthermore, earlier studies by ma et al. (2024) also found a positive and significant correlation between perceived social support and work readiness. this study aims to examine the role of learning agility and perceived social support on work readiness in vocational students. previous research has focused more on learning agility interventions in improving students' work readiness (qomariyah et al., 2022), but not specifically on vocational high school students, as in this study. in addition, previous research also focused more on social support and self-regulation (tentama & riskiyana, 2020) not on learning agility as one of the abilities that students must have to adapt to changes that occur, especially in the context of work that is currently needed. investigating learning agility and perceived social support simultaneously will provide a more comprehensive picture of the factors that influence vocational students' work readiness. the hypotheses proposed in this study are (1) there is a role of learning agility on vocational high school students' work readiness, (2) there is a role of perceived social support on vocational 118 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) zakira adila jali et.al (work readiness among vocational high school students: learning agility and.. ) high school students' work readiness, and (3) there is a role of learning agility and perceived social support on vocational high school students' work readiness. method research design the research design of this study is a quantitative method with a correlational design. participants the population of this study was class xi students majoring in office management at one of the vocational high schools in surakarta, totaling 105 students. the research sample was selected using a simple random sampling technique, which ensures that each member of the population has the same opportunity to be selected. data were collected from a sample of 93 students. all participants were given a consent form to express their willingness to participate in this study. the majority of participants in this study were female, with ages varying between 15 and 17 years. the distribution of participants is shown in table 1. table 1 the distribution of study participants category frequency percentage gender male 5 5.38% female 88 94.62% age 15 years old 2 2.15% 16 years old 62 66.67% 17 years old 29 31.18% note. n=93. instruments work readiness was measured using the work readiness scale developed by nasution (2021), which originally consisted of 35 items; however, after the tryout process conducted to ensure reliability and validity, 5 items turned out to be invalid. the instrument is finally 30 items and is based on brady (2010) work readiness theory consisting of 6 aspects, which include responsibility (e.g., “i complete the task according to the time specified”), flexibility (e.g., “i can adjust to schedule changes that occur at any time”), skills (e.g., “i have skills that will be needed in the world of workforce”), communication (e.g., “i do not hesitate to ask others for help when experiencing difficulties”), self-view (e.g., “i can be relied upon to do a task well”), and health & safety (e.g., “i feel that i am in good enough health to work”). the level of students’ work readiness is considered high when the total score obtained is high, and vice versa. the work readiness scale for the current study has a cronbach’s alpha value of 0.95 and an item discrimination index ranging from 0.37 to 0.81. learning agility was assessed using the learning agility scale, originally developed by gravett and caldwell (2018) and translated into indonesian by wardhani et al. (2022). the instrument comprises 18 items based on 4 dimensions, including people agility (e.g., “i enjoy working with others to solve problems”), results agility (e.g., “i can find ways to get the job done even when not given clear directions”), mental agility (e.g., “i am optimistic that i can learn new information”), and change agility (e.g., “i try to seek feedback on my skills and abilities”). the total score reflects the level of students’ learning agility. the humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 119 zakira adila jali et.al (work readiness among vocational high school students: learning agility and..) learning agility scale for the current study has a cronbach’s alpha value of 0.92 and an item discrimination index ranging from 0.36 to 0.73. perceived social support was measured using the multidimensional scale of perceived social support (mspss), originally developed by zimet et al. (1988), then translated into indonesian by sulistiani et al. (2022). this instrument consists of 12 items, assessing students’ perceived social support from 3 dimensions, including family (e.g., “i got the emotional help and support i needed from my family”), friends (e.g., “i can talk about my problems with my friends”), and significant other (e.g., “i have a special person who is a real source of comfort for me”). the mspss scale can assess these three sources of social support as a unidimensional construct with an excellent category value (sulistiani et al., 2022). the multidimensional scale of perceived social support used in the current study has a cronbach’s alpha value of 0.92 and an item discrimination index ranging from 0.37 to 0.85. data analysis the collected data were analysed using multiple regression analysis techniques with the spss software. before conducting hypothesis testing, the assumptions for normality and linearity were tested. the data were found to be normally distributed (p>0.05), and the results indicated linearity between learning agility and work readiness, as well as between perceived social support and work readiness (p < 0.05). the multicollinearity test was assessed through vif (variance inflation factor) and tolerance value, and no multicollinearity was found (vif = 1.21; tolerance = 0.83). the heteroscedasticity test using the glejser test also indicates the absence of heteroscedasticity in the regression model (p > 0.05). lastly, an autocorrelation test is conducted through the durbin-watson method, showing the absence of autocorrelation in the data. results the results of hypothesis testing revealed that learning agility was significantly predicted vocational high school students' work readiness (t = 5.49; p < 0.05), so the first hypothesis is accepted. however, social support perceived by vocational high school students did not predict work readiness (t = 1.31; p > 0.05), so the second hypothesis is rejected. see table 2. when analysed together, learning agility and perceived social support can predict work readiness among vocational high school students (f = 22.88; p < 0.05), so the third hypothesis is accepted. see table 2. table 2 multiple regression analysis results model r r2 adjusted r2 f sig. regression 0.58 0.34 0.32 22.88 0.00 note. the dependent variable is work readiness the results showed the role of learning agility and perceived social support in predicting work readiness among vocational high school students. learning agility and perceived social support simultaneously explained 33.7% of the variance in work readiness (r2 = 0.34), while the remaining 66.3% could be attributed to other factors not included in this study. see table 3. 120 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) zakira adila jali et.al (work readiness among vocational high school students: learning agility and.. ) table 3 partial test results b std. error beta t sig. (constant) 65.35 5.20 12.57 0.00 learning agility 0.35 0.06 0.52 5.49 0.00 perceived social support 0.18 0.14 0.12 1.31 0.19 discussion the research findings show that the first hypothesis is accepted. learning agility positively predicts vocational students' work readiness. this result means that if there is an increase in student learning agility, then student work readiness also increases. this result is aligned with the research findings by qomariyah et al. (2022) that work readiness tends to increase in participants who take part in learning agility training. the increase in work readiness occurs because learning agility focuses on increasing curiosity, flexibility, and problemsolving skills that produce new experiences and become a source of learning. the existence of learning agility will make it easier for individuals to be more adaptive to changes that occur, especially those experienced by students during the transition from school to the world of work. individuals with learning agility are also described as having openness, willingness to learn, and flexibility (gravett & caldwell, 2018). these characteristics are part of the indicators that show work readiness, especially in the aspects of skills and flexibility. however, the analysis also showed that social support perceived by vocational students was not able to significantly predict vocational students' work readiness. thus, this result contradicts previous research findings from sari (2017) as well as indrayana and kumaidi (2021) as both found that social support and work readiness in vocational high school students are positively and significantly correlated. the absence of a significant correlation between perceived social support and work readiness also indicates that the findings of this study are not in line with the results previously obtained by ma et al. (2024). this insignificant result can be caused by several things. first, social support that is present and received by students can certainly be a supporting resource in building confidence to face future career demands. however, perceived social support emphasizes the subjective perceptions of individuals who receive social support, and these perceptions can be influenced by individual differences (meuleman et al., 2024). not all individuals perceive that social support is available, and even when it is, there are individual differences in the extent to which they choose to utilize it. this is reflected in the decisions of some individuals who prefer independence in dealing with problems or making decisions, while others prefer to seek support from others (wilson et al., 2021). in addition, the social support measurement tool used in this study is still general and has not specifically measured social support in the context of a career. this may have influenced the results of the analysis, as generalized social support may not necessarily be relevant or have a direct impact on aspects of work readiness. a person may feel supported in their social or family life, but this may not necessarily relate to the support needed in planning, preparing, or facing the world of work. thus, the mismatch between the social support measured and the context of work readiness analyzed could be one of the causes of not finding a significant relationship between the two. social support obtained in certain situations can also be interpreted as a burden and add to individual worries, rather than playing a role in increasing work readiness (mitra & attiq, 2024). ultimately, the effectiveness of social support provided to help improve work readiness will be determined by students' subjective perceptions of the support available. in addition, perceived social support does not directly have a significant relationship with work humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 121 zakira adila jali et.al (work readiness among vocational high school students: learning agility and..) readiness, but may be able to relate to work readiness when mediated by other factors. previous research conducted by mitra and attiq (2024) found that although there was no significant relationship between social support and work readiness, when the relationship between the two variables was mediated by self-efficacy, there was a positive relationship. through the availability of emotional and practical resources, social support helps individuals to build self-confidence, which in turn facilitates goal achievement, including improving work readiness (mitra & attiq, 2024). furthermore, it was found that learning agility and perceived social support significantly predicted job readiness among vocational high school students. although perceived social support was not able to make a significant contribution separately, its presence in the model still helped explain some of the variation in vocational school students' work readiness, especially when joined with learning agility. the level of work readiness demonstrated by vocational high school students can be significantly predicted based on the level of learning agility and perceived social support. learning agility and perceived social support explained 33.7% of work readiness. this result contributes to work readiness research in the context of vocational high school students in indonesia, as no previous research has examined these three variables simultaneously. the significant results indicate that students who have the willingness and ability to learn from experience and apply it to new situations and are supported by the perceived availability of relevant social support, both from friends, family, and significant others, will be more prepared to face the world of work. learning agility allows individuals to learn quickly and be flexible in changing thoughts and behaviors as needed (lee & song, 2022), which can contribute to individual readiness in facing a dynamic work environment. at the same time, students who perceive specific social support related to relevant knowledge and skills will find it easier to do career planning and make preparations to enter the world of work (tentama & riskiyana, 2020). the results of this study provide a number of practical implications that can be used by schools, counseling guidance teachers, and vocational education policy makers. first, learning agility was found to contribute significantly to work readiness, so schools need to start designing learning development programs that not only focus on technical skills but also train students to become resilient, flexible, and adaptive learners. for example, using a curriculum that can integrate experiential learning or case study approaches. guidance teachers or homeroom teachers can also provide soft skills training that emphasizes aspects such as the ability to learn from failure, openness to feedback, and speed of adapting to new demands. secondly, although social support did not show a significant relationship in this study, social support likely needs to be more specifically provided in the context of students' careers. therefore, schools and families can be empowered to provide more contextual and career-oriented support, such as providing information related to the world of work or emotional support in facing the transition from school to the world of work. third, the contribution of the two variables, which only amounted to 33.7% makes schools also need to consider other factors in improving students' work readiness. for example, providing an understanding of the job market, opportunities for internships, or direct mentoring from field practitioners in order to build a more holistic work readiness. this study has several limitations that need to be considered in interpreting the results and their implications. first, the scope of the study, which was limited to only grade xi students majoring in office management at one of the vocational high schools in surakarta, limits the generalizability of the results. the findings may not reflect the condition of students from other majors or regions that have different characteristics, curricula, and learning environments. therefore, future research is expected to involve more diverse samples from various majors, grade levels, and vocational schools in various regions so that the results are more representative. 122 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) zakira adila jali et.al (work readiness among vocational high school students: learning agility and.. ) second, this study only tested two predictors of work readiness, namely learning agility and perceived social support. together, the two variables only explain 33.7% of the variance in work readiness. this shows that there is still 66.3% other variance influenced by other factors that have not been revealed, such as practical or internship experience, information about the work field, and interpersonal communication skills (azky & mulyana, 2024; ihsan, 2018; indrawati et al., 2023; istiqamah & jalal, 2020). future research needs to consider more psychosocial and contextual factors that have the potential to contribute significantly to work readiness. third, the definition and scope of individuals included in the category of significant others in the perceived social support scale are not explicitly described. the meaning of who is considered as a source of support (for example, parents, teachers, peers, or other figures) can vary between individuals and affect their perceptions of the availability of support (thoits, 2011). this difference in interpretation could potentially affect the results of the study, so future research is expected to explicitly define the category of significant others in the measuring instrument or provide space for respondents to self-identify the source of support that is most meaningful to them. finally, there is an imbalance in the composition of respondents based on gender, where there are more women than men. this imbalance can affect the results of the analysis because there are gender differences in the way individuals build work readiness and receive and utilize social support (astuti et al., 2025; ismail et al., 2020). future research should consider a more balanced gender distribution or test gender differences exploratively to see if there are specific patterns based on gender. conclusion the findings of this study indicate that learning agility and perceived social support simultaneously influence work readiness among vocational high school students. however, when perceived social support was analyzed separately, the results were not significant in influencing students' work readiness. meanwhile, learning agility was able to significantly predict students' work readiness separately. acknowledgment the authors would like to thank all the participants who participated in this study. declarations author contribution. all authors have contributed equally to this paper. all authors have read and approved the final manuscript. funding statement. no funding support was received. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references andrianus, i. j. 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(2022). the concept of social cognitive career theory. jurnal riset tindakan indonesia, 7(1), 24–28. https://doi.org/10.29210/30031454000 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 22 (1), february 2025, 87-101 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas 10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.992 prophetic leadership and employee well-being: gratitude as a mediator sus budiharto*, yulizta putri pratiwi faculty of psychology and socio-cultural sciences, universitas islam indonesia, yogyakarta, indonesia corresponding author: budiharto@uii.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction employee well-being within an organization is critical due to its positive impact on employee performance. research findings indicate that employee well-being positively influences work engagement (astuti & dhania, 2022;garg & singh, 2019; koon & ho, 2021), organizational commitment (ariva et al., 2023; kolakowski et al., 2020; pertiwi et al., 2023), organizational citizenship behavior (alzgool et al., 2023;ansong et al., 2024; pelealu, 2022; rossouw & rothmann, 2020), and employee performance (abdullah et al., 2021; johari et al., 2019; rafifah et al., 2022; sofyanty & setiawan, 2020; yan et al., 2020). additionally, employee well-being negatively impacts absenteeism (coelho et al., 2023; medina-garrido et al., 2020), burnout (coelho et al., 2023; gonzález-rico et al., 2022), social harm of work (chillakuri & vanka, 2021), and turnover intentions (khairunisa & muafi, 2022; nae & choi, 2022; samad et al., 2022). studies on employee well-being have been reported in several constructs, including employee well-being, workplace well-being, employee subjective well-being, and employee psychological well-being (budiharto & athirah, 2024). in this study, employee well-being refers to the conceptualization by zheng et al., (2015), who define it as an employee’s positive perception of their life, encompassing three aspects: workplace wellbeing, psychological well-being, and life well-being. workplace well-being encompasses employees' perceptions of their work, including factors such as the work environment, article info abst ract article history received august 11, 2024 revised january 6, 2025 accepted january 8, 2025 this study investigates the role of gratitude as a mediator in the relationship between prophetic leadership and employee well-being. the participants comprised 146 employees (118 males; 28 females) from a sharia financial institution in yogyakarta. measurement instruments included the prophetic leadership scale, the islamic gratitude scale (igs-10), and the employee well-being scale (ewbs). mediation analyses were employed for data examination. results indicated that gratitude fully mediates prophetic leadership and employee well-being (indirect estimate = 0.12; p<0.01). employees who perceive their leaders as embodying prophetic qualities tend to experience higher levels of gratitude, enhancing their well-being within the organization. these findings have significant practical implications, suggesting that organizations can foster employee well-being by promoting gratitude and improving their leaders’ prophetic leadership capacities. keywords employee well-being gratitude islamic gratitude prophetic leadership mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.992 mailto:budiharto@uii.ac.id https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 88 budiharto & pratiwi (prophetic leadership and employee well-being: gratitude as a mediator) workload, management practices, and relationships with colleagues. psychological wellbeing refers to employees' perceptions of their mental state, encompassing self-acceptance, personal growth, purpose in life, and positive relationships with others. this perception reflects employees’ ability to grow psychologically, achieve personal goals, and maintain confidence in life and work. life well-being pertains to employees' overall perception of their lives, including their relationships with family, living conditions, and personal achievements, all of which contribute to their well-being as members of their organization(zheng et al., 2015). previous studies have shown that both internal and external factors influence employee well-being. the internal factors affecting employee well-being include gratitude (badri et al., 2022; firdiansyah et al., 2023; zhao et al., 2023), resilience (calvo et al., 2022; siswanto & mangundjaya, 2024;wut et al., 2022), self-efficacy (dinarwati & purba, 2023;straus et al., 2023; yan et al., 2020), self-esteem (dose et al., 2023; vanisri & chandrapadhy, 2023; zhang et al., 2021), and spirituality (fitria & suryani, 2023; hassan et al., 2022; salem et al., 2023). the external factors influencing employee well-being include job satisfaction (abdullah et al., 2021; hayat & afshari, 2022), leadership (bashir & hussain, 2023; koon & ho, 2021; satryo et al., 2023), organizational justice (ali et al., 2023; fransiska et al., 2023;septyarini & pratiwi, 2020), organizational support (hong et al., 2024;mihalache & mihalache, 2022; sefnedi et al., 2023), work-life balance (kurnia & widigdo, 2021; nabawanuka & ekmekcioglu, 2022; stankevičienė et al., 2021; wong et al., 2021), work feedback (johari et al., 2019;tian et al., 2021), workplace bullying (farley et al., 2023;mehmood et al., 2024; hayat & afshari, 2021), work-related conflict (huo & jiang, 2023; kuriakose et al., 2020; putri & etikariena, 2020), and work stress (desiana et al., 2024; schmidt et al., 2019; sindu bharathi & sujatha, 2024). according to the conceptual framework developed by mazzetti et al. (2023), employee’s well-being can be influenced by several variables, including 1) personal resources, such as self-efficacy, optimism, resilience, and proactivity; 2) development resources, such as feedback and development opportunities for employees; 3) work resources, such as job control, task variety, and integration of employee resources; 4) social resources include coworker support, supervisor support, work teams, role clarity, and integration of social resources; 5) the type of leadership exhibited by the employee’s supervisor. gratitude is one of the internal factors that impact employee well-being. previous studies have reported that employee gratitude positively influences well-being (badri et al., 2022; firdiansyah et al., 2023; utomo & widyastuti, 2023; zhao et al., 2023). badri et al., (2022) conducted a study on 272 millennial employees working in the service industry in malaysia, finding that gratitude and workplace friendships enhance the well-being of millennial employees. firdiansyah et al., (2023) researched 68 production employees at a company in east java, finding that gratitude is a positive predictor of employee well-being. utomo and widyastuti (2023) reported a study involving 118 employees, which found a significant positive relationship between gratitude and employee well-being. zhao et al., (2023) reported a study on 300 employees of a biomedical company in northeast china, finding that dispositional gratitude was positively related to employee well-being, mediated by leader-member exchange and coworker exchange. gratitude, in this context, originated from the concept of syukur, which is the way humans express appreciation for allah’s blessings or contentment with the gifts from allah (rusdi, 2016). it serves as a foundation for virtuous behavior through words and actions (rusdi et al., 2021). therefore, in this study, gratitude is understood as an employee’s positive attitude in expressing allah’s blessings, which underlies virtuous behavior through words and deeds. according to rusdi et al., (2021), there are two main aspects of employee humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 89 budiharto & pratiwi (prophetic leadership and employee well-being: gratitude as a mediator) gratitude, firstly, intrinsic gratitude, which arises from the employee’s understanding that all blessings and goodness received come from allah. employees recognize that every gift they receive is a blessing from allah. intrinsic gratitude involves a sense of appreciation, pleasure, and satisfaction that employees feel through their knowledge and heart, accepting and enjoying the blessings given by allah. secondly, extrinsic gratitude, which is expressed verbally by acknowledging the blessings provided by allah through the use of phrases such as “alhamdullillah” and by living a life that adheres to allah’s commands and avoids his prohibitions. extrinsic gratitude is expressed through words and actions, not only by expressing thanks to allah and offering gratitude to others but also by engaging in both ritual and social acts of worship as expressions of that gratitude (rusdi et al., 2021). leadership is one of the external factors that influence employee well-being(bashir & hussain, 2023;septyarini & pratiwi, 2020). types of leadership reported to have an impact on employee well-being include authentic leadership (koon & ho, 2021), ethical leadership (sarwar et al., 2020), leader-member exchange (zhao et al., 2023), servant leadership (syahda & handoyo, 2022), and transformational leadership (samad et al., 2022; firdiansyah et al., 2023; satryo et al., 2023). research on the role of prophetic leadership in employee well-being remains limited. in this study, prophetic leadership refers to employees' perception of their supervisors as leaders who sincerely control themselves and influence others to achieve goals by emulating the prophets' mindset, attitudes, and behaviors, as exemplified by the prophet muhammad (pbuh). prophetic leadership is a concept within the study of authentic leadership from the perspective of islamic psychology, particularly in the context of industrial and organizational psychology, which emphasizes that every individual is a leader who will be held accountable for their leadership (budiharto, 2021). prophetic leadership comprises four interrelated aspects: 1) sidik: employees perceive their leader as honest with allah, themselves, and the universe, adhering to their conscience and truth in understanding problems and making decisions; 2) amanah: employees perceive their leaders as loyal to allah, his messenger, and their conscience, acting justly and thus being trustworthy; 3) tablig: employees perceive their leader as open to ideas and feedback from others and communicating assertively and empathetically; 4) fatanah: employees perceive their leader as intelligent due to their piety towards allah, making them a part of the solution to problems (a problem solver) rather than a part of the problem (a troublemaker) (budiharto, 2021). employees’ perceptions of their supervisor’s prophetic leadership had been reported to have positive role on employee well-being, as evidenced by sari and shohib (2023) involving hospital managers and staff. leaders perceived by employees as practicing prophetic leadership create an inner experience that makes employees feel comfortable and at ease, allowing them to focus better on their tasks to achieve targets and goals. problems are handled wisely, leading to increased job satisfaction and employee well-being. employees’ perceptions of their supervisor’s leadership positively impact their gratitude (baykal et al., 2018; xia et al., 2024; zheng & wang, 2024). a study by baykal et al., (2018) involving 527 employees in marmara, turkey, found that employees’ perceptions of their supervisor’s leadership had a positive role on empowerment and gratitude, which in turn affected their innovation and performance within the organization. xia et al., (2024) researched 270 small and medium-sized enterprises employees from various provinces in china, finding that the perceptions of supervisors' inclusive leadership could enhance employees' gratitude, increasing their proactive behavior. zheng & wang (2024) researched 678 university students in zhejiang province, china, and found that perceived positive teacher leadership predicted their gratitude, which in turn improved subjective well-being and academic performance. currently, there is no specific research reporting on the role of humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 90 budiharto & pratiwi (prophetic leadership and employee well-being: gratitude as a mediator) prophetic leadership in employee gratitude, making this a necessary area of study. figure 1 presents the theoretical framework of this research. based on the theoretical framework shown in figure 1, the following hypotheses were proposed: (a) h1: prophetic leadership was positively associated with employee gratitude; (b) h2: gratitude was positively associated with employee wellbeing; (c) h3: prophetic leadership was positively associated with employee wellbeing; (d) h4: gratitude mediated the relationship between prophetic leadership and employee wellbeing. figure 1 the theoretical framework of the research method participants the participants in this study were 146 employees (118 males and 28 females; m = 32.9; sd = 8.38) of a baitul maal wat tamwil (bmt) organization headquartered in the special region of yogyakarta. bmt is a microfinance institution functioning as a vital financial intermediary for underserved communities, particularly in indonesia, that provides accessible financial services to economically disadvantaged groups, thereby fostering economic development and improving social welfare. instruments the study employed a quantitative research design using a cross-sectional survey method. psychological scale were distributed to participants to collect data. employee wellbeing conceptually, employee well-being in this study referred to the framework proposed by zheng et al., (2015), which included three aspects: workplace well-being (e.g.,” i am satisfied with my work responsibilities”), life well-being (e.g.,” i feel satisfied with my life”), and psychological well-being (e.g., “i feel i have grown as a person”). operationally, employee well-being was measured by the scores obtained from the employee well-being scale (ewbs), which had been adapted into indonesian by rahmi et al., (2021). high scores indicated greater employee well-being, and lower scores indicated lesser well-being. the indonesian version of the ewbs consisted of 18 items with response options ranging from “strongly disagree” (1) to “strongly agree” (7), with a reliability coefficient (cronbach’s alpha) of 0.94. in this study, the ewbs has cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficient of 0.93. gratitude gratitude was conceptually defined as the employees’ understanding and acceptance of allah’s blessings, encompassing two aspects: intrinsic (e.g., “i can be satisfied with a little humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 91 budiharto & pratiwi (prophetic leadership and employee well-being: gratitude as a mediator) pleasure”) and extrinsic gratitude (e.g., “i pray for others who have given me benefits and convenience”). operationally, gratitude was measured using the islamic gratitude scale (igs-10) developed by rusdi et al., (2021). higher scores indicated greater levels of gratitude among employees, while lower scores indicated less gratitude. the igs-10 consisted of 10 items with response options ranging from “strongly disagree” (1) to “strongly agree” (6), with a reliability coefficient (cronbach’s alpha) of 0.86. in this study, the igs10 has a cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient of 0.87. prophetic leadership prophetic leadership was conceptually defined as the employees’ perceptions of their supervisors’ ability to control themselves and influence others sincerely to achieve organizational goals by emulating the prophets' mindset, attitudes, and behaviors (budiharto, 2021). operationally, prophetic leadership was measured by participants’ responses to a modified version of the prophetic leadership scale (pls), originally developed by budiharto and himam (2006). higher scores indicated stronger prophetic leadership, and lower scores indicated weaker leadership. the pls consisted of four aspects: sidik (conscience-centered), amanah (trustworthy and highly committed), tablig (communication skills), and fatanah (problem solver) which included 24 items (e.g., “my leader is honest in his work”). the response options range from “never” (0) to “always” (6), with a reliability coefficient (cronbach’s alpha) of 0.96. in this study, the prophetic leadership scale has a cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient also 0.96. procedures this study received ethical approval from the research ethics committee of the faculty of psychology and socio-cultural sciences at universitas islam indonesia with number 474/dek/70/durt/ii/2024. data was collected online, with participants invited to join through the zoom platform. participants were provided with an explanation of the research objectives, the potential benefits of the research for both the participants and the organization, and the nature of their involvement in the study. participants were given the option to either consent to or decline participation. those who agreed to participate proceeded to complete the research scales, while those who declined could choose whether to complete the scales. data analysis was conducted only on the responses of participants who consented to participate in this study. data analysis the statistical analysis technique used in this study was mediation analysis and regression analysis by jamovi. version 2.3 (the jamovi project, 2022). the basis of mediation analysis is regression analysis, so the normality test used is the residual data of each path rather than the variables (li et al., 2023). based on the kolmogorov-smirnov standard, on path a (prophetic leadership & gratitude: p = 0.28), path b (gratitude & employee well-being: p = 0.87), and path c (prophetic leadership & employee well-being: p = 0.39), the data are normally distributed. results as shown in table 1, the means, standard deviations, and correlations between variables revealed that the correlation coefficients between prophetic leadership (sidik, amanah, tablig, and fatanah), gratitude (extrinsic and intrinsic), and employee well-being (life wellhumanitas: indonesian psychological journal 92 budiharto & pratiwi (prophetic leadership and employee well-being: gratitude as a mediator) being, workplace well-being, and psychological well-being) were significant. however, the correlation between gratitude and employee well-being was found to be stronger than the correlation between prophetic leadership and employee well-being. there were no significant correlations between prophetic leadership (sidik, amanah, tablig, and fatanah) and life well-being. table 1 means, standard deviations, and correlations between variables mean sd ewb lwb wwb pwb gratitude extrinsic intrinsic pl sidik amanah tabling fatanah ewb 5.64 0.69 (0.93) lwb 5.51 0.86 0.91 *** (0.86) wwb 5.71 0.77 0.92 *** 0.74 *** (0.88) pwb 5.71 0.67 0.88 *** 0.68 *** 0.75 *** (0.82) gratitude 5.39 0.45 0.56 *** 0.53 *** 0.44 *** 0.56 *** (0.87) extrinsic 5.52 0.45 0.46 *** 0.37 *** 0.38 *** 0.51 *** 0.93 *** (0.88) intrinsic 5.08 0.66 0.55 *** 0.61 *** 0.41 *** 0.47 *** 0.81 *** 0.53 *** (0.77) pl 5.05 0.85 0.21 * 0.13 0.26 ** 0.19 * 0.27 *** 0.26 ** 0.22 ** (0.96) sidik 5.18 0.84 0.20 * 0.11 0.24 ** 0.21 * 0.29 *** 0.29 *** 0.19 * 0.89 *** (0.82) amanah 5.18 0.91 0.19 * 0.11 0.26 ** 0.16 0.22 ** 0.22 ** 0.16 0.937 *** 0.87 *** (0.86) tablig 4.98 0.99 0.21 * 0.15 0.26 ** 0.17 * 0.27 *** 0.25 ** 0.22 ** 0.89 *** 0.69 *** 0.76 *** (0.87) fatanah 4.87 0.98 0.17 * 0.10 0.20 * 0.15 0.22 ** 0.18 * 0.22 ** 0.93 *** 0.76 *** 0.80 *** 0.81 *** (0.85) note. * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001, ewb: employee well-being, lwb: life well-being, wwb: workplace well-being, pwb: psychological well-being, pl: prophetic leadership, (…) : cronbach’s alpha as shown in table 2: (a) prophetic leadership positively influences employee gratitude (estimate = 0.14; p < 0.001; h1 is supported); (b). gratitude positively influences employee well-being (estimate = 0.84; p<0.001; h2 is supported); and (c) prophetic leadership does not have a significant direct impact on employee well-being (estimate = 0.05; p = 0.382; h3 is rejected). these findings indicate that employees’ positive perceptions of their supervisor’s prophetic leadership significantly enhance their gratitude. the more positive perception of prophetic leadership, the more likely it is to predict an increase in gratitude. additionally, gratitude positively enhances employee well-being; the more grateful employees feel, the greater their well-being. conversely, lower levels of gratitude are associated with decreased well-being. this study also indicates that employees’ perceptions of their supervisor’s prophetic leadership do not directly influence their well-being. in other words, employee well-being is not determined by their perception of prophetic leadership alone but is mediated by gratitude. table 2 path estimates label estimate se z p prophetic leadership gratitude a 0.14 0.04 3.41 < 0.001 gratitude employee well-being b 0.84 0.11 7.66 < 0.001 prophetic leadership employee well-being c 0.05 0.06 0.87 0.38 table 3 further reveals that gratitude acts as a mediator in the relationship between prophetic leadership and employee well-being (indirect estimate = 0.12; p<0.001), confirming hypothesis 4. the mediating role of gratitude is a full mediator, meaning that employees who have a positive perception of their supervisor’s prophetic leadership feel humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 93 budiharto & pratiwi (prophetic leadership and employee well-being: gratitude as a mediator) more grateful, and this gratitude positively contributes to their well-being as members of the organization. table 3 mediation analysis 95% confidence interval effect label estimate se lower upper z p % mediation indirect a x b 0.12 0.04 0.04 0.19 3.12 0.00 70.4 direct c 0.05 0.06 0.06 0.16 0.88 0.38 29.6 total c + a x b 0.17 0.07 0.04 0.30 2.59 0.01 100. 0 further analysis, as shown in table 4, reveals that among the four aspects of prophetic leadership, only the aspect of sidik (conscience-centered) predicts gratitude (estimate = 0.22; t = 2.39; p<0.05). this implies that employees’ perceptions of their supervisors' honesty positively contribute to their level of islamic gratitude. table 4 model coefficients gratitude predictor estimate se t p intercept 4.53 0.23 19.83 < 0.001 sidik 0.22 0.09 2.39 0.02 amanah -0.13 0.09 -1.37 0.17 tablig 0.12 0.07 1.89 0.06 fatanah -0.04 0.07 -0.59 0.56 as indicated in table 5, both intrinsic (estimate = 0.45; t = 5.42; p<0.001) and extrinsic aspects (estimate = 0.35; t = 2.83; p<0.01) of gratitude significantly predict employee wellbeing. this indicates that employees who feel more intrinsically and extrinsically grateful contribute positively to enhancing their well-being. table 5 model coefficients – employee well-being predictor estimate se t p intercept 1.39 0.59 2.37 0.019 extrinsic 0.35 0.12 2.83 0.005 intrinsic 0.45 0.08 5.42 < 0.001 discussion the findings show that prophetic leadership can be a positive predictor of employee gratitude. employees who have a positive perception of their supervisor's prophetic leadership feel more grateful. this finding strengthens the research conducted by baykal et al., (2018) in turkey, and xia et al., (2024) in china which found that employees' perceptions of their superiors' leadership had a positive effect on increasing their sense of gratitude. it was also found that gratitude plays a positive role in employee well-being. this finding aligns with the research by badri et al. (2022) in malaysia, firdiansyah et al. (2023), utomo and widyastuti (2023) in indonesia, and zhao et al. (2023) in china which reported that gratitude positively influences employee well-being. the study also revealed that prophetic leadership does not significantly impact employee well-being. this result contrasts with the findings of sari and shohib (2023), who reported that perceptions of supervisors’ humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 94 budiharto & pratiwi (prophetic leadership and employee well-being: gratitude as a mediator) prophetic leadership positively influence islamic job satisfaction, a component of employee well-being. the findings also show that gratitude fully mediates the relationship between prophetic leadership and employee well-being. employees with a positive perception of their leader’s prophetic leadership feel more grateful, which increases their well-being as members of the organization. this finding aligns with the research by zheng & wang (2024) which reported that gratitude mediates the relationship between leadership and well-being. this study contributes new insights by positioning gratitude as a full mediator in the relationship between prophetic leadership and employee well-being. the findings reveal that employees’ perceptions of prophetic leadership do not directly enhance their well-being; rather, this effect occurs through increased gratitude. these results diverge from prior research that primarily emphasizes the direct effects of various leadership styles on employee well-being such as authentic leadership (koon & ho, 2021), ethical leadership (sarwar et al., 2020), leader-member exchange (zhao et al., 2023), and transformational leadership (samad et al., 2022). within the context of islamic financial institutions, this study is distinctive as it applies an islamic psychology approach that links the values of prophetic leadership with employee well-being. this approach provides a fresh perspective on managerial practices aligned with islamic values, offering meaningful implications for organizations within this sector. this study addresses the importance of understanding the psychological life of employees in islamic financial institutions through the lens of islamic psychology, particularly regarding employee well-being. in this context, prophetic leadership emerges as a significant topic due to its emphasis on integrity, honesty, and exemplary conduct aligned with islamic values. the influence of prophetic leadership on employee well-being is examined through the mediating role of gratitude. gratitude is seen as crucial in fostering psychological well-being, ultimately enhancing performance (zheng & wang, 2024) and commitment to the organization (zhao et al., 2023). this study underscores that, within islamic financial organizations, a deep understanding of employees' psychological dynamics can support a more harmonious and productive work environment. these findings imply the importance of organizations enhancing employee well-being by fostering both intrinsic and extrinsic gratitude. intrinsic gratitude can be strengthened by encouraging employees to express gratitude for both painful and pleasant experiences, recognizing that all occurrences happen by the will of allah (rusdi et al., 2021). employees tend to find it easier to be grateful for positive or desired outcomes but are less accustomed to expressing gratitude or patience for less pleasant or undesired outcomes. however, both pleasant and unpleasant experiences are ultimately blessings and tests from allah. pleasant experiences are blessings and tests of gratitude, while unpleasant experiences are also blessings and tests of patience (budiharto, 2021). extrinsic gratitude can be enhanced by frequently expressing thanks to allah, engaging in ritual worship with sincerity, and expressing gratitude to others through social acts of kindness, such as helping others and other creatures, as an expression of gratitude to allah (rusdi et al., 2021). the findings also suggest that organizations should focus on enhancing employee gratitude by developing the prophetic leadership capacities of their leaders. this can be achieved by cultivating the qualities of sidik, amanah, tablig, and fatanah. developing sidik involves fostering gratitude for outcomes that align with the leader's expectations and strengthening patience for outcomes that do not. amanah can be enhanced by reinforcing leaders' sincerity in exhibiting positive behavior aligned with work ethics and organizational goals and by promoting repentance for negative behavior that contradicts these standards. the development of tablig can be achieved by encouraging assertive and empathetic humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 95 budiharto & pratiwi (prophetic leadership and employee well-being: gratitude as a mediator) communication among leaders while reducing passive, aggressive, or passive-aggressive communication styles. finally, fatanah can be cultivated by encouraging leaders to practice and become accustomed to being part of the solution (problem solver) rather than part of the problem (troublemaker) (budiharto, 2021). this study has limitations including the homogeneity of the samples that were recruited from a single organisation, which limits the generalizability of the results. future research should evaluate a broader range of samples, including employees from nonfinancial organisations, or government and non-government organisations. secondly, the current sample also contained a disproportionate number of males compared to females, which may potentially lead to bias. future research may confirm the identified relationships using a sample that more accurately reflects the gender distribution in the population. finally, this study was cross-sectional, the direction of causality cannot be confirmed. future research should examine the model over time to investigate reciprocal causation, wherein prophetic leadership fosters gratitude, subsequently enhancing wellbeing, as well as reverse causation, where wellbeing promotes gratitude, which in turn encourages prophetic leadership. future research should investigate conditional variables or moderators, that may affect the strength of the relationships between leadership, gratitude, and well-being. conclusion this study demonstrated that gratitude fully mediates the relationship between prophetic leadership and employee well-being. thus, prophetic leadership positively influences employee gratitude, which in turn, positively affects employee well-being. these findings highlight the importance of organizations enhancing employee well-being by promoting employee gratitude and improving their leaders' prophetic leadership capacities. organizational leaders and management are urged to develop and implement intervention programs emphasizing gratitude and prophetic leadership, given their proven effectiveness in enhancing employee well-being. similarly, employees are encouraged to nurture and strengthen both intrinsic and extrinsic gratitude in their professional and personal lives, as these practices play a vital role in fostering overall well-being. declarations author contribution. the first author contributed to designing the research design, analyzing data, writing, revising, and finalising the manuscript. the second author contributed to preparing the measurement tools and collecting research data. funding statement. we want to express our gratitude to the department of psychology, faculty of psychology and social-cultural sciences, universitas islam indonesia, for providing departmental grant funding for this research. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest which can influence this study. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references abdullah, m. i., huang, d., sarfraz, m., ivascu, l., & riaz, a. 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(2015). employee well‐being in organizations: theoretical model, scale development, and cross‐cultural validation. journal of organizational behavior, 36(5), 621–644. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.1990 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 22 (1), february 2025, 31-44 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas 10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.975 pathways of adolescent intention for mental health help-seeking: insights from the theory of planned behavior nurlaela widyarini, ria wiyatfi linsiya faculty of psychology, universitas muhammadiyah jember, jember, indonesia corresponding author: nurlaela@unmuhjember.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction adolescent mental health has become an increasingly urgent global health issue, driven by various factors such as social changes induced by the pandemic (amran, 2022; cooper & sawaf, 1997), technological advancements (garcía-gil et al., 2022; marciano et al., 2022), and increasingly complex life demands (ortuño-sierra et al., 2021). it encompasses the psychological well-being of individuals aged 10-19, integrating emotional, psychological, and social dimensions that influence their cognition, emotions, and behaviors. according to the world health organization (who), over 700,000 people die by suicide annually, making it the fourth leading cause of death among individuals aged 15-29 years, with 77% of cases occurring in lowand middle-income countries (buli et al., 2024; kim et al., 2020; world health organization, 2023). in indonesia, adolescent mental health issues are similarly pressing. one in three adolescents has exhibited symptoms of mental disorders over the past 12 years, with anxiety being the most prevalent among those aged 10-17 years (wahdi et al., 2023). a national survey by the ministry of women's empowerment and child protection reveals alarming article info abst ract article history received: august 1, 2024 revised: january 3, 2025 accepted: january 12, 2025 adolescent mental health has emerged as a critical global issue influenced by social changes, technological advancements, and complex life demands. this study, conducted in jember, east java, indonesia, aimed to explore psychosocial factors influencing adolescents' mental health help-seeking intention using the theory of planned behavior (tpb). the research comprised two phases. phase 1 included 72 students (mean age = 15.86 years, 87% female) from two junior high schools and three senior high schools. these students were interviewed to investigate their beliefs about mental health helpseeking intention through open-ended questions. phase 2 involved 413 students (mean age = 15.3 years, 52.5% female) from three junior high schools and three senior high schools. this phase developed a model of mental health help-seeking intention based on attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. the study underscored the pivotal role of social support, positive attitudes, and accessible services in shaping adolescents’ intentions to seek mental health assistance. these findings imply that strengthening social support networks, particularly within family and community contexts, promoting positive attitudes and enhancing service accessibility, could substantially increase adolescents' intention to seek help. keywords adolescent mental health help-seeking planned behavior theory professional help psychosocial factors mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas http://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.975 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 32 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) nurlaela widyarini et.al (pathways of adolescent intention for mental health help-seeking:…) statistics: 21% of female adolescents who experience violence express a desire to self-harm, 17% of those experiencing sexual violence have contemplated suicide, and eight out of 100 have attempted it (susilowati et al., 2021). furthermore, while 46.3% of adolescents reportedly have flourishing mental health, others exhibit moderate to languishing mental health (sulistiowati et al., 2019). adolescents in rural areas face particularly pronounced barriers to accessing mental health services, including stigma, lack of awareness of resources, and limited service availability (oduola et al., 2024). rurality amplifies attitudinal barriers such as stoicism and distrust of formal systems, shaped by cultural and geographic factors (cheesmond et al., 2019). on the other hand, facilitators like family involvement, school-based initiatives, and flexible, informal support settings have shown promise in encouraging help-seeking behaviors (oduola et al., 2024). flexible and informal meeting settings may also encourage help-seeking behaviors (cheesmond et al., 2020). situated in jember, a rural district in east java, indonesia, this study seeks to explore how adolescents in this unique socio-geographic context perceive and navigate the mental health resources available to them. despite growing attention to adolescent mental health, significant knowledge gaps remain. existing studies often focus on urban populations, overlooking the rural context where barriers and facilitators may differ substantially. moreover, while individual-level models have been used to explain health-related behaviors, these approaches often neglect the broader social factors that shape such behaviors. by addressing these gaps, this study contributes to the literature by examining the psychosocial determinants of help-seeking behavior among rural adolescents and contextualizing them within the theory of planned behavior (tpb). the tpb offers a comprehensive framework for understanding mental health helpseeking intentions and behaviors, addressing limitations in other models like the health belief model (hbm) and the transtheoretical mode (ttm) (ajzen, 2012; ajzen et al., 2009). the tpb has been widely applied to understand mental health help-seeking intentions and behaviors. it posits that behavior is determined by psychosocial aspects such as attitudes (assessments of benefits), subjective norms (perceptions of social support or hindrance), and perceived behavioral control (situational factors or resources that facilitate or impede behavior) (fishbein, 2008; fishbein & ajzen, 2010). while attitudes and perceived behavioral control are consistently significant predictors of help-seeking intentions, subjective norms have shown more variable influence (adams et al., 2022; bohon et al., 2016; tomczyk et al., 2020; zorrilla et al., 2019). this study applies the tpb framework to examine the factors influencing adolescents' help-seeking behavior and to propose actionable recommendations tailored to the rural indonesian context. method this research was conducted in two sequential phases, guided by the structured framework of the theory of planned behavior (tpb). the first phase focused on identifying and understanding the challenges that adolescents perceive as difficult or stressful and how these experiences influence their mental health and willingness to seek help. to achieve this, we identified situations that adolescents found challenging, aiming to uncover the types of experiences that significantly impact their mental health and help-seeking behaviors (weathers et al., 2013). the participants in this study were students from two junior high schools and three senior high schools located across two districts in jember regency. participants were asked whether they had personally experienced, witnessed, or learned about these events happening to a close family member or friend, providing valuable insights into the stressors that adolescents consider significant. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 33 nurlaela widyarini et.al (pathways of adolescent intention for mental health help-seeking:…) next, we conducted a qualitative exploration of adolescents' beliefs regarding mental health help-seeking. open-ended questions were used to examine the content and nature of these beliefs, addressing the research question, "what beliefs do adolescents hold regarding seeking mental health assistance, and how strong are these beliefs?" additionally, we measured the strength of these beliefs to develop instruments assessing three core components of the tpb: attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control (pbc). this step was guided by the question, "how can the strength of adolescents' beliefs about mental health help-seeking be measured to develop instruments for assessing attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control?" the second phase of the study applied a regression model to examine the influence of these predictors—attitudes, subjective norms, and pbc—on adolescents' intentions to seek mental health help. this phase addressed the research questions, "how do attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control influence adolescents' intentions to seek mental health help?" and "to what extent can a regression model based on the tpb predict adolescents' mental health help-seeking intentions?" by testing the regression model, we sought to evaluate the predictive power of the tpb framework in explaining adolescents' intentions to seek help in the context of mental health challenges. this research adheres to the ethical guidelines established by the research ethics commission of the faculty of psychology, universitas muhammadiyah jember, as outlined in document no. 03/etk/ii.3.au/fpsi/f/2024. consent for participation in this study was obtained directly from the students, with prior notification provided to the principals of each school. participation was entirely voluntary, and students were informed of their right to decline involvement or withdraw from the study at any time without any repercussions. this ensured that their autonomy and willingness to participate were respected throughout the research process phase 1. identification perceived stressful situation and exploration of beliefs in mental health help-seeking intention participants phase 1 involved 72 students (m_ age = 15.86 years; sd = 1.43) from two junior high schools and three senior high schools across two districts in jember regency. the sample included 63 female adolescents (87%) and nine male adolescents (13%). the data showed that only 10% of the sample had sought professional mental health services, highlighting a low frequency of help-seeking behavior. the ethnic composition was predominantly javanese (81%), with smaller representations of madurese (11%) and other ethnic groups (8%). data collection and analysis methods for beliefs related to mental health help seeking intentions participants were asked to respond to a series of open-ended questions regarding their beliefs about seeking mental health assistance. these questions aimed to uncover the perceived benefits and drawbacks, the influence of social support, and the control factors related to helpseeking. the researchers used open-ended questions to adolescents: 1) "what are the advantages and disadvantages of seeking mental health assistance from professionals?" 2) "who are the individuals or groups that support or obstruct in seeking mental health assistance from professionals?" 3) "what situational factors or resources facilitate or hinder seeking mental health assistance?" based on these three open-ended questions, the researcher conducted a content analysis and identified the five most frequent responses (table 2). 34 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) nurlaela widyarini et.al (pathways of adolescent intention for mental health help-seeking:…) questionnaire development the purpose of developing the belief strength questionnaire (bsq) was to systematically quantify these beliefs and understand their strength in predicting help-seeking intentions. this questionnaire was crucial for identifying the specific beliefs that influence adolescents' decisions to seek help, thereby informing the development of interventions targeted at increasing help-seeking behavior. the six constructs—behavioral belief, outcome evaluation, normative belief, motivation to comply, control belief, and power—are derived from the content analysis conducted during phase 1. open-ended questions were analyzed to identify key themes and categories that represent adolescents’ perceptions and experiences related to seeking mental health assistance. these findings were then used to create structured items for the belief strength questionnaire (bsq), allowing for the systematic measurement of these beliefs in phase 2. the bsq is a single tool designed to measure all six constructs as part of a comprehensive assessment. while each construct has its own subscale, with unique items and response scales tailored to capture specific dimensions, they collectively form one unified instrument. differences in scoring and reliability across constructs arise naturally due to the diversity of beliefs being measured. behavioral belief. this refers to the adolescents' beliefs about the consequences or outcomes of seeking mental health assistance. the construct consists of six items (α = 0.57). for example, one item states, "the outcome i will achieve when seeking assistance from a psychologist/psychiatrist in difficult situations is that my mental burden will be reduced because i will receive solutions to the problems i am facing." responses are measured on a scale from 1 (impossible for me to obtain) to 7 (possible for me to obtain). outcome evaluation. this assesses adolescents' evaluations of the likely consequences of seeking mental health assistance. it consists of six items (α = 0.72), such as "experiencing greater tranquillity due to the ability to express emotions." responses range from -3 (something of little importance/value to me) to +3 (something important/valuable to me). normative belief. this measures the beliefs about the support or hindrance provided by individuals or groups regarding seeking mental health assistance. this construct comprises five items (α = 0.68), such as "the parties that determine when to seek assistance from a psychologist/psychiatrist when facing a difficult situation are friends, parents, relatives, partners, or teachers." responses are rated on a scale from 1 (less supportive/less agreeable) to 7 (supportive/agreeable). motivation to comply. this refers to the tendency to follow the advice of influential individuals. the construct includes five items (α = 0.65), with responses ranging from -3 (i will not act on/follow the advice from this party) to +3 (i will act on/follow the advice from this party). control belief. this assesses the perceived availability of resources or situations that facilitate or obstruct help-seeking. it consists of five items (α = 0.84), such as "easily accessible information regarding the availability of psychologists/psychiatrists, costs, and service hours provided." responses are measured on a scale from 1 (not available/not possessed) to 7 (available/possessed). power. this refers to the perceived strength of the factors that enable or impede seeking mental health assistance. it includes five items (α = 0.89), with responses ranging from -3 (hindering) to +3 (facilitating). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 35 nurlaela widyarini et.al (pathways of adolescent intention for mental health help-seeking:…) data analysis data from phase 1 were analyzed using content analysis to identify key themes from the openended questions, followed by descriptive analysis of the bsq data to assess the strength and impact of each belief on help-seeking intentions phase 2: regression model of adolescent mental health help-seeking intention participants. phase 2 involved 413 students (m_age = 15.3 years; sd = 1.66) from three junior high schools and three senior high schools across three districts in jember regency. the sample included 196 males (47.5%) and 217 females (52.5%), with an ethnic composition predominantly javanese (80%), followed by madurese (12%) and other ethnic groups (8%). data collection the instruments used in phase 2 were developed based on the constructs (attitude, subjective norms and pbc) identified in phase 1. the instruments are four separate scales, each designed to measure a distinct variable within the context of the theory of planned behavior (tpb): attitude towards mental health help-seeking intentions, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and mental health help-seeking intentions. each scale operates independently, as these variables are analyzed separately to explore their individual contributions to adolescents' help-seeking behavior. these instruments included: attitude towards mental health help-seeking intention scale (three items, α= 0.79). this scale assesses adolescents' overall disposition towards seeking mental health assistance, encompassing both positive and negative evaluations of potential outcomes. subjective norm scale (four items, α = 0.68). this scale measures the influence of social norms on adolescents' help-seeking intentions, categorized into vertical (injunctive norms) and horizontal (descriptive norms) relationships. perceived behavioral control scale (four items, α = 0.73). this scale evaluates adolescents' perceptions of the ease or difficulty of seeking mental health assistance, influenced by factors such as accessibility of information, communication resources, and logistical concerns. mental health help-seeking intention scale (five items, α = 0.66). this scale measures the adolescents' willingness to seek mental health assistance, reflected in behaviors such as researching services, contacting a psychologist, and attending appointments. the number of items in each scale is intentionally limited to ensure the instruments remain concise and focused, reducing the response burden on adolescent participants. however, we acknowledge that the relatively small number of items can contribute to moderate reliability scores, such as α = 0.66 for the mental health help-seeking intention scale. this is a limitation of the study, and future research should consider expanding the number of items in each scale to improve internal consistency and reliability. despite this limitation, the reliability scores obtained are acceptable for exploratory research and provide meaningful insights into the relationships between these variables. the findings contribute to understanding adolescents' help-seeking behaviors and offer a foundation for refining these instruments in subsequent studies to enhance their robustness and reliability. 36 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) nurlaela widyarini et.al (pathways of adolescent intention for mental health help-seeking:…) data analysis data from phase 2 were analyzed using regression analysis, conducted with jamovi software version 1.6.18.0, to determine the model fit and identify the most significant predictors of mental health help-seeking intention. results table 1 illustrates the various challenging events and situations that adolescents reported as impacting their lives, their families, or others around them. bullying emerged as a common issue, affecting individuals, families, and others equally. conflicts with friends and teachers were primarily personal struggles, with some impact extending to others but rarely involving family members. similarly, conflicts with romantic partners and siblings were mostly personal matters, with less effect on the broader family or community. transportation accidents and natural disasters had a more widespread impact, affecting not just the individuals involved but also their families and others in their community. on the other hand, feelings of inadequacy in academic tasks and fear of future failure were mainly internal challenges faced by the adolescents themselves, with little to no reported impact on their families or others. this overview highlights how certain stressful events are more likely to affect only the individual, while others have broader implications for families and communities. table 1 frequency of adolescent-reported events and situations affecting individuals, families, and others event or situation number of responds happened to me happened to my family happened to other bullying (physical, verbal, and psychological) 7 7 7 conflict with friends 12 1 3 conflict with parents 7 5 2 conflict with teachers 12 0 4 conflict with a romantic partner 6 5 1 conflict with siblings 8 2 0 transportation accidents (e.g., car accident, shipwreck, train accident, plane crash) 4 5 3 natural disasters (floods, earthquakes, landslides, disease outbreaks, etc.) 9 0 7 feeling inadequate in academic tasks 3 0 2 fear of future failure 3 0 0 phase 1 the study explored the various factors influencing adolescents' mental health help-seeking intentions by examining attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. the findings are summarized in table 2, which outlines the relationships between specific beliefs, evaluations, and the resulting components of intention. column 1 in table 2 contains the most frequent responses from participants to the open-ended questions asked by the researchers: 1) "what are the advantages and disadvantages of seeking mental health assistance from professionals?" 2) "who are the individuals or groups that support or obstruct in seeking mental health assistance from professionals?" 3) "what situational factors or resources facilitate or hinder seeking mental health assistance?" based on these three open-ended humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 37 nurlaela widyarini et.al (pathways of adolescent intention for mental health help-seeking:…) questions, the researchers conducted a content analysis and identified the five most frequent responses. the study explored the various factors influencing adolescents' mental health helpseeking intentions by examining attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. the findings are summarized in table 2, which outlines the relationships between specific beliefs, evaluations, and the resulting components of intention. column 1 in table 2 contains the most frequent responses from participants to the open-ended questions asked by the researchers: 1) "what are the advantages and disadvantages of seeking mental health assistance from professionals?" 2) "who are the individuals or groups that support or obstruct in seeking mental health assistance from professionals?" 3) "what situational factors or resources facilitate or hinder seeking mental health assistance?" based on these three openended questions, the researchers conducted a content analysis and identified the five most frequent responses. the content analysis employed in this study involved transforming qualitative responses into quantitative data to facilitate statistical analysis. participants' responses to questions about their beliefs, evaluations, and motivations were coded using a likert scale (e.g., 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree). the mean values calculated represent the average response across all participants, providing an overview of the trends and relative strength of each factor. this approach allowed us to quantify subjective perceptions, such as the strength of behavioral beliefs and the importance of specific outcomes, ensuring that the findings were both systematic and interpretable. in line with the theory of planned behavior (tpb), the study multiplied belief strength by outcome evaluation (b × e) to calculate attitudes, normative belief by motivation to comply (n × m) to determine subjective norms, and control belief by power (c × p) to assess perceived behavioral control. this multiplication reflects the interactive nature of these constructs, where both components must be considered together to capture their combined effect. for instance, a strong belief about the benefits of seeking help would contribute less to attitudes if the associated outcome were deemed unimportant. similarly, the influence of social expectations depends not only on the perceived strength of those expectations but also on the individual’s willingness to comply. by employing this approach, the study aligns with the tpb framework to evaluate the predictors of help-seeking intentions comprehensively and meaningfully. based on the findings from phase 1 (table 2), adolescents' attitudes towards seeking psychological help reveals that the most significant factor influencing a positive attitude is enhanced calmness through attentive listening, with the highest attitude score (mean = 9.85), supported by strong behavioral belief (mean = 4.9) and high outcome evaluation (mean = 1.46). additionally, emotional expression that leads to calmness also contributes significantly to a positive attitude (mean = 8.40). the belief that psychological help can alleviate mental burden is viewed positively as well (mean = 6.93), though slightly less so. on the other hand, the financial cost is the most substantial deterrent, resulting in a low attitude score (mean = 0.26), followed by significant time investment (mean = 3.53) and feelings of awkwardness or discomfort (mean = 3.18), which have a more moderate impact. the influence of significant others on adolescents' intentions to seek mental health help shows that parents have the strongest impact, with the highest subjective norm score (mean = 6.56), driven by a significant normative belief (mean = 4.06) and motivation to comply (mean = 1.04). this highlights the crucial role of parental expectations in encouraging helpseeking behavior. teachers and school counselors also exert considerable influence, with a subjective norm score of 4.36, underscoring their authority in guiding adolescents towards seeking help. friends and siblings have a moderate influence, with mean of subjective norm are 2.68 and 3.14, respectively, indicating that while their opinions matter, they are less impactful compared to parents and teachers. interestingly, the influence of a partner or close friend is relatively low, with a subjective norm score of 1.69 and even a negative motivation 38 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) nurlaela widyarini et.al (pathways of adolescent intention for mental health help-seeking:…) to comply (mean = -0.25), suggesting that some adolescents may not prioritize the opinions of close friends when deciding to seek psychological help. these findings demonstrate that parental and teacher expectations are the most influential factors, while peer influence is more moderate. the results of phase 1 also explore perceived behavioral control reveals that the availability of online mental health services is the most influential factor, with a high perceived behavioral control (mean = 3.49), indicating that adolescents find online resources highly accessible and motivating for seeking help. school-issued permission, while notable, has a moderate impact (mean = 2.25), suggesting that obtaining school permission plays a role but is not a major barrier. the proximity of services to home presents a lower influence (mean = 0.89), indicating that geographical distance may be a barrier, though less significant than online accessibility. lastly, the availability of information about services shows the least influence (mean = 0.42), suggesting that while information is accessible, it is not a strong motivator for adolescents to seek help. these findings highlight that online accessibility is the most empowering factor, while geographical proximity and information availability are less influential in adolescents' help-seeking behavior. table 2 attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control based on beliefs attitude based on behavioral belief and outcome evaluation behavioral belief strength (b) outcome evaluation (e) attitude (bxe) mean mean mean alleviated mental burden 4.35 1.18 6.93 enhanced calmness through emotional expression 4.89 1.19 8.40 enhanced calmness from attentive listening 4.86 1.46 9.85 high financial cost 3.44 -0.43 0.26 significant time investment 4.07 0.49 3.53 experiencing awkwardness, embarrassment, or discomfort 4.32 0.15 3.18 subjective norm based on normative belief and motivation to comply normative belief (n) motivation to comply (m) subjective norm (nxm) mean mean mean friends 4.58 0.21 2.68 parents 4.06 1.04 6.56 siblings 3.94 0.24 3.14 partner/close friend 3.85 -0.25 1.69 teachers/school counselors 4.07 0.44 4.36 perceived behavioral control based on control belief and power control belief (c) power (p) perceived behavioral control (c x p) mean mean mean readily accessible information 2.79 -0.15 0.42 comprehensive information on obtaining services 2.90 0.26 2.17 proximity of services to the home 2.81 -0.26 0.89 availability of online mental health services 3.68 0.60 3.49 school-issued permission 3.29 0.19 2.25 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 39 nurlaela widyarini et.al (pathways of adolescent intention for mental health help-seeking:…) phase 2 the overall intention to seek mental health assistance integrates the key predictors: attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control (f(4.41) = 44.7; p<0.01). the analysis revealed that these three factors significantly influence adolescents' mental health helpseeking intentions, with a determination coefficient (r² = 0.30; p < 0.01). this indicates that 30.4% of the variance in mental health help-seeking intention can be explained by the combination of these predictors. attitudes toward seeking assistance demonstrated a significant positive influence (β = 0.24; p<0.01), indicating that adolescents with more favorable views of mental health services are more inclined to seek help when required. subjective norm demonstrated the most significant influence (β = 0.44; p<0.01), indicating that the social expectations and pressures from significant others, such as parents and peers, play a crucial role in shaping adolescents' intentions to seek help. perceived behavioral control also played a significant role (β = 0.25; p<0.01), reflecting that adolescents' confidence in their ability to access mental health services—considering factors like the availability of services and perceived ease of access—strongly impacts their intention to seek help. interestingly, gender did not significantly influence the intention to seek help in this regression model (β = -1.19; p>0.05), suggesting that, within this context, gender differences do not play a crucial role in determining help-seeking intentions. discussion this study explored the psychosocial factors influencing adolescents' mental health helpseeking intentions using the theory of planned behavior (tpb) framework. by examining attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control, phase 1 and phase 2 provided comprehensive and sequential insights into these factors and their interconnections, demonstrating the importance of this dual-phase approach in yielding significant findings. phase 1 focused on identifying and understanding adolescents’ beliefs and perceptions regarding mental health help-seeking. the qualitative exploration revealed that positive attitudes toward seeking psychological help were primarily influenced by benefits such as enhanced calmness and reduced mental burden (aras & peker, 2024). however, financial costs, time investment, and embarrassment were notable deterrents. subjective norms, especially parental and teacher influence, emerged as significant motivators for help-seeking intentions (digal & gagnon, 2020; hassett et al., 2018), while peer influence played a moderate role (sears & macintyre, 2023). perceived behavioral control highlighted the availability of online mental health services as a critical enabler, with geographical proximity and information accessibility being less influential (sweeney et al., 2019). these findings provided a foundation for developing the instruments used in phase 2, underscoring the sequential nature of this research. phase 2 built upon these foundational insights by analyzing how attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control predicted adolescents' intentions to seek help. these results affirm the importance of social expectations and the perceived ease of accessing services in shaping help-seeking intentions. interestingly, gender did not significantly impact help-seeking intentions, suggesting that cultural or societal norms within the study context may encourage equitable perceptions of mental health services. this phase confirmed the interconnectedness of the findings from both phases and reinforced the predictive power of the tpb model (fishbein, 2008; fishbein & ajzen, 2010). 40 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) nurlaela widyarini et.al (pathways of adolescent intention for mental health help-seeking:…) this study shares similarities with prior research, such as the consistent finding that subjective norms significantly influence mental health help-seeking intentions (bohon et al., 2016; kam et al., 2022). like these studies, the present research highlights the critical role of social support systems, particularly from parents and teachers, in motivating adolescents to seek help. similarly, the emphasis on perceived behavioral control aligns with existing literature, underscoring the importance of adolescents’ confidence in their ability to access mental health services and navigate logistical barriers (adams et al., 2022). however, differences were also observed. unlike some studies that reported significant gender differences in help-seeking behaviors (syakarofath & widyasari, 2023), this research found no such disparities. this discrepancy may be attributed to cultural or societal norms in the study’s context, which appear to promote more equitable attitudes toward mental health services across genders. additionally, while earlier studies emphasized the challenges posed by stigma and confidentiality concerns (boyd et al., 2011; cramer, 2016), this research identified online mental health services as a particularly empowering factor, reflecting a shift toward digital solutions in adolescent health behavior. the findings also extend prior research by integrating a sequential mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative insights with quantitative validation. this design enabled a deeper understanding of the interplay between attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control, offering a more nuanced perspective than studies that relied solely on one methodological approach. the study’s integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches provides a robust understanding of adolescent mental health help-seeking behaviors. by adopting a sequential design, the research effectively bridged the gap between exploratory and confirmatory analyses, enabling a deeper examination of the predictors of help-seeking intentions. the findings underscore the relevance of the tpb framework in predicting health-related intentions (bohon et al., 2016; tomczyk et al., 2020). the study’s strengths lie in its dual-phase design and emphasis on cultural and social contexts, which offer valuable insights for tailored interventions. one of the primary strengths of this study lies in its mixed-method approach, which allowed for a nuanced exploration of the psychosocial factors influencing mental health help-seeking intentions. the sequential design effectively combined qualitative findings from phase 1 with quantitative validation in phase 2, providing a comprehensive understanding of the predictors of help-seeking behavior. the application of the tpb framework further added a structured lens for analyzing these intentions, with findings aligning closely with established literature (guo et al., 2024). moreover, the study's emphasis on cultural and social contexts enriched its relevance, highlighting how societal norms and support systems influence adolescents' behaviors (kam et al., 2022; tomczyk et al., 2020). however, certain limitations should be noted. first, the sample predominantly consisted of adolescents from a rural area, which may limit the applicability of the findings to urban or more diverse demographic contexts, so it may limit the generalizability of the findings to urban populations. second, while phase 1 provided rich qualitative data, the reliance on self-reported measures, while practical, introduces the possibility of response biases, particularly in a study focusing on sensitive issues like mental health (boyd et al., 2011; cramer, 2016). these limitations underscore the need for future research to include a broader range of participants and to consider alternative data collection methods to mitigate potential biases. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 41 nurlaela widyarini et.al (pathways of adolescent intention for mental health help-seeking:…) conclusion this study highlights the critical roles of attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control in shaping adolescents' mental health help-seeking intentions. positive attitudes toward mental health services, significant social influences from parents and teachers, and confidence in accessing services emerged as key factors. the sequential design of phase 1 and phase 2 demonstrated the importance of understanding both qualitative beliefs and quantitative predictors, reinforcing the utility of the tpb framework in this context. the findings suggest that interventions should focus on fostering positive attitudes, strengthening supportive social norms, and enhancing perceived control over accessing mental health resources. addressing barriers such as stigma and financial costs while leveraging facilitators like online mental health services is essential for improving help-seeking behaviors. future research should consider diverse cultural and urban contexts to further validate these findings and develop targeted intervention strategies. acknowledgment we extend our deepest gratitude to the majelis pendidikan tinggi penelitian dan pengembangan (diktilitbang) pimpinan pusat muhammadiyah for their generous funding that made this research possible. we are also profoundly thankful to the lembaga penelitian dan pengabdian kepada masyarakat universitas muhammadiyah jember for their invaluable technical support throughout this study. furthermore, we appreciate the cooperation and permissions granted by the pimpinan daerah muhammadiyah kabupaten jember, as well as the school principals within their jurisdiction. their assistance was crucial for the successful implementation of this research. lastly, we wish to express our sincere thanks to the study participants for their willingness to contribute their time and insights, which were essential to the completion and success of this study. declarations author contribution. author 1 was the principal investigator, responsible for leading the research project, including the development of the research design, overseeing data collection, and conducting the analysis. author 2 contributed as a co-investigator, supporting the data collection process, assisting with the analysis, and helping interpret the findings. both authors were actively involved in the drafting and critical revision of the manuscript, contributing to its intellectual content and ensuring the integrity of the study. funding statement. this research was funded by the national muhammadiyah research grant, batch vii, 2024 [grant number: 0258.168/i.3/d/2024] conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. 42 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) nurlaela widyarini et.al (pathways 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(2019). depression and help-seeking intention among young adults: the theory of planned behavior. american journal of health education, 50(4), 236–244. https://doi.org/10.1080/19325037.2019.1616014 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 21 (1), august 2025, 157-168 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1514 the role of perfectionism traits and affect in predicting academic dishnonesty of college students abdurosid nur ali, wuri prasetyawati faculty of psychology, universitas indonesia, depok, indonesia corresponding author: abdurosidnurali@gmail.com this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction unethical behavior by individuals has led to a decline in trust in educational institutions and companies. several unethical acts such as corruption, sabotage, exploitation and others are often encountered by educational institutions and companies. the use of technology in scientific writing is also encountered, such as chatgpt (parker et al., 2023). even though the effectiveness of using chatgpt as a tool exhibits mixed stances. some students may appreciate its aid in academic task or some express concern in plagiarism, academic dishonesty, and potentially erode the genuine learning experiences. inappropriate use of artificial intelligence in scientific writing will lead to fraud, since it does not employ proper citation and repetitive sentences (dinçer, 2024; taiye et al., 2024). some individuals may have planned to commit unethical acts from the beginning to take advantage of opportunities that benefit themselves (brief et al., 2001), some individuals have good intentions at the beginning and then engage in unethical acts after some time. articl e inf o abstract article history received: 2 june 2025 revised: 30 june 2025 accepted: 30 june 2025 this study aimed to investigate the relationship between perfectionism traits and affect on academic dishonesty in college students. this study involved 98 students as participants who were voluntarily filling out the survey after the final exams. data were collected using the academic dishonesty questionnaire, the multidimensional perfectionism scale, and the positive-negative affect scale. data were analysed using a correlation and comparative approach. the study found that only the socially prescribed perfectionism domain positively correlated with academic dishonesty in college students. the effect of socially prescribed perfectionism was diminished by the presence of emotions while controlling several demographic variables as covariates. positive affect shows a greater effect on reducing the possibility of academic dishonesty occurrence. it highlighted that perfectionism may not be directly associated with academic dishonesty and limitations of self-report as a measure of dishonesty in college students. keywords academic dishonesty affect cheating multidimensional perfectionism students mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1514 mailto:abdurosidnurali@gmail.com https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 158 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) abdurosid nur ali et.al (the role of perfectionism traits and affect in predicting academic dishnonesty of…) an unethical or illicit behavior is an action that can have an adverse effect on others and is prohibited or unacceptable to society (jones, 1991). according to brown (2008), forbidden, immoral, illegal actions can be categorized into seven groups, namely: (1) doing evil for personal gain (bribery, corruption, and theft), (2) conflict of interest, (3) unprofessional service (official misconduct), (4) poor administrative systems, (5) improper officer placement systems, (6) misusing regulations, and (7) complaints. students as individuals in the academic world are not free from unethical behavior, namely academic dishonesty. in 2016, it was reported that 77% of students admitted to committing academic dishonesty, and in 2021, during the covid-19 pandemic, it was still rising to the point of concern (herdian et al., 2021; winardi et al., 2017). 31.3% were in the form of plagiarism, 31.6% in the form of cheating, and 37.1% in the form of collaboration. but, what’s academic dishonesty? academic dishonesty, according to mccabe et al. (2012) is the involvement of someone who performs at least one specific behavior that should not be done to get better grades. there are nine specific behaviors called cheating, namely (1) copying sentences from writing without writing the source, (2) including sources that are not actually used on assignments in the bibliography column, (3) plagiarism of public writings, (4) getting exam questions and answers before the exam takes place from other people, (5) copying other people's answers during the exam, (5) copying other people's answers during the exam, whether known or unknown to the person who is the source of the answer, (6) working on assignments with others on assignments that are instructed to be done independently, (7) claiming by changing names on assignments that are actually done by others, (8) giving answers to other people during the exam, and (9) using paper or sources that are not allowed to answer questions during the exam (mccabe et al., 2012). individuals who commit acts of academic cheating feel it is permissible to have an advantage over others due to low or minimal instructions from the instructor, such as individual assignments that allow them to be done in groups. shalvi et al. (2011), states that unethical behavior occurs because there is room to justify their actions. individuals who are given more than one opportunity increase the likelihood of committing unethical acts. mazar et al. (2008) found that individuals will act unethically (lie) in the presence of greater rewards. (kilduff et al., 2016) prove that unethical actions can also occur due to rivalry or competition with peers to increase self-esteem and status. forms of unethical behavior in the educational context are plagiarism and academic fraud, such as cheating and exploitation. carrell et al. (2008) found that academic fraud perpetrators will increase at each grade. individuals with similar characteristics will gather and behave according to the group's morals (carrell et al., 2008; yam et al., 2014). this shows a shift in moral values, that cheating becomes permissible. external influences, such as peers, dilute moral values so that individual self-control decreases to behave in accordance with the norms or rules set by the teacher/university. students were required to sign declarations of ‘academic honesty’ on submitting assignments, confirming that all sources consulted have been acknowledged (ashworth et al., 1997). these sets of rules were mutual; the institution and students drew up rules differentiating correct and impermissible practices in assessments, such as cheating and plagiarism. students also benefit from this agreement to act morally and experience genuine learning. even though the institution enforces this rule, students still engage in academic dishonesty throughout their academic years. in indonesia, some internal factors that can inhibit cheating are religious beliefs, self-efficacy, and the desire to get higher grades (farisandy & putri, 2024; salma et al., 2023). however, some previous studies have not considered internal factors, namely personality and emotions, as traits that shape individual character (williams et al., 2010). several studies on personality have been conducted to humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 159 abdurosid nur ali et.al (the role of perfectionism traits and affect in predicting academic dishnonesty of…) examine its relationship with unethical behavior (curtis et al., 2022; day et al., 2011; malesky et al., 2022), but trait perfectionism research in indonesia still does not have a consistent relationship (błachnio et al., 2022; siaputra, 2013). perfectionism is a behavioral tendency for individuals to strive for unrealistic results according to their abilities (baumeister & vohs, 2012). in educational institutions, individuals with perfectionist tendencies will be motivated to achieve maximum grades. in the world of work, individuals will tend to try to get the best assessment on each key performance indicator (kpi). perfectionist tendencies are not only driven by individuals, but many types of perfectionism are practised. hewitt & flett (1991) explained that perfectionism does not only focus on individual cognition, but there are implicit factors that also become other factors that encourage individuals to have perfectionist tendencies. some of the existing perfectionism factors are self-oriented perfectionism (sop), socially prescribed perfectionism (spp), and other-oriented perfectionism (oop). the two dimensions of environmentally motivated perfectionism (sop and oop) also need to be measured in determining whether individuals have perfectionist tendencies. self-oriented perfectionism is the discrepancy between the actual self and the ideal self. the tendency of perfectionism is directed towards the self by evaluating the self and trying to avoid failure. other-oriented perfectionism is the tendency for individuals to set unrealistic standards for others, position others as perfect, and constantly evaluate others' performance. this tendency is outwardly directed. socially prescribed perfectionism is the individual's tendency to acquire standards and fulfil expectations from others. expectations given by others are always tried to be fulfilled by the individual, resulting in discrepancies between the actual self and the self desired by others. these three dimensions can be categorised into two comprehensive groups in research, namely perfectionistic concern (or can be called maladaptive perfectionism) and perfectionistic striving (positive striving perfectionism) (dunkley et al., 2006; stoeber, 2014). perfectionism is the tendency of individuals to try to meet unrealistic standards according to their abilities. this tendency can arise adaptively or maladaptively. to meet these unrealistic standards, individuals may involve themselves in unethical actions, for example, cheating and plagiarism. individuals' involvement in cheating is an attempt to protect their self-concept, which has high standards (mazar et al., 2008). individuals who believe they can achieve their standards can be called adaptive or personal standards perfectionists, whereas individuals who cannot are called maladaptive or self-critical perfectionists (slaney et al., 2001; yang et al., 2016). individuals with maladaptive perfectionist tendencies are likely to experience fear of failure, negative affect, anxiety, and depression. they may use maladaptive coping techniques to deal with daily problems, and when they often feel excessive negative feelings they will exhibit aggressive behaviors directed at themselves or at others when receiving negative appraisals (chester et al., 2015; levine et al., 2017). various forms of negative perfectionist tendencies will make individuals engage in unethical behavior (levine et al., 2017). individuals who strive to meet the expectations of their environment may engage in unethical behavior, such as cheating, exploiting loopholes, and other actions to achieve the standards set by their environment. yip & côté (2013) shows that the emotions felt by individuals also cause their involvement in making decisions. the decision that may be made is to take unethical actions, such as cheating. affect as a form of emotions is a mental state involving evaluative feelings, which a person feels good or bad, or likes or dislikes what is happening (ekkekakis, 2013). these emotions could be shown in positive or negative. positive emotions such as pride, happiness, excitement, gratitude, awe, love, and compassion. negative emotion such as anger, anxiety, 160 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) abdurosid nur ali et.al (the role of perfectionism traits and affect in predicting academic dishnonesty of…) envy, guilt, disgust, shame, and sadness. the emotions that individuals feel make them more focused on themselves or focused on others in making decisions. when individuals feel emotions that involve themselves, they will reduce their attention to others and start behaving unethically, in this case individuals will engaged in academic dishonesty (kouchaki, 2015). increased feelings of negative emotions in college students are positively associated with increased attitudes and behaviors towards cheating (tindall et al., 2021). in contrast, zhong (2011) found that individuals when feeling emotions involving others will give unbalanced judgments. individuals will tend to behave in accordance with the norm, individuals will speak honestly. these results are similar to curtis (2023), negative emotions act as a buffer in predicting fraud. by feeling guilt and shame, students try to avoid cheating. individual emotional conditions can reinforce or reduce the occurrence of student academic dishonesty. based on the explanation above, this study aims to conduct a preliminary study to test the relationship between perfectionism with academic dishonesty by replicating (krone & rouse, 2012) research. in this study, we hypothesize there is relationship between perfectionism traits and emotional tendencies with academic dishonesty by students. method these studies used quantitative research approaches by distributing a survey. self-oriented perfectionism, socially prescribed perfectionism, other-oriented perfectionism, positive affect and negative affect were predictors of academic dishonesty in college students. participants participants were collected through convenience sampling in courses in universitas indonesia and universitas muhammadiyah malang representing a public and private university. the 4 selected courses are descriptive statistics, quantitative research methodology, psychometry, and psychology measurement tool construction. 168 undergraduate students in these courses were asked to participate in the study. 98 (58%) of the students chose to complete the survey. the 98 students who participate are aged between 18-25 years old with average age of 21 years old (sd = 1.28). most respondents (74%) were between 20 (n=51) and 21 (n=22) years old. most participants were female (56%). 67% participant were from private university students. instruments academic dishonesty will be measured using the academic dishonesty instrument developed by faradiena (2019) modifying mccabe & trevino (1993) and iyer & eastman (2008) instruments. this instrument consists of 11 items. “i smuggle a cheat sheet during test”; “copying materials and claiming it to be my own”. statements are responded by choosing one of four rating scales, (1) never, (2) once, (3) twice, and (4) more than twice. the academic dishonesty instrument has an internal consistency of 0.89. perfectionism tendency was measured using the indonesian multidimensional perfectionism scale developed by safitri & preston (2020) based on the theory of hewitt & flett (1991). the imps consists of 45 statement items. “it makes me uneasy to see an error in my work” (sop); “the people around me expect me to succeed at everything i do” (spp); “the people who matter to me should never let me down” (oop). statements are responded to by choosing one of seven rating scales, (1) strongly disagree to (7) strongly agree. the selforiented dimension has an internal consistency of 0.87, other-oriented 0.63, and socially prescribed 0.75. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 161 abdurosid nur ali et.al (the role of perfectionism traits and affect in predicting academic dishnonesty of…) positive affect and negative affect scale (panas) is one of the instruments to measure individual emotions. the instrument uses panas (watson et al., 1988) which has been adapted by akhtar (2019) into indonesian. panas consists of two dimensions of affect, positive affect of 10 items (interested, enthusiastic, determined) and negative affect of 10 items (distressed, alert, ashamed). items are in the form of one word that describes the subject's feelings. items can be responded to by choosing one of five rating scales, (1) almost never to (5) almost always. the positive affect dimension has an internal consistency of 0.86 and negative affect of 0.85. procedure and data analysis the survey was distributed through course e-learning system. the survey can be filled in by students through the google form. forms are distributed during the final semester exams to survey students' college experience. this survey consisted of multiple-choice and likert-type items. the instruments used were academic dishonesty, multidimensional perfectionism scale, and panas. all instruments were presented in bahasa indonesia. students who did not completed the survey were excluded. the data was analysed using jasp software and all statistical analyses were performed at the 0.05 level of significance. we ran correlational and comparative analyses to investigate the relationship between variables and the difference from each group. results table 1 means, standard deviation, reliability, and correlations between variables m sd α 1 2 3 4 5 academic dishonesty 12.18 6.95 0.84 self-oriented perfectionism 67.86 12.49 0.89 0.08 other-oriented perfectionism 53.62 9.52 0.73 -0.08 -0.68 ͨ socially prescribed perfectionism 56.18 8.07 0.62 0.23ᵃ 0.66 ͨ 0.53 ͨ positive affect 40.64 6.86 0.88 -0.44 ͨ 0.13 0.18 0.15 negative affect 23.42 8.47 0.92 0.45 ͨ 0.13 0.10 0.36 ͨ -0.74 ͨ a) p < 0.05; b) p < 0.01; c) p < 0.001; α = cronbach’s alpha reliability based on the results of the correlation test between variables, it was found that only socially prescribed perfectionism was significantly correlated to academic dishonesty variable. the greater pressure or expectancies from the environment could lead individuals to engage in academic dishonesty. only positive emotions are negatively correlated with academic dishonesty, the higher the positive emotions that individuals feel academic dishonesty will decrease. the relationship between self-oriented and socially prescribed domains is quite strong (r > 0.5). conceptually, the object of perfection resides in the participant or is directed at the participant. see table 1. multiple regression analysis conducted based on the correlational result. there is a negative effect of positive affect on academic dishonesty, while controlling the gender, age, year in college, and university f (7.90) = 5.71, p<0.001). variance explained by the model was 30.8%. the effect of socially prescribed perfectionism and negative affect were diminished by the presence of positive affect. see table 2. 162 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) abdurosid nur ali et.al (the role of perfectionism traits and affect in predicting academic dishnonesty of…) table 2 multiple regression analysis on academic dishonesty β p-value r r-squared gender (reference: male) -0.08 0.35 0.55 0.31 age 0.24 0.02 year in college 0.02 0.83 university (reference: public) 0.11 0.25 socially prescribed perfectionism 0.14 0.17 positive affect -0.32 0.02 negative affect 0.19 0.19 t-test and anova was conducted to see if there were differences in individual involvement in academic dishonesty. there was no significant difference in engagement in academic dishonesty by male or female participants, t (96) = 0.67, p = 0.51. the researcher wanted to see if college level would drive students’ engagement in academic dishonesty. results showed no difference between first, secondand third-year students in their involvement in academic dishonesty, f (2.95) = 1.92, p = 0.15 (figure 1). these findings show that each year they would likely to engage in academic dishonesty through several means. since the freshmen already engage in academic dishonesty, it will be most likely to participate in unethical behavior in their further academic years. figure 1 comparison of academic dishonesty on academic year and university discussion this study aimed to examine the relationship between perfectionism tendencies and emotions towards academic dishonesty. only socially prescribed perfectionism domain showed significant correlation with academic dishonesty. this result has similarities with the research of nathanson et al. (2006), no significant relationship was found. although respondents committed academic dishonesty, perfectionism trait that come from selves has not been able to prove the relationship directly. these findings also imply the greater role of environment shaping how individuals behave. high expectations from others could push humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 163 abdurosid nur ali et.al (the role of perfectionism traits and affect in predicting academic dishnonesty of…) individuals to engage in academic dishonesty. ashworth et al. (1997) academic dishonesty that occurred were done consciously to achieve benefits and has a small chance of being discovered or caught by supervisors. students also take these actions a way to meet university expectations. in the process of cheating, individuals also feel a sense of guilt that may prevent themselves from cheating or a shift in moral values to feel it is not a problem. social factors become a greater influence for student to engage in academic dishonesty. students may felt pressure particularly from parents, peers, and scholarship committees (heriyati & ekasari, 2020). pressure from parents and peer are the main contributor that changed students’ behavior to act morally. socially prescribed perfectionism is shaped by expectation from parents or peers as a social aspect (hewitt & flett, 1991). in the finding, only socially prescribed perfectionism could directly predict academic dishonesty. it shows that student could not control themselves to act with integrity. but the academic dishonesty does not only happen because of pressure. opportunities and rationalization would construct a ‘fraud triangle’ (becker et al., 2006). opportunities to act immorally by cheating or plagiarism happen because lack of monitoring from the professor or the presence of technology. heighten the supervision during the exams and in lectures would lower the potential of academic misconduct. academic dishonesty also would likely to happen if students rationalized or perceived unfair competitions (lewellyn & rodriguez, 2015). in addition, emotions and academic dishonesty have a significant relationship. tindall et al. (2021) proved that negative emotions can increase the potential for academic fraud. the relationship between positive emotions and academic dishonesty in this study. when individuals feel positive emotions, it could reduce the potential for academic dishonesty. individuals who feel interested, enthusiastic, and excited may not involve themselves in cheating and plagiarism. but also, the individuals who feel negative emotions, it could amplify the potential for academic dishonesty. individuals who feel fear, anxiety, jealousy, and shame may involve themselves in cheating. every negative emotion could justify the unethical behavior to protect their self-identity. positive emotions negatively predict academic dishonesty. it indicates that individuals who were feeling enthusiastic could reduce the potentiality of dishonesty. these findings against vincent et al. (2013) that found individual who’s experiencing positive affect to a greater extent may facilitate moral disengagement which promote a dishonest act. the feelings of being watched by others could affect the person ability to process moral. either the urge to act morally to protect positive self in a long term or act unethical to take a shortterm sense of fulfilment (gino, 2015). an interesting finding in this study is that there is no significant difference between male and female individuals, all of whom have been involved in academic dishonesty activities. this finding is also supported according to chala (2021), woman consider cheating to be an unethical act, but their involvement is not much different from the male group. we also tested whether the level of study influenced participation in academic dishonesty. the involvement of first, secondand third-year students did not have a significant difference, although visually there was a difference (figure 1). this finding is quite different from the research of daneil et al. (2020) where third year students (seniors) are more likely to commit fraud than firstand second-year students. this possibility can occur because students in the early days of college are still adapting to the system. the habit of committing academic fraud at a higher level is trying to maintain high grades from previous evaluations. in early academic year, maintaining expectation for the students by lecturers or teachers whom enforcing academic integrity would shape how they behave throughout the semester. since based on our findings, academic dishonesty is associated with social expectations (socially prescribed perfectionism). teachers could set a realistic goal for each student, together. social factor such competitiveness between students also happens within 164 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) abdurosid nur ali et.al (the role of perfectionism traits and affect in predicting academic dishnonesty of…) class or lecture. being in larger competition pool such as class could increase cheating by influencing one’s expectation of other’s cheating (chui et al., 2021). teachers or lecturers could divide them into smaller groups to minimize the potential of academic dishonesty. this also would reduce the perceptions of cheating as socially acceptable, which leading to more cheating (eriksson et al., 2015). not only maintaining the expectation of the students, by managing their emotions, such as shame and guilt would reduce the intentions to engage in specific form of academic misconduct (curtis, 2023). when students could face shame and guilt as a valid emotion even before doing an unethical behavior. students that feeling enthusiastic and active while learning or doing tests less likely to act immorally. creating fun activities such as interactive games, that would increase the positive emotions of the students could minimize the possibility of academic dishonesty and keeping them engaged (costley, 2019; sutherlandsmith & dawson, 2022). despite of the findings above, some limitations in this study lead to results that may not be significant, namely: (1) the use of self-report measurement tools is not strong enough to measure unethical behavior so that behaviorist measurements need to be used through experiments, (2) the construct of perfectionism which is understood is still limited to a linear relationship, it is possible that there is a maximum point of academic dishonesty that occurs due to perfectionism at a moderate level, so that the relationship between perfectionism and academic dishonesty is quadratic, and (3) the withdrawal of the number of samples needs to be balanced to prove that there are differences in academic dishonesty at certain academic levels. future research is expected to pay attention to the three things that are the limitations of this study. it is also reported in pascual-ezama et al. (2015), self-reported treatment has higher amount of lying. by employing more concrete tools to measure academic dishonesty, not by using self-report questionnaire that would likely to be bias or faking good on the responses by students. conclusion perfectionism has not shown a significant relationship with academic dishonesty in college students. individual motivation to be perfect may be able to predict academic dishonesty due to other factors. the highest potential for academic dishonesty could occur if individuals had a high and low perfectionism or moderate level of perfectionism. acknowledgment authors thanks to all participants who willingly took part in this study. declarations author contribution. first author: idea conceptualization, literature review, data collection and writing the article. second author: guide the research framework, review, and improve the manuscript. funding statement. this research was conducted with independent funding from author. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 165 abdurosid nur ali et.al (the role of perfectionism traits and affect in predicting academic dishnonesty of…) references akhtar, h. 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(2011). the ethical dangers of deliberative decision making. administrative science quarterly, 56(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.2189/asqu.2011.56.1.001 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 21 (2), august 2024, 203-215 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas supervising success: strategies for supporting fast-track postgraduate students in indonesia hari setyowibowo1,2*, nisrina nur izzah2, juniarti duwi lestari3, asep khoerudin3, harinaldi4, nuri andar wulan5 1department of psychology, faculty of psychology, universitas padjadjaran, indonesia 2psychological intervention research working group, centre for psychological innovation and research, faculty of psychology, universitas padjadjaran, indonesia 3directorate of resources for higher education, directorate general of higher education, research, and technology, ministry of education, culture, research, and technology, indonesia 4department of mechanical engineering, faculty of engineering, universitas indonesia, indonesia 5department of food science and technology, institut pertanian bogor, indonesia corresponding author: h.setyowibowo@unpad.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction education plays a vital role in national development by laying the groundwork for technological advancement, economic prosperity, and overall societal advancement. cultivating a highly skilled academic workforce is crucial for countries aiming to boost global competitiveness. in this regard, the indonesian ministry of education, culture, research, and technology launched a scholarship programme named pmdsu (pendidikan magister menuju doktor untuk sarjana unggul, translated as master's programme to doctorate for excellent scholars). this initiative aims to accelerate the academic journey of exceptional undergraduates, enabling them to fast-track their master’s and doctoral degree completion under the mentorship of experienced supervisors. it is expected that this program article info abst ract article history received: july 19, 2024 revised: august 26, 2024 accepted: august 28, 2024 students in fast-track postgraduate programmes face unique challenges, including intense academic pressure, role management difficulties, and high expectations for research output. this study, using the selfdetermination theory (sdt) framework, specifically investigated good practices of supervisory strategies to improve postgraduate student well-being and academic performance in such accelerated programs. we collected data through online focus group discussions (fgds) with 264 supervisors from various academic fields and then analysed the data using thematic analysis. we incorporated expert review, fgds facilitator guidance, and rigorous data validation processes to ensure trustworthiness. the findings reveal several critical challenges students face, including academic, self-management, relationship, financial, and program-related difficulties, highlighting areas where enhanced supervisory support is crucial. furthermore, we found that supervisors assist students by providing essential academic information, offering structured guidance, and fostering a supportive environment. these findings can guide improved supervision strategies in a postgraduate fast-track programme. keywords fast-track programme postgraduate students self-determination theory supervisor’s support mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 204 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) hari setyowibowo et al. (supervising success: strategies for supporting fast-track postgraduate students in indonesia) could expedite the production of high-quality research and foster academic excellence. furthermore, the pmdsu programme is designed to cultivate a new generation of highly skilled researchers, thereby enhancing indonesia’s competitive edge on the global stage (ministry of education, n.d.). despite the potential benefits of fast-track postgraduate programs, students enrolled in such programs face unique and often overwhelming challenges (almasri et al., 2022; barry et al., 2018; bireda, 2015; castelló et al., 2017; sverdlik et al., 2018). in the pmdsu program, a master's and doctorate typically take six years to complete and are condensed into four years. during this shorter timeframe, pmdsu students must conduct and publish high-quality research while excellently meeting their academic responsibilities (ministry of education, n.d.). even in a typical master's programme, postgraduate students encounter various challenges, including mastering complex topics and excelling in scientific writing, all while maintaining personal well-being in the face of intense academic pressures (bireda, 2015). managing demanding academic requirements, juggling family responsibilities, and navigating role conflicts are everyday stressors that students face and, in the end, can contribute to burnout (castelló et al., 2017; sverdlik et al., 2018). furthermore, financial constraints and feelings of isolation often compound these challenges, leading to psychological issues like anxiety and depression (almasri et al., 2022; barry et al., 2018; bireda, 2015). students' relationships with their supervisors are another crucial challenge for postgraduate students. a good relationship can help increase students' determination to complete their research, while a discrepancy could lead to more confusion and stress (sverdlik et al., 2018). previous studies have underscored the crucial role of adequate supervisory support in helping students overcome these obstacles and complete their postgraduate degree programmes (devos et al., 2015; rigler et al., 2017; wollast et al., 2023). according to selfdetermination theory (sdt), individuals will likely flourish in environments that meet their fundamental psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness (ryan & deci, 2022). in the context of postgraduate education, adequate supervision should address autonomy, competence, and relatedness needs by offering structured guidance, emotional support, and opportunities for meaningful academic engagement (devos et al., 2015). for example, supervisors should empower their students by granting them autonomy to determine their work. this autonomy can foster a sense of responsibility and ownership, increasing motivation and productivity. simultaneously, supervisors must boost students’ sense of competence by providing constructive feedback. furthermore, reassuring students during difficult times can help students acknowledge supervisors’ care for their studies (devos et al., 2015). previous research on doctoral supervision has also identified the key factors for a successful supervisor & student relationship, including clear communication of expectations, regular and constructive feedback, and the establishment of a supportive academic community (hospel & galand, 2016; rigler et al., 2017). however, most of these studies have been conducted in western contexts, where educational norms, cultural values, and academic systems are distinct from non-western countries (hassan et al., 2010). in indonesia, hierarchical cultural norms play a significant role in shaping the student-supervisor relationship. as the teacher-centred culture is strong in asia, supervisors have greater power and authority, potentially limiting students’ sense of autonomy and agency in their research (gong et al., 2021; hofstede, 2011). this dynamic can be at odds with the egalitarian and autonomous approach to postgraduate supervision commonly encouraged in western settings, creating unique challenges for indonesian students. in contrast to western cultures, which often prioritise individualism and encourage students to take the initiative, indonesian students may feel uncomfortable asserting their humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 205 hari setyowibowo et al. (supervising success: strategies for supporting fast-track postgraduate students in indonesia) preferences or questioning their supervisors’ guidance. this situation can hinder open communication and may limit the effectiveness of supervisory support, particularly for students struggling to meet the demands of a fast-track program (devos et al., 2015). therefore, this study addresses the gap in the existing literature by exploring the specific challenges faced by fast-track postgraduate students in indonesia and identifying supervisory strategies that can best support these students. focusing on fast-track students in indonesia, this study offers a novel contribution to the literature by investigating the experience of accelerated programme supervision, specifically in a non-western, accelerated academic context, which has been largely underexplored. this perspective holds the key to uncovering new insights and potential solutions that could prevent students from dropping out of their accelerated programme and promote their academic excellence. for these reasons, this study aims to identify good practices of supervision strategy to support students in dealing with the challenges associated with fast-tracked postgraduate education. the study also outlines recommendations for enhancing supervisory support in accelerated programmes like pmdsu. method study design this study employed a qualitative design with a semi-structured group interview approach, using focus group discussions (fgds) to gather various experiences and strategies from the pmdsu supervisors (hammarberg et al., 2016; shafie et al., 2022). using fgd, the data collected is more profound due to the discussion and arguments happening in each group (shafie et al., 2022). the fgds were conducted online using a video conference method to accommodate participants' geographical dispersion while maintaining the data quality (shafie et al., 2022; woodyatt et al., 2016). before the fgds, a focus group discussion guide was created by the researcher to be used as a guide for the facilitators. semi-structured interview questions were also prepared, with finding supervisors' best practices in mentoring their students as the main objective. to ensure dependability, the fgd guide was reviewed by a psychologist first and revised accordingly before being shared with the facilitators (shafie et al., 2022). briefing sessions were also conducted for each facilitator group as the facilitator's role is critical to ensure a smooth and consistent discussion process (nyumba et al., 2018). these sessions provided facilitators with detailed instructions on how to use the fgd guide and manage the online discussions. during the session, two main questions are being discussed. the questions discussed in the fgds were: (1) what are the academic and non-academic challenges you commonly encounter among pmdsu students? (2) what are your good practices for assisting the pmdsu students in overcoming these difficulties? ethical considerations were addressed by obtaining informed consent from all participants before the focus group discussion sessions (sim & waterfield, 2019). participants were assured of the confidentiality of their responses, and all data were anonymised to protect their identity and were treated as group data (sim & waterfield, 2019). participants were also informed about the session recording and allowed to opt out if uncomfortable. to ensure data privacy, the fgds’ video recording data has been stored in a protected cloud folder that only researchers can access (carter et al., 2021). lastly, the written recordings of the focus group discussions were shared with the participants to guarantee there was no sensitive or wrong information. 206 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) hari setyowibowo et al. (supervising success: strategies for supporting fast-track postgraduate students in indonesia) participants and facilitators the participants of this study were experienced pmdsu supervisors who have been supervisors for one or more pmdsu batches. participants were then searched and selected using a purposive sampling method within a qualitative study where researchers can screen people with specific knowledge about a topic (rai & thapa, 2019). in this case, the researcher then collected a list of supervisors who supervised more than one batch of pmdsu from the ministry of education and contacted them to ensure their availability. a total of 234 participants were collected, 73 females and 161 males. most participants (204) were professors, while the rest were associate professors (30). the participants were divided into 30 groups, each with 6–8 participants. the fgds were led by 30 facilitators who are also experienced supervisors who have been supervising pmdsu students for more than one batch. the fgd facilitators consist of seven females and 23 males. among the facilitators, 29 were professors, and one was an associate professor. data collection and analysis the fgds were conducted via zoom, which used its breakout room feature to create a conducive environment for small group discussions. miro and google docs were used for real-time note-taking and collaboration. each fgd session was facilitated by a senior supervisor who deeply understood the context and could guide the discussions effectively (nyumba et al., 2018). furthermore, the facilitator ensures the discussion is visually recorded via zoom and written via miro or google docs. to analyse the data, the researcher conducted a thematic analysis of the fgd results across all groups. thematic analysis is a process of understanding data by identifying patterns (braun & clarke, 2022). several steps were taken, adapted from castleberry and nolen (2018): (1) compiling. this is the initial step where the raw data is compiled and cleaned to increase its readability, removing any blank data or typing mistakes. it should be noted that during the process, we didn’t receive back the data from three facilitators (groups 2, 9, and 25), and they’re labelled “missing.”. due to this situation, the analysis continued with only data from 27 groups. (2) coding. the raw data is reviewed in this stage, and relevant information is tagged with labels or “codes.” the authors used colours and name labels to differentiate each data. (3) identify themes. once the data has been coded, they’re grouped into several themes. themes represent patterns or topics that come up repeatedly across different codes. each theme also has its own colour that represents it, and this was done so that the researcher could differentiate the theme groups. (4) interpreting. interpretation means drawing a higher-level conclusion regarding the relationship between all themes and codes. during this process, we developed the general context of the research findings: (5) concluding. the authors related the findings to previous research questions in this final step. results this study revealed two significant findings. first, we identified the numerous challenges that postgraduate students encounter while participating in the fast-track program. these challenges were grouped into distinct themes: academic, self-management, relationship, financial, and program-related issues. secondly, we uncovered supervisors' diverse strategies to support and guide students through their educational journey. these strategies were classified based on the supervisors' supportive actions, such as providing valuable humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 207 hari setyowibowo et al. (supervising success: strategies for supporting fast-track postgraduate students in indonesia) information, fostering an encouraging environment, and offering structured mentorship and guidance. students challenges students face a multitude of challenges during their postgraduate journey. this section provides an overview of the student’s difficulties from the perspective of their supervisors. during the focus group discussion, we asked supervisors to identify the prevalent challenges that hinder their students’ progress toward degree completion. the findings were later classified into four categories. academic challenges. most focus group discussions concurred that students’ inadequate academic skills pose a significant obstacle. supervisors noted that students often lack solid foundational knowledge and struggle with literature comprehension. despite the necessity of proficient english skills for understanding literature, many students reported difficulties reading literature written in english. additionally, students often require assistance to operate laboratory equipment, even though it’s a prominent skill for their study. here are some comments from the fgd: “students have difficulties in describing the novelty of their research” (group 29). “students are not keen on reading literature” (group 29). “students have limited english skills” (group 21). “students lack experience working in a laboratory” (group 1). in addition to the research topic mastery, supervisors also expressed dissatisfaction with students' writing and presenting skills, especially when related to scientific works. one of the supervisors' main concerns was the students’ minimal understanding of research methodologies and difficulties articulating their academic thoughts. students also struggle to analyse their research data, giving poor results. several fgd groups also concluded that the students lacked experience in publishing scientific journals. see the statements that support this conclusion below: “(they have) a weak ability to synthesise (data)” (group 08). “new undergraduate students tend to be less experienced in research and writing” (group 18). “oftentimes, the issues raised do not match the research methods being used” (group 29). self-management challenges. with all the demands coming left and right, supervisors noted that students often struggle to manage their emotions, resulting in low self-confidence and deteriorating mental health. in addition, students were also found to need help with selfregulation and time management. the supervisors shared that they often found students procrastinating on their research cause of their difficulties in regulating themself and prioritising important task. for example, the supervisors pointed out these challenges for students: “stress due to the demands of reputable publications” (group 3). “students find it difficult to divide their time because of other projects outside academics” (group 10). “students are afraid to meet with promoters because of their insecurities.” (group 10). relationship management challenges. as students must spend a lot of time working on their research, balancing academic and relationship demands can be a significant difficulty. often, supervisors find that students become stressed and demotivated due to discord in their relationships. these situations can happen with partners, family, friends, and 208 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) hari setyowibowo et al. (supervising success: strategies for supporting fast-track postgraduate students in indonesia) supervisors. in addition, supervisors also need help managing their relationship with their students; differences in characteristics and communication styles are some of the contributing factors. some of them mentioned that: “the student’s family condition is problematic” (group 07). “there are family problems, so they (the students) cannot complete their studies” (group 29). “there's a barrier like a different culture; (they say) it's scary to meet with the supervisor” (group 16). other fgd groups shared that their students often find themselves in a new social role, such as being a husband or a parent, causing them to hold or stop their studies entirely. “students “disappear” due to marriage or job application” (group 3). “pmdsu students become pregnant before completing their studies, hindering the completion of their studies on time” (group 26). “students want to settle down and get married” (group 28). financial challenges. we discovered that students are still struggling to secure funding for their research, which results in difficulties in continuing their studies. this issue was frequently linked to the economic conditions of the students’ families. some students even sought part-time jobs or paid projects to improve their financial condition. see the related fgd result below: “students disappear due to family economic problems” (group 11). “financial problems” (group 16). programme-related challenges. this issue mainly relates to the clarity of rules and details of the fast-track programme, different policies at each university, and other administrative demands that students face. the differences in institutions that offer master's and doctoral programmes are also difficulties faced by students. for example, the supervisor shared: “(they) faced difficulty in obtaining a visa when conducting collaborative research abroad” (group 27). “there are differences in the study programme policies of each university regarding the master's and doctoral study period in 4 years” (group 15). “the faculty staff does not understand the fast-track programme system.” (group 16). supervisors support in the section after this, we will report on supervisors’ answers to this question, “what are your good practices for assisting the pmdsu awardees in overcoming these difficulties?”. the responses to this question are diverse, proving the magnitude of actions taken to support the postgraduate students. however, after the thematic analysis, we found three commonly used strategies. giving valuable information. based on the data, supervisors support the students by providing them with the necessary resources and helping them establish relevant connections. it includes connecting students with other institutions or funders. the supervisors also give information regarding research grants or funds and share relevant research topics. furthermore, supervisors with lab-related topics often assist students in finding alternative lab tools or materials. for example, the supervisors' fgd result stated that: “we contact partners (in other universities) and implement collaborative research schemes” (group 19). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 209 hari setyowibowo et al. (supervising success: strategies for supporting fast-track postgraduate students in indonesia) “we also planned out a tentative research theme beforehand so that students received guidance to carry it out” (group 15). “(attempted to search for) other tools with similar characterisation have been tried, although they are not very exact” (group 18). providing structured guidance. we also identified that much of supervisors’ support revolves around giving doctoral students structured and comprehensive guidance throughout their doctoral journey. this includes providing students with plans to improve their topic mastery, such as sitting in on classes, conducting literature reviews, or attending seminars on related materials. there are also efforts to improve students’ skills, whether related to reading and writing papers, personal skills such as self-regulation and time management, or complementary skills like english and lab proficiency. we also found that supervisors try to make their advisory sessions more structured by asking students to write clear action notes after each meeting. some examples they shared are: “we practised reading and reviewing papers & presentations weekly” (group 01). “the overseas internship has been planned from the beginning; where to go and what to do has been thought of” (group 15). “we provided tutorials held specifically for subjects considered difficult for students” (group 18). creating a supportive environment. besides tangible support, the data also shows that supervisors are trying to create a supportive environment for the students. the finding includes supervisors’ personalised and emotional-focused communication approach, especially when their students face motivational problems. it also includes supervisors’ actions to facilitate peer support by creating pmdsu awardees’ whatsapp groups and creating sharing sessions between students. as some supervisors shared in the fgd: “during the consultation, we open with other things first (small talks) before jumping to the material” (group 10). “we carry out a group sharing session to provide support” (group 3). “(we) engaged students in many group activities with other pmdsu fellows” (group 1). discussion this study offers critical insights into the challenges fast-track postgraduate students face in indonesia and the supervisory strategies that support their academic journey. by applying sdt as a framework, the discussion enhances our understanding of how supervisors can effectively help students manage these challenges, which have significant implications for student well-being and academic performance. pmdsu students encounter various academic challenges, including a lack of fundamental knowledge in specific research areas, difficulties with scientific writing, and limited proficiency in english. the demanding nature of the pmdsu program requires students to quickly master advanced content, which is made even more challenging by their limited time for research and publication. previous studies on early-career researchers and postgraduate students have documented similar issues, where the pressure to produce highquality academic work within a constrained timeframe leads to significant stress (cornwall et al., 2019). previously, bireda (2015) also identified that students often express a need for improved digital literacy and academic writing skills based on supervisor feedback. the findings of this study mirror the existing literature, highlighting the heightened difficulties that fast-track students face in learning and applying research methodologies, writing good articles, and publishing their work, which is often essential for academic advancement and 210 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) hari setyowibowo et al. (supervising success: strategies for supporting fast-track postgraduate students in indonesia) program completion. these findings align with our study, emphasizing the steep learning curve students face in mastering research methodologies, writing scientific articles, and publishing their work tasks that are essential for academic success and program completion. in addition to academic challenges, fast-track students also face significant selfmanagement challenges, particularly with prioritizing tasks and regulating emotions. many students struggle to balance the rigorous academic demands of fast-track programs with personal and professional responsibilities, leading to procrastination, stress, and self-doubt. these self-management concerns are well-documented in postgraduate education literature, where the psychological burden of managing multiple priorities contributes to low selfconfidence, leading to burnout, anxiety, and depression (almasri et al., 2022; bireda, 2015; castelló et al., 2017; sverdlik et al., 2018). the compressed timeline of fast-track programs intensifies these challenges, limiting students' ability to manage workloads effectively, further exacerbating stress, and undermining their confidence. another prevalent issue is relationship management, particularly in balancing academic demands with family, friends, and supervisors. students reported feeling isolated due to the demands of their academic workload, leading to strained relationships and a sense of disconnection from their support networks. this finding aligns with previous studies highlighting the importance of solid student-supervisor relationships for academic success (le roux, 2018; rigler et al., 2017; wollast et al., 2023). in indonesia’s collectivist culture, familial expectations and responsibilities add another layer of complexity, as students are often required to maintain traditional family roles while pursuing their academic goals (utari, 2023). the additional emotional burden of managing these competing demands can amplify feelings of isolation and stress, making it difficult for students to sustain healthy relationships. moreover, many students face financial challenges, even with scholarship support. although the pmdsu program offers funding, students must often cover additional research expenses, such as conference participation, data collection, and travel. this financial strain can significantly affect students' ability to focus on their studies, as they may need to seek external funding or part-time employment to cover these costs (rigler et al., 2017). research has shown that financial difficulties are a key factor contributing to postgraduate student attrition, as students with limited financial resources are more likely to experience stress and disengagement from their studies (bireda, 2015; greene, 2015; rigler et al., 2017). our study confirms these trends, as financial concerns emerged as a significant stressor for students in the pmdsu. finally, participants reported program-related challenges, particularly navigating university policies, program requirements, and administrative processes. frequently cited obstacles to progress reports included confusion regarding institutional guidelines, visa issues for conducting research abroad, and difficulties obtaining necessary resources (e.g., lab equipment or research materials). this finding aligns with a previous study that revealed administrative barriers could hinder students' performance from completing their research on time, creating additional stress and potentially delaying program completion (ekpoh, 2016). supervisors play a crucial role in helping fast-track students overcome various challenges by employing three primary strategies: providing valuable information, offering structured guidance, and fostering a supportive environment. these strategies align with self-determination theory (sdt), which emphasizes three core psychological needs for student motivation and well-being: autonomy, competence, and relatedness (ryan & deci, 2022). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 211 hari setyowibowo et al. (supervising success: strategies for supporting fast-track postgraduate students in indonesia) the first support strategy gives valuable information. supervisors acted as crucial sources of information, helping students navigate academic resources, research networks, and institutional policies. this guidance was essential for students in fast-track programs, who often have limited time to identify and utilise the resources they need to succeed. by giving students relevant materials, supervisors could help prevent students from dropping out by enhancing their engagement and satisfaction (blanchard & haccoun, 2020). students are also free to filter and choose the most needed information. any opportunities for students to make their own choices and initiatives are crucial, as they fulfil one’s need for autonomy and foster student confidence (devos et al., 2015; litalien & guay, 2015; wollast et al., 2023). however, it should be noted that over-controlling the information used by postgraduate students can have the opposite effect (wollast et al., 2023). for example, they can pressure students to use the supervisor’s preferred approach (blanchard & haccoun, 2020; devos et al., 2015). ideally, providing information must be accompanied by a rational explanation and respect for the student’s perspectives (devos et al., 2015). by providing students with access to academic literature, research methodologies, and professional networks, supervisors helped students build their autonomyan essential element of sdt (blanchard & haccoun, 2020). the second strategy, providing structured guidance, is crucial for helping students develop the competencies needed to meet the rigorous academic demands of the pmdsu program. the supervisor provides structured guidance to support pmdsu students throughout their educational journey, including plans to enhance research understanding, skill improvement, and structured advisory sessions. this strategy strengthened previous findings that structured guidance is crucial for developing students' competencies and improving students' well-being (hospel & galand, 2016; wollast et al., 2023). students often acknowledged their academic shortcomings (bireda, 2015) and preferred a supervisor who could provide structured support to guide them (olivier et al., 2021). with clear outcome expectations and detailed directions for each activity, students can slowly develop their skills, fostering a sense of competence in themselves(devos et al., 2015; hospel & galand, 2016). specifically, proper constructive feedback, clear writing guidelines, regular supervision, and in-depth responses to their enquiries can achieve structured guidance (devos et al., 2015; olivier et al., 2021; rigler et al., 2017). supervisors could maintain students' motivation and improve their engagement by doing all these things (hospel & galand, 2016; olivier et al., 2021). the third strategy was creating a supportive environment. supervisors are working to establish a nurturing environment for students. this involves personalised and emotionally focused communication, particularly when students encounter motivation challenges. supervisors also make efforts to foster peer support by creating whatsapp groups for pmdsu awardees and organising sharing sessions among students. emotional and social support from supervisors was critical in helping students manage the stress and emotional challenges of the fast-track program. it allows them to lift their emotional burden, and by doing so, it buffers the negative effects of stress, lowers anxiety levels, and improves emotional well-being (blanchard & haccoun, 2020; greene, 2015; sverdlik et al., 2018). supervisors in this study actively worked to create a sense of community among their students, often facilitating peer support networks and encouraging collaboration. these efforts were particularly important in the indonesian context, where collectivist cultural values emphasise the importance of social harmony and interdependence (hofstede, 2011). devos et al. (2015) also mentioned the importance of supervisors treating students with compassion, particularly when they're facing stressful times. taking a little time to show interest and listen to their problem can be crucial to solving their emotional problem. 212 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) hari setyowibowo et al. (supervising success: strategies for supporting fast-track postgraduate students in indonesia) however, wollast et al. (2023) noted that once students' need for control and structure is satisfied, emotional support becomes a secondary necessity. therefore, supervisors should prioritise providing structured support with relevant information before focusing on emotional support, reassuring students, and enhancing their confidence in the process. based on the discussion, it is strongly recommended that both supervisors and universities take proactive steps to enhance the support provided to pmdsu students. specifically, we are looking at strategies to provide the three basic psychological factors: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. supervisors could initiate the process by providing students with a curated list of recommended literature to foster autonomy. in tandem, universities and supervisors should contemplate implementing comprehensive research writing guidelines and meticulously structured workshops. these initiatives would serve to enhance students’ academic skills while fulfilling their need for competence. moreover, establishing a nurturing environment, such as research groups, can aid students in managing emotional difficulties. it also fosters a sense of relatedness, thereby creating a supportive and collaborative academic community. this study has its limitations. firstly, this research attempts to understand the types of support supervisors provide from the supervisors’ perspective. given the nature of social support, which can differ between the giver and receiver, there is a need for additional research that examines the types of support required from the student’s viewpoint. secondly, the data collection process was conducted collectively without considering the gender of the supervisor or the student. consequently, the research findings are discussed in a general, non-gendered context. for future research, the authors recommend further exploration into the relationship between gender, the differences in student difficulties, and the support provided by supervisors. this could bring a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics in fast-track postgraduate programmes. a mixed-methods approach, including qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys or statistical analyses, would also help confirm the results across a larger, more diverse sample and give more helpful information for improving fast-track program supervision. conclusion this study has identified several key challenges fast-track postgraduate students face, including academic, self-management, relationship, financial, and program-related difficulties. the findings underscore the crucial role of adequate supervisory support, particularly in accelerated academic settings. striking a balance between autonomy and structured support empowers students to become more independent while ensuring they receive the academic and emotional guidance needed to succeed. moreover, a supportive environment helps mitigate the psychological and social pressures often impeding student progress. these findings are essential for improving supervisory practices in indonesia, where hierarchical cultural norms can influence the student-supervisor dynamic. enhancing these practices will empower institutions to guide the next generation of scholars more effectively, promoting their academic success and overall well-being. future research should investigate these dynamics from the students' perspectives, employing a mixed-method approach to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the supervisory process acknowledgment we wish to convey our heartfelt appreciation to all the facilitators and participants involved in the data collection process and to the pmdsu management team for their oversight. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 213 hari setyowibowo et al. (supervising success: strategies for supporting fast-track postgraduate students in indonesia) declarations author contribution. the following are each author's contributions to this study. hs led the research planning, data collection, processing, and writing. nni coordinated the data processing and wrote the initial draft. jdl and ak coordinated the data collection process and contributed to the review of article drafts. h and naw are in charge of the review and quality control of the article. funding statement. this study was supported by the indonesian ministry of education, culture, research, and technology in order to run the data collection process. conflict of interest. the authors reported no potential conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this article. references almasri, n., read, b., & vandeweerdt, c. 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(2016). in-person versus online focus group discussions. qualitative health research, 26(6), 741–749. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732316631510 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 22 (1), february 2025, 102-110 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas 10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1000 impact of emotional intelligence and perceived self-efficacy on the implementation of community policing practice okoka happiness1,*, kheswa j. g1, vakpa iliya2 1department of psychology, university of fort hare, dikeni, south africa 2department of psychology, nasarawa state university, keffi, nigeria corresponding author: okokah@gmail.com this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction community policing is a philosophy and practice that emphasizes the collaboration between law enforcement agencies and the community to identify and solve problems. in nigeria, the implementation of community policing has been challenging due to various factors. community policing, a strategy that emphasizes collaboration between law enforcement agencies and the community to address crime and disorder, has gained significant attention in recent years. community policing is a philosophy that promotes organizational strategies, which support the systematic use of partnerships and problem-solving techniques, to proactively address the immediate conditions that give rise to public safety issues such as crime, social disorder, and fear of crime. community policing has been defined as a “philosophy, management style and organizational strategy” with the end goal of building community relationships and not only solving crime but addressing the causes of crime within a community. community policing involves anybody of people (whether that be schools, article info abst ract article history received august 24, 2024 revised january 6, 2025 accepted january 24, 2025 this study aimed to investigate the association between emotional intelligence, perceived self-efficacy (pse) and implementation of community policing practice among police officers in the nigeria police force. this study involved 107 police officers as participants who were selected through purposive random sampling. data were collected using emotional intelligence, perceived self-efficacy (pse) and implementation of community policing practice scales. data were analysed using a regression analysis and partial correlation technique to test the hypotheses. the study found weak, counterintuitive negative correlations between both emotional intelligence and perceived selfefficacy and community policing implementation in nigerian police. emotional intelligence positively associates with implementation, but perceived self-efficacy does not, demanding further context-specific qualitative and longitudinal research to understand these dynamics and improve policing strategies. the study highlights the importance of emotional intelligence and self-efficacy for successful community policing practice among police officers in nigeria. the results imply how the nigeria police force can enhance the officers’ implementation of the community policing practice by managing their self-efficacy and increasing emotional intelligence. keywords emotional intelligence self-efficacy community policing practice police officer mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1000 mailto:okokah@gmail.com https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 103 happiness et. al (impact of emotional intelligence and perceived self-efficacy on the implementation of community policing practice) businesses, residents, community organizations, churches or anyone in the community) collaborating with the police to identify problems within the areas they live and how to solve them. whereas, traditional policing tends to draw from police officers and law enforcement agencies working solely at identifying problems in the community and tackling how to solve them on their own. traditional policing can separate police departments from the communities they serve. departments that use more traditional policing also tend to be more reactive and can create a disconnect with the community. little time is taken to look beyond strategies that will potentially mediate a situation they are placed in without the necessary use of force. in the 1950’s, during the reform era, police were seen as “enforcers” who were called to deal with large riots and social disorder. usually, when things went wrong, whether large or small, this continued identity and behaviour was used to handle any situation presented. community policing challenges this approach by creating a dynamic within law enforcement officials to build trust and relationships with their communities, dismantling this in-and-out “enforcer” approach. more understanding is needed to establish this philosophy within police departments to create it as an overall staple in police response tactics. this study examined internal factors that are believed to contribute to the success of the implementation of community policing among nigerian police officers that have not been examined before. community policing, a philosophy that emphasizes collaboration between law enforcement and the community, has emerged as a promising strategy for addressing crime and disorder. however, the successful implementation of community policing hinges on the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours of police officers. important factors that can influence the successful implementation of community policing are the perceived self-efficacy of police officers and the ability to manage their emotions. emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions in order to assist and understand emotions and emotional meanings (salovey and mayer (1997). any array of personal, emotional and social abilities and skills that influence one’s ability to succeed in coping with the environment. it addresses the emotional, personal, social and survival dimensions of intelligence that are more important for daily functioning than traditional aspects of intelligence. goleman (1995) identified the five 'domains ‘of emotional intelligence as: knowing one own’s emotions, managing emotions, motivating oneself, recognizing and understanding other people's emotions and managing relationships, i.e. managing the emotions of others. individuals with high emotional intelligence are usually successful in most things they do as they're the ones that others want on their team (goleman, 1995). emotional intelligence plays an important role in ensuring success in the workplace and it should be nurtured and practised by all parties facing the challenges of globalization and competition in business. then, it is also a positive encouragement to create human relationships that can lead to the achievement of common goals and organizational effectiveness (chong & zainal, 2024). according to bar-on (2010) emotional intelligence makes individuals to effectively understand of their selves and others; they usually have a good relationship with other people and are able to adapt and cope with their environment as well as become more successful in dealing with environmental demands. previous research found that emotional intelligence was associated with higher employee performance, work engagement and job satisfaction (sarangi & vats, 2015; sharmin et al., 2024; vratskikh et al., 2016). other factors that influence the successful implementation of community policing is self-efficacy. self-efficacy is defined as people’s belief in their capabilities to organize, execute and achieve success in a particular task (bandura, 1991). self-efficacy belief is the humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 104 happiness et. al (impact of emotional intelligence and perceived self-efficacy on the implementation of community policing practice) trust people have in themselves that they are capable of performing in a certain manner to attain a set goal (bandura, 1991). perceived efficacy plays a key role in human functioning because it affects behaviour not only directly, but by its impact on other determinants such as goals and aspirations, outcome expectations and perception of impediments and opportunities in the social environment (bandura, 2001). self-efficacy also influences the course of action people choose to pursue the challenges and goals they set for themselves and their commitment to them, how much effort they put forth in given endeavours, the outcomes they expect their efforts to produce and how long they persevere in the face of obstacles (bandura, 1991). self-efficacy influences the emotional response of individuals. self-efficacy beliefs on several different levels, varying in psychological character from general self-efficacy which appears to be interchangeable with self-confidence in one’s competence broadly defined; to domain self-confidence to perform the tasks involved in pursuing a career; and to more narrowly defined domain confidence to perform specific tasks (lucas et al., 2006). previous research found that high self-efficacy is associated with a range of positive outcomes, including job performance, effort, work engagement and organizational commitment, work quality and quantity as well as negative associations with negative outcomes such as tiredness and absenteeism (anfajaya & rahayu, 2020; chan et al., 2017; mcdonald & siegall, 1992; seo & ilies, 2009). despite numerous efforts to implement community policing in nigeria, its effectiveness has been hindered by various challenges. those challenges required individuals to be able to manage their own and other emotions as well as believe in their own ability to do their job which impacts their ability to effectively engage with the community, build trust, and implement community policing strategies. specifically, this study seeks to address the following research objectives: to investigate the relationship between police officers' emotional intelligence, perceived self-efficacy and the implementation of community policing principles within the nigerian police force. thus, the hypotheses we proposed are 1) there is a positive correlation between police officers' perceived self-efficacy (pse) in community policing and the extent to which community policing principles are implemented in their daily practice within the nigerian police force; 2)there is a positive correlation between police officers' emotional intelligence (ei) and the degree to which community policing principles are implemented in their daily practices within the nigerian police force. method research design this study employed a quantitative approach examining the relationship between emotional intelligence, perceived self-efficacy (predictor variables) and the implementation of community policing practice (outcome variable) among police officers in nigeria. participants the population of this study consists of 6,199 police personnel in kaduna state source: police headquarters. the majority of the police personnel are male, while a few are female. most are between the ages of 20 and 40, while a few are 40 and over. the sample size for the study was 107 participants, the sample will be made up of 63 males and 44 females that was determined using formula (krejcie & morgan, 1970). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 105 happiness et. al (impact of emotional intelligence and perceived self-efficacy on the implementation of community policing practice) procedures the ethical committee of the university of fort hare, south africa has granted approval for this study on 9 september 2022 (ref. no.khe)041soko01). these study only recruited police officers who volunteered and were used for the study and copies of the questionnaires were administered to them. instruments in this study, three different questionnaires were used. they are the emotional intelligence scale (eis), the self-efficacy scale (ses) and community policing practice scale ( cpps). the emotional intelligence scale (eis) is a self-reported inventory designed to assess the emotional intelligence of people, including those of police personnel. it is based on a model proposed by schutte et al., (2007), which includes four aspects of emotional intelligence: the appraisal of emotion in self and others, the expression of emotion, the regulation of emotion in self and others, and the utilisation of emotion in problem-solving. it was validated and used in nigeria by mwantu et al., (2013). the eis consists of 33 items, each of which was rated using a five-point likert-type scale. this scale ranges from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). the survey can be completed in maximum of ten minutes. the self-efficacy scale (sses) by tsai et al., (2014) is a questionnaire that measures someone’s self-belief in their ability to build a sense of personal strength as they apply it to their day-to-day life. the self-efficacy scale is another instrument that was used for the study. it was designed to provide information that could help determine the level of perceived efficacy of junior class ii students in the study of integrated science. the scale was generated by the researcher with the help of an expert in educational psychology after the review of relevant literature. it is a four point rating scale. it ranges from strongly agree (sa= 4), agree (a=3), disagree (d=2), and strongly disagree (sd=1). police-community interaction survey (pcis) develop by rosenbaum et al., (2017) to capture both officer and community perspectives, addressing key elements such as officer engagement in community events, departmental support for proactive problem-solving, officer comfort with problem-solving techniques, perceived supervisory support, and the integration of community feedback into policing strategies; simultaneously, it assesses community perceptions of police visibility, responsiveness, trust, communication, and involvement in problem-solving. to ensure comprehensive data collection, the questionnaire recommends incorporating open-ended questions for qualitative insights, contextual adaptations, and rigorous reliability and validity testing, ultimately providing a robust tool for assessing the effectiveness of community policing practices. (scale: not at all, slightly, moderately, very much, extremely). data analysis regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses. results the partial correlation analysis revealed a statistically significant, albeit weak, negative relationship between emotional intelligence and the implementation of community policing principles. specifically, a beta coefficient of -.164 and a significance value of .012 indicate that as emotional intelligence increases, the implementation of these principles tends to humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 106 happiness et. al (impact of emotional intelligence and perceived self-efficacy on the implementation of community policing practice) decrease. however, the r-squared value of .024 suggests that emotional intelligence accounts for only 2.4% of the variance in community policing implementation, highlighting a weak association despite its statistical significance. similarly, the result showed that perceived self-efficacy and the implementation of community policing principles demonstrates a statistically significant, yet weak, negative relationship. a beta coefficient of -.141 and a highly significant p-value of .001 indicate that as perceived self-efficacy increases, the implementation of community policing principles tends to decrease. however, the r-squared value of .039 signifies that perceived self-efficacy explains only 3.9% of the variance in community policing implementation, revealing a weak association, though slightly stronger than that observed with emotional intelligence. result of the linear regresion analyis showed a statistically significant overall model (f = 12.793, p < .001) where emotional intelligence and perceived self-efficacy jointly predict the implementation of community policing principles, though the model only accounts for 6.5% of the variance (r² = .065). r² suggests that other, unmeasured variables significantly influence the implementation of community policing practices. see table 1 table 1 the correlation between emotional intelligence, perceived self-efficacy and the implementation of community policing principles t variables r r2 f df p constant 0.254 0.065 12.793 2,371 0.000 emotional intelligence perceived selfefficacy discussion the study aimed to examine the relationship between emotional intelligence, perceived selfefficacy and implementation of community policing principles among police officers in nigeria. the finding of a statistically significant yet weak, negative relationship between emotional intelligence and the implementation of community policing principles presents a complex scenario. while the linear regression analysis confirms a statistically significant effect, the practical significance is limited. this indicates that emotional intelligence, while showing a detectable negative correlation, explains only a small fraction of the variability in community policing implementation. this suggests that other potentially unmeasured variables are likely to exert a more substantial influence on the adoption and execution of these policing strategies (cohen, 1988). the negative direction of the relationship, wherein higher emotional intelligence is associated with decreased implementation of community policing principles, is counterintuitive and requires careful consideration. it may point to a potential disconnect between the theoretical benefits of emotional intelligence in fostering community engagement and the practical realities of policing (goleman, 1995). perhaps officers with higher emotional intelligence perceive barriers or challenges in implementing these principles, or possibly, they prioritize alternative policing strategies that they deem more effective. this finding necessitates a deeper exploration of the context within which these principles are applied, including the organizational culture, training, and available resources (skogan, 2004). ultimately, while the statistical significance of the finding cannot be dismissed (field, 2018), the need for further research to identify and understand the more dominant factors that impact the implementation of community policing principles. future studies could humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 107 happiness et. al (impact of emotional intelligence and perceived self-efficacy on the implementation of community policing practice) benefit from incorporating qualitative methods to explore the perspectives of officers and community members, as well as examining the influence of organizational and systemic factors (bryman, 2016). by broadening the scope of inquiry, researchers can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics at play and develop more effective strategies for enhancing community policing practices. a statistically significant but weak negative correlation was found between perceived self-efficacy and community policing implementation. this indicates that while a reliable association exists, perceived self-efficacy explains only 3.9% of the variance, suggesting other influential factors are at play (cohen, 1988). the counterintuitive nature of this negative correlation, where higher self-efficacy is linked to decreased implementation, necessitates deeper investigation. it could reflect officers favoring traditional policing methods or systemic barriers hindering community policing despite high self-efficacy (skogan, 2004). given the limited explanatory power of perceived self-efficacy, a broader research approach is crucial. future studies should incorporate qualitative methods to explore officer perspectives and contextual factors like organizational culture and training (bryman, 2016). this will provide a nuanced understanding of the dynamics influencing community policing and facilitate the development of more effective implementation strategies. the result also found that emotional intelligence and perceived self-efficacy collectively predict community policing implementation, though they only explain 6.5% of the variance , highlighting the influence of unmeasured variables (cohen, 1988). emotional intelligence shows a significant positive association, consistent with its role in effective interpersonal skills (goleman, 1995). conversely, perceived self-efficacy, while negatively related, is not a significant predictor diverging from theoretical expectations and necessitating further exploration of mediating factors. the model's low explanatory power necessitates a broader examination of contextual and organizational factors, such as departmental culture and resource allocation (skogan, 2004). future research should employ qualitative methods to understand officer and community perspectives (bryman, 2016) and longitudinal studies to clarify causal relationships. despite emotional intelligence's significant predictive role, the limited r² underscores the need for a comprehensive, multifaceted approach to enhancing community policing. the findings of this study, revealing statistically significant but weak negative correlations between both emotional intelligence and perceived self-efficacy with community policing implementation, carry several key implications for policing practices in nigeria. firstly, the weak r-squared values suggest that relying solely on these psychological factors for effective community policing implementation is insufficient. this highlights the need to consider a wider array of variables, such as organizational culture, training, and resource allocation, in developing and implementing community policing strategies. practically, it means that police leadership should not assume that officers with high emotional intelligence or self-efficacy will automatically excel in community policing roles. secondly, the counterintuitive negative correlations demand a re-evaluation of current training and implementation models. the possibility that officers with higher emotional intelligence or self-efficacy perceive barriers to community policing or favor traditional methods suggests a potential disconnect between theoretical benefits and practical application. this necessitates a review of training programs to ensure they adequately address these perceptions and equip officers with the skills and knowledge to overcome these challenges. the study underscores the importance of contextual factors in shaping policing outcomes. future research should prioritize qualitative methodologies to understand the humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 108 happiness et. al (impact of emotional intelligence and perceived self-efficacy on the implementation of community policing practice) perspectives of officers and community members. this will provide a deeper understanding of the systemic and organizational barriers that hinder effective community policing. policymakers and police leadership should utilize these insights to develop more contextually relevant and effective strategies, potentially leading to improved policecommunity relations and enhanced public safety.in essence, the implications of this study call for a multi-faceted approach to improving community policing in nigeria, emphasizing the need for comprehensive training, contextual understanding, and a shift away from relying solely on individual psychological traits. conclusion this study found weak, negative links between emotional intelligence/self-efficacy and community policing in nigeria. the low r-squared suggests other factors heavily influence implementation. the negative correlation is counterintuitive, demanding further contextual exploration. while the model demonstrates a statistically significant relationship between emotional intelligence and perceived self-efficacy in predicting community policing implementation, the low r² suggests other factors heavily influence outcomes. emotional intelligence shows a significant positive association, but perceived self-efficacy does not, demanding further investigation. therefore, a comprehensive, multi-faceted approach, incorporating contextual and qualitative analyses, is crucial for enhancing community policing practices. future research should use qualitative methods to investigate officer perspectives and systemic barriers. this will provide a more comprehensive understanding and improve community policing practices. acknowledgment the authors thank all participants who willingly took part in this study. declarations funding statement. this research is supported by the university of fort hare (grant number: rec-270710-028-ra level 01 transparency. the authors confirm that the manuscript is an honest, accurate, and transparent account of the study; that no vital features of the study have been omitted; and that any discrepancies from the study as planned have been explained. this study followed all ethical practices during writing. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. references anfajaya, m. a., & rahayu, a. 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(2016). the impact of emotional intelligence on job performance via the mediating role of job satisfaction. international journal of business and management, 11(2), 69-91. https://doi.org/10.5539/ijbm.v11n2p69. https://doi.org/10.4236/jhrss.2024.122013 https://doi.org/10.5539/ijbm.v11n2p69 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 22 (2), august 2025, 102-114 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1421 how does psychological well-being mediate the relationship between resilience and depression among muslim students? ahmad muhammad diponegoro, herlina siwi widiana faculty of psychology, universitas ahmad dahlan, indonesia corresponding author: ahmad.diponegoro@psy.uad.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction depression is the largest mental health challenge in the world. the global health-related burden has only become increasingly prevalent since the covid-19 pandemic (covid-19 mental disorders collaborators, 2021). according to a ministry of health report in indonesia, depression was already affecting 6.1 percent of the indonesian population before the pandemic (kementrian kesehatan, 2018). moreover, depressive symptoms have been found to be significantly associated with suicide attempts in asean countries (ahmed et al., 2017; chee et al., 2022). depression is a common problem among student worldwide. the problem has been observed across universities in various continents has increased significantly in the last decade (duffy et al., 2019; oswalt et al., 2020). depression rates among university students in chile rose markedly, from 37.1% prior to the pandemic to 63.1% in the aftermath (martinez-libano et al., 2023). among medical students worldwide, the prevalence increased from approximately 25–30% to more than 50% (lin et al., 2024). in indonesia, available articl e inf o abstract article history received: 25 april 2025 revised: 2 september accepted: 2 september 2025 depression is a mental health concern that is prevalent worldwide, including among university students. this study aims to examine the mediating role of psychological well-being on the relationship between resilience and depression among muslim students in indonesia. two hundred forty muslim students at one islamic college institution participated in this study. participants completed the indonesian version of the center for epidemiological studies depression scale, psychological well-being scale, and connordavidson resilience scale. the results show resilience has a significant negative correlation with depression; the higher the resilience, the lower the depression will be. moreover, the mediation analysis shows that psychological well-being fully mediated the relationship between resilience and depression among muslim students. the relationship between psychological well-being and depression in muslim students who were participants in this research can be explained using the dual continua mental health paradigm. participants tend to have either a high level of psychological wellbeing and depression or low levels of psychological well-being and depression. keywords depression students psychological well-being resilience mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1421 mailto:ahmad.diponegoro@psy.uad.ac.id https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 103 ahmad muhammad diponegoro et al. (resilience and depression among muslim students: the mediating…) studies have reported depression rates among university students varying between 17.3% and 43.9%, depending on the population and instruments used (andriani & fitriani, 2022; astuti & wibowo, 2023; fransiska & widiastuti, 2020; pramesti & haryanto, 2022; putri et al., 2022; rahmawati & nurhasanah, 2021; wulandari & susanti, 2024). depression in students is associated with various academic demands (nam et al., 2010). the demand to manage time, read and understand large amount of course material, along with uncertainties about their future and family and social issues, can significantly impact their ability to learn and perform well academically (ribeiro et al., 2023). therefore, the consequences of depression will affect students' attitudes, behavior, and interpersonal relationships (january et al., 2018). moreover, the prevalence of depression among college students is influenced by the complex transition from late adolescence to early adulthood period (pedrelli et al., 2015). various teaching methods and academic requirements can increase depression among students from school to higher education. entering university can make individuals feel distant from their families and as a result student face new stressful situations that require adaptation. new students face numerous challenges such as transitioning to a free environment, new responsibilities, academic pressures, and financial challenges (negash et al., 2021; pham et al., 2019). students are part of a group that is vulnerable to depression. students throughout the world, from asia to america, including indonesia, tend to experience symptoms of depression (kaloeti et al., 2019). symptoms of depression in students were reported in studies in pakistan (khan et al., 2021), japan (nguyen et al., 2019), brazil (demenech et al., 2021), south africa (wagner et al., 2022) and libya (abuhadra et al., 2023). depression experienced by students has a negative impact on their quality of life and academic performance (ribeiro et al., 2023). depression prevents students from concentrating and maximizing learning. even suicidal ideation among medical students has been identified as being caused by depression and various depressive symptoms (kumar et al., 2022). many prior studies have explored depression with negatively associated psychological topic such as suicide. however, with the emergence of positive psychology, depression became associated with concepts such as resilience and well-being. resilience and psychological well-being significantly contribute to reducing depressive tendencies in students, operating through both direct influence and indirect processes such as mediation or moderation (yan et al., 2024). resilience is the adaptive ability to maintain an active life despite difficulties and stressful events (herman et al., 2011). in other words, resilience can be understood as the ability to persist in resolving difficulties encountered in various areas of life by overcoming difficulties and, thus, strengthening one's resistance to stress and trauma in the future (sisto et al., 2019). psychological resilience allows society to activate its resources to recover after experiencing adversity, thereby re-establishing a state of balance. therefore, resilience can reduce the risk of depression (dai & smith, 2023). meanwhile, previous research has verified the relationship between resilience and depression (poole et al., 2017). resilience also influences psychological well-being as it is an individual's capacity to bounce back when facing life's adversities. during the covid-19 pandemic in south africa, studies showed a strong relationship between resilience and psychological well-being (sayed et al., 2024). more recent studies among university students showed a relationship between resilience and psychological well-being (chaliawala et al., 2025; sayed et al., 2024). meanwhile, a study during the covid-19 pandemic in turkey showed that there was a relationship between psychological well-being and depression (ceri & cicek, 2021). specifically, a study on students in japan showed that a lack of psychological well-being influenced depression (liu et al., 2009). therefore, psychological well-being is expected to mediate the relationship between resilience and depression. the role of psychological wellbeing as a mediator between resilience and depression in this research is reviewed from the dual continua model of mental health as a theoretical framework (keyes, 2005). 104 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ahmad muhammad diponegoro et al. (how does psychological well-being mediate the relationship between …) recent international studies have examined the prevalence of depression among university students from diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds, offering relevant insights into mental health disparities between muslim and non-muslim populations. a previous study showed that arab and middle eastern students—many presumed muslim—exhibited higher depression rates than their white peers (abuelezam et al., 2022). however, research from sri lanka found that muslim (moor) students reported fewer depressive symptoms compared to predominantly buddhist sinhala students (wickramasinghe et al., 2023). both studies indicate that religious identity and affiliation—particularly among muslim student populations—may intersect with mental health outcomes in complex ways. therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the correlation between resilience, psychological wellbeing, and depression among muslim students in indonesia. the hypothesis proposed is that resilience is negatively associated with depression. additionally, psychological well-being acts as a mediator in the relationship between resilience and depression. method participants a total of 240 muslim students from an islamic college in indonesia took part in this study. participants were drawn from the general muslim university student population, based on the rationale that depression is a mood disorder existing along a continuum that can affect individuals (ayuso-mateos et al., 2010; tebeka et al., 2021). most of the participants were women (73.33%), which is almost three times the number of male participants. all the participants willingly participated in the study by providing their informed consent. materials depression was measured with the center for epidemiologic studies depression scale (cesd). the ces-d was developed to measure depressive symptoms in the general population (radloff, 1977). ces-d consists of twenty items with four answer choices, namely rarely or never (less than one day), some or a little of the time (1-2 days), occasionally or moderate amount of time (3-4 days), most or all of the time (5-7 days). ces-d has been used in research in indonesia (seyle et al., 2013). the level of resilience was measured using the connor-davidson resilience scale (cdrisc). this scale comprises 25 items, rated on a 5-point scale (connor & davidson, 2003). the cd-risc has been found to be a valid and reliable tool for measuring resilience in indonesian adults (azizah et al., 2021). psychological well-being is measured by the psychological well-being scale (pwb). pwb consists of 18 items that measure six dimensions: autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations with others, purpose in life, and self-acceptance (ryff & keyes, 1995). the pwb scale has six alternative answers: completely disagree to completely agree. pwb with 18 items is valid and reliable for measuring psychological well-being with a sample of indonesian people (aryani & umar, 2022). data analysis data analysis was conducted using jamovi 2.3.28 software. initially, an independent sample t-test was performed to examine gender-based differences in depression, as previous studies showed female university students exhibit higher levels of depression when compared to male students (haruna et al., 2025; zhu et al., 2025). subsequently, a correlation analysis with product-moment was conducted to ascertain the relationship between resilience, psychological well-being, and depression. finally, a mediation analysis was carried out to humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 105 ahmad muhammad diponegoro et al. (resilience and depression among muslim students: the mediating…) investigate the impact of resilience as a predictor, psychological well-being as a mediator, and depression as an outcome. results the results of the independent sample t-test showed no difference in depression based on gender (t = -1.08; p > .05). table 1 shows each variable's mean and standard deviation based on gender. table 1 descriptive statistic male (n=64) female (n=176) resilience 75.1 + 11.8 74.8 + 10.18 depression 38.4 + 10.38 40.0 + 10.81 psychological wellbeing 63.7 + 5.76 65.3 + 5.16 product-moment correlation analysis is used to determine the correlation between variables. the analysis of the results reveals that there is a significant correlation between the variables presented in table 2. resilience has a significant negative correlation with depression (r = -.22; p < .001). similarly, psychological well-being has a significant positive correlation with depression (r = .48; p < .001). resilience and psychological well-being have a significant negative correlation (r = -.27 p < .001). the strongest correlation coefficient was found for the relationship between psychological well-being and depression. table 2 correlation matrix resilience depression psychological wellbeing resilience pearson’s r p depression pearson’s r -.22*** p < .001 psychological wellbeing pearson’s r -.27*** .48*** p < .001 < .001 mediation analysis was carried out to determine the mediating role of psychological well-being in the relationship between resilience and depression. figure 1 shows that the relationship between resilience and depression is significant, as indicated by c, which is the total effect (β = -.23; p < .001). with the mediation of psychological well-being, the relationship between resilience and depression is not significant, as indicated by c', which is a direct effect (β = -.10; p > .05). meanwhile, the indirect effect between resilience and depression with the mediator's psychological well-being was significant (β = -.12; p < .001), with a mediation percentage of 55.1%. the indirect effect results from the significant relationship between resilience and psychological well-being (β = -.14; p < .001) and the significant relationship between psychological well-being and depression (β = .90; p < .001). these results indicate that the relationship between resilience and depression is fully mediated by psychological well-being. 106 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ahmad muhammad diponegoro et al. (how does psychological well-being mediate the relationship between …) figure 1 mediation model with resilience (predictor), psychological wellbeing (mediator) and depression (outcome) discussion the findings of this study indicate that there is no significant difference in depression levels between male and female students. this result contrasts with several previous studies (dita & nopiyanto, 2023; haruna et al., 2025; zhu et al., 2025); however, it aligns with other research conducted among university students in indonesia, which likewise reported no gender-based differences in depression (sa’adah et al., 2024). based on these findings, the mediating role of psychological well-being in the relationship between resilience and depression appears consistent across genders, suggesting that separate gender-based analyses are not required in this context. the research findings indicate a significant negative correlation between resilience and depression among indonesian muslim students. this means that when resilience is high, depression is low and vice versa. these findings align with the diathesis-stress model proposed by broerman (2020), which suggests that individuals who can overcome challenges in their lives are less likely to experience psychological problems such as depression. as resilience refers to a person's ability to bounce back from life's difficulties, it can act as a protective factor against depression among students. the results of the mediation analysis indicate that psychological factors play a significant role in mediating the relationship between resilience and depression. initially, the correlation test revealed that resilience was negatively correlated with depression. however, when psychological well-being was factored in as a mediator between resilience and depression, the direct effect of resilience on depression became insignificant. these findings suggest that resilience does not directly impact depression but rather does so indirectly through psychological well-being. the mediation analysis results show a significant indirect effect of resilience on depression through psychological well-being. resilience is negatively correlated with psychological well-being, while psychological well-being is positively related to depression. although previous research shows a positive correlation between resilience and psychological well-being (yu & chae, 2020), a negative relationship between resilience and psychological well-being was also obtained in research conducted on students in china (smith & yang, 2017). the results of this study suggest that there is a positive correlation between psychological well-being and depression. according to the dual continua model theory, mental health and mental illness are two distinct yet interrelated concepts (keyes, 2005). the psychological wellbeing a: β = -.14***, se = .03 95% ci [-.20, -.07] resilience depression c: β = -.23***, se = .06 b: β =.90***, se = .12 95% ci [.67, 1.13] c’: β = -.10, se = .06 95% ci [-.21, .01] humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 107 ahmad muhammad diponegoro et al. (resilience and depression among muslim students: the mediating…) relationship between mental health and mental illness is presented in a quadrant model with four categories: complete mental health, vulnerable, symptomatic but content, and struggling (iasiello et al., 2020). the complete mental health category, located in the upper right quadrant, describes individuals who experience high mental health and no mental illness. the vulnerable category, located in the lower right quadrant, describes individuals who experience low mental health but no mental illness. the symptomatic but content category, located in the upper left quadrant, describes individuals who experience mental illness but high mental health. finally, the struggling category, located in the lower left quadrant, describes individuals who experience both mental illness and low mental health. when applied to the relationship between well-being and depression, the dual continua model theory produces quadrants, as in figure 2. based on the model, psychological wellbeing and depression may correlate negatively, as shown in the upper right quadrant, which shows the group of individuals who have high psychological well-being with low depression. and also the lower left quadrant shows a group of individuals who have low psychological well-being with high depression. previous studies found a negative correlation between psychological well-being and depression among japanese university students (liu et al., 2009) and healthcare professionals and non-healthcare professionals in turkey (ceri & cicek, 2021). on the contrary, psychological well-being and depression may also correlate positively. as depicted in figure 2, the upper left quadrant shows a group of individuals who have high psychological well-being and depression. in contrast, the lower right quadrant shows a group of individuals who have low psychological well-being and depression. the positive relationship between psychological well-being and depression results found in this study can be explained using the dual continuity model theory, which was also used in a previous study on mental well-being and psychological distress (stephens et al., 2023). figure 2 the relation between psychological wellbeing and depression based on dual continua model one of the most critical aspects of psychological well-being is purpose in life (azañedo et al., 2021). the muslim students who are the subjects of this research are those who, apart from carrying out academic activities, also carry out religious activities. for example, they must be able to read the qur’an well to graduate. in addition, the curriculum has teaching and learning activities related to moral ethics. these activities have the potential to enrich high psychological wellbeing high depression high psychological wellbeing low depression low psychological wellbeing high depression low psychological wellbeing low depression 108 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) ahmad muhammad diponegoro et al. (how does psychological well-being mediate the relationship between …) students' understanding, which in turn may influence their psychological well-being. from an islamic perspective, the initial step toward achieving psychological well-being is grounded in knowledge—encompassing self-awareness, vices and virtues, understanding of human nature, worldly life, common psychological challenges, as well as foundational knowledge of islamic beliefs and moral principles (aycan, 2024). muslim virtues based on islamic values, narrated in the hadith sahih muslim number 2999, are gratitude and patience. suhaib bin sinan ra reported that the messenger of allah swt said: how wonderful is the affair of the believer, for his affairs are all good, and this applies to no one but the believer. if something good happens to him, he is grateful for it, and that is good for him. if something bad happens to him, he bears it with patience, which is good for him. a muslim can experience high psychological well-being and high depression at the same time, and this can be described as a state of being thankful. this state of thankfulness may help muslims maintain their psychological well-being. thankfulness can enhance several dimensions of psychological well-being, including personal growth, positive relationships with others, purpose in life, and environmental mastery (czyżowska & gurba, 2022; nawa & yamagishi, 2024). this condition describes high psychological well-being and high depression in the upper left quadrant of the dual continua model of mental health theory. conversely, a muslim experiencing diminished psychological well-being may still maintain a low level of depression by embodying the virtue of patience. while meaning in life can indeed be constructed apart from religious frameworks (schweiker, 2009), islamic teachings view hardships as spiritual opportunities—means of drawing nearer to allah and avenues for the purification of sins (ibn al-jawzi, 2018). the cultivation of patience and gratitude during times of difficulty serves both as a coping mechanism and a path toward spiritual proximity to god (al-jawziyya, 1997). for many muslim students, life becomes meaningful through a deep connection with the divine, fulfilling spiritual purposes, and living in alignment with ethical principles (mohamad et al., 2011). as such, it is possible for individuals to experience both low psychological well-being and low depression simultaneously—corresponding to the lower-right quadrant in the conceptual framework. the present research study has some limitations that need to be acknowledged. firstly, the sample size and characteristics were limited as only two hundred and forty muslim students participated. therefore, future studies should aim to expand the number of participants and the population. secondly, the psychological well-being scale, which has 18 items, was used despite having some psychometric limitations (ryff & keyes, 1995). however, previous research conducted on indonesian respondents has validated and established the reliability of the 18-item psychological well-being scale for measuring psychological well-being (aryani & umar, 2022). conclusion psychological well-being fully mediated the relationship between resilience and depression among muslim university students. with the dual continuity model of mental health, the positive relationship between psychological well-being and depression in muslim university students can be interpreted as the presence of muslim morals, including gratitude and patience, which may open possibilities for study participants to have high psychological wellbeing and high depression at the same time, as well as low psychological well-being and low depression. acknowledgment the authors would like to thank universitas ahmad dahlan for supporting and funding this work under the supported professorship candidate research grant 2024. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 109 ahmad muhammad diponegoro et al. 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(2025). mental well-being of college students: focus on sex differences and psycho physiological indices. bmc public health, 25, 3038. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889025-24231-9 https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2024.1497076/full https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-025-24231-9 https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-025-24231-9 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 21 (1), february 2025, 45-56 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas 10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1044 modification of the indonesian academic cyberloafing scale (iacs): a tool for assessing online deviance in educational contexts muhammad nurrifqi fuadi, rizal galih pradana, mutmainnah budiman, farah fauziyah, karima nada medina, syukron ramadhan, avin fadilla helmi, wahyu widhiarso faculty of psichology, universitas gadjah mada, yogyakarta, indonesia corresponding author: muhammadnurrifqifuadi@mail.ugm.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction the phenomenon of cyberloafing is closely tied to technological advancements. the presence of digital devices such as laptops and smartphones enables individuals to easily access the internet and engage in cyberloafing (metin-orta & demirtepe-saygılı, 2023). furthermore, the simultaneous rise of various social media platforms, including facebook, twitter, youtube, instagram, and tiktok, has accelerated the growth of the cyberloafing phenomenon (keser et al., 2016; yildiz & yildiz, 2022). social media platforms facilitate individuals in passing their leisure time or simply communicating with one another through text, audio, or even visual messages (marangoz et al., 2012). initially, cyberloafing behavior was employed as a coping mechanism to relieve stress. however, this purpose has gradually shifted, and cyberloafing has started to exert a negative influence on individuals. various forms of cyberloafing manifest in activities such as using social media, online shopping, personal email usage, online gaming, news browsing, and even accessing inappropriate websites (toker & baturay, 2021). these behaviors have significant consequences for individuals in various contexts, especially in educational article info abstract article history received september 23, 2024 revised december 17, 2024 accepted january 11, 2025 the initial ease of internet use has led to new challenges, one of which is the phenomenon of cyberloafing. cyberloafing refers to the activity of accessing the internet during learning processes. the aim of this study is to modify the cyberloafing scale within an educational setting in indonesia using the dimensions of sharing, shopping, real-time updating, accessing online content, and gaming/gambling. the modifications include contextualizing the original and adding new relevant items. data collection was conducted using purposive sampling, involving 235 university students from various higher education institutions in indonesia. the method used to test the validity of the cyberloafing model was confirmatory factor analysis. the results showed that out of 65 items, 20 were found to be valid, with a satisfactory total cronbach’s alpha of 0.73-0.93 and mcdonald’s omega of 0.71-0.93 for measuring reliability for each dimension of cyberloafing. the practical implication of this measurement tool is that it can be used to assess the intensity of cyberloafing among higher education students in indonesia. keywords college students confirmatory factor analysis cyberloafing indonesian version psychometry mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1044 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 46 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) muhammad nurrifqi fuadi et.al (modification of the indonesian academic cyberloafing scale (iacs):...) setting, ranging from decreased performance and productivity (desnirita & sari, 2022; saleh et al., 2018) lower academic achievement (wu et al., 2020), academic procrastination (durak, 2020), reduced focus and attention (li et al., 2022; zhang et al., 2022), to diminished motivation (mei et al., 2021) and a reduced sense of life meaning (krishna & agrawal, 2023). these negative impacts arise from students being distracted during class by their gadgets, neglecting to engage with the lecture or learning activities (widiastuti & margaretha, 2016). research on cyberloafing initially emerged within organizational settings. lim (2002) suggested that cyberloafing behavior stems from three theories: social exchange theory, organizational justice, and neutralization. social exchange theory refers to the motivation of individuals to engage in social exchanges that maximize rewards and minimize costs. organizational justice pertains to perceptions of fairness and the quality of treatment received by individuals within their environment. neutralization, on the other hand, refers to a theoretical perspective that rationalizes and justifies deviant behavior. later, anandarajan et al. (2004) explored the personal use of the web in workplace settings using the dimensions of opportunities versus threats and organizational versus interpersonal contexts. further development was made by blanchard & henle (2008), who categorized cyberloafing into minor and serious types. their study aimed to examine whether cyberloafing could be considered tolerable behavior or if it constituted serious misconduct. minor cyberloafing involves engaging in deviant behavior with limited impact, such as checking sports scores while at work, whereas serious cyberloafing entails extreme impacts, such as online gambling or accessing adult websites during work. however, this research has not yet definitively categorized minor and serious behaviors, as the classification of cyberloafing depends heavily on the intent behind the behavior. the phenomenon of cyberloafing has also garnered attention in the field of education, not just within organizational settings. kalayci (2010) conducted the first study on cyberloafing behavior in an educational context, proposing three new factors: personal works, socialization, and news-reading. akbulut et al. (2016) then developed a cyberloafing scale targeting high school and university students, identifying five dimensions: sharing, shopping, real-time updating, gaming/gambling, and accessing online content. akbulut et al. (2016) study critiqued the content validity of kalayci’s (2010) modifications, pointing out that despite the adaptation for educational settings, the original scale remained too focused on workplace environments. additionally, kalayci’s (2010) modifications removed too many items, resulting in a loss of essential information from the original scale. most recently, , polat (2018) developed the smart phone cyberloafing scale in classes (spcsc), which consists of three dimensions: browsing-related cyberloafing, interactive cyberloafing, and entertainment cyberloafing, with an internal consistency coefficient of 0.88 (alanoğlu & karabatak, 2021; ozdamli & ercag, 2021). polat's scale adapts blau et al. (2006) framework, focusing on cyberloafing via smartphones, based on the assumption that cyberloafing in the classroom primarily occurs through smartphone usage. however, this scale overlooks other digital devices commonly used today, both for learning and nonlearning purposes, such as tablets and laptops (koay, 2018). this study focuses on akbulut et al.’s (2016) theory, as it accurately reflects current internet usage and provides detailed explanations of its theoretical foundations. akbulut et al. (2016) define cyberloafing in the educational context as internet activities performed for non-educational purposes during learning processes. in indonesia, pratama and satwika (2022) adapted this measurement using pearson's product-moment correlation. however, the adaptation is largely a literal translation, which may lead to cultural discrepancies. meanwhile, the modifications in this study attempt to contextualize the original items from akbulut et al. (2016) and add other items that are relevant to the current students’ humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 47 muhammad nurrifqi fuadi et.al (modification of the indonesian academic cyberloafing scale (iacs):...)et.al cyberloafing behaviour. therefore, this study aims to modify akbulut et al.’s (2016) cyberloafing scale to better align with indonesian academic settings and cultural nuances. method this study employed a quantitative method to modify the cyberloafing scale developed by akbulut et al. (2016) to fit the context of participants in indonesia. participants were selected based on predetermined criteria (purposive sampling). eligible participants were asked to complete all items of the survey after providing informed consent. participants this study involved 250 participants, consisting of university students from various institutions across indonesia. however, after data cleaning, only 235 participants were included in the final analysis. this sample size aligns with the minimum number of participants recommended by plichta and kelvin (2013), which suggests at least 200 participants for conducting confirmatory factor analysis (cfa). the inclusion criteria for participants were: (a) aged 18–35 years; (b) enrolled in a diploma (d3), applied bachelor’s (d4), bachelor’s (s1), master’s (s2), or doctoral (s3) program; (c) had been enrolled in their studies for at least one month. the exclusion criteria were: (a) incomplete questionnaire responses; (b) refusal to complete the informed consent form; (c) duplicate identities. as shown in table 1, the majority of participants were female (73.62%), enrolled in undergraduate programs (76.17%), and attending public universities (83.83%). table 1 demographic data of participants (n=235) demographic n percentage cumulative gender male 62 26.38 % 26.38 % female 173 73.62% 100 % age 18-21 120 51.06 % 51.06 % 22-35 115 48.94% 100 % educational level post graduate 56 23.83 % 23.83 % undergraduate 179 76.17 % 100 % type of university public 197 83.83 % 83.83 % private 38 16.17 % 100 % field of study science 87 37.02 % 37.02 % social 148 62.98 % 100 % region java, bali, & nusa tenggara 133 56.60% 56.60 % kalimantan 18 7.66% 64.30 % sulawesi, maluku, & papua 53 22.55% 86.81 % sumatra 31 13.19% 100 % construction and establishment of the blueprint the cyberloafing scale by akbulut et al. (2016) originally consisted of 30 items with five dimensions. the researchers then modified the scale by adding items relevant to the context of indonesian participants, resulting in a total of 65 items. afterward, a readability test was conducted with five graduate students in psychology. the results of this test were used to revise the items to ensure linguistic clarity, align them with the context of the blueprint, and 48 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) muhammad nurrifqi fuadi et.al (modification of the indonesian academic cyberloafing scale (iacs):...) minimize social desirability bias. table 2 presents the blueprint that served as the foundation for the modification process of the scale. data collection data was collected through a google forms survey by distributing the modified cyberloafing scale. the primary reason for choosing a survey method was the need to test the measurement tool in a confirmatory manner, aligned with the real conditions of the participants, without requiring in-depth elaboration on the phenomenon (sugiyono, 2018). the google forms platform was chosen for its practicality, allowing researchers to reach a larger number of participants within a relatively short time frame. to fill out the cyberloafing scale, participants were instructed to read the instructions at the beginning. the following are several statements regarding "internet access behavior carried out during learning in the last month." the scale used a five-point likert scale (1: never; 2: rarely; 3: sometimes; 4: often; 5: always) to measure the intensity of cyberloafing behavior during learning activities over the past month. table 2 cyberloafing blueprint for indonesian version dimension definition weight target sharing (shar) behavior related to accessing the internet to share, check, and interact with others through social media during learning activities. 27.69 % (18 items) 20% (4 items) shopping (shop) behavior related to accessing the internet for online shopping activities, including selecting products, purchasing products, and tracking product deliveries during learning activities. 23.08 % (15 items) 20% (4 items) real time updating (real) behavior related to accessing the internet to obtain the latest information through social media during learning activities. 15.38 % (10 items) 20% (4 items) game / gambling (game) behavior related to accessing the internet for gaming or online gambling activities during learning activities. 12.31 % (8 items) 20% (4 items) accessing online content (acce) behavior related to accessing the internet for listening to music, watching videos, reading articles, or other references outside the context of the ongoing learning activities. 21.54 % (14 items) 20% (4 items) total 100 % (65 items) 100% (20 items) data analysis before analyzing the data, the researchers conducted a normality test by examining the skewness (acceptable range = -2 < x < 2) and kurtosis (acceptable range = -7 < x < 7(kim, 2013). the researchers then performed confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) to test and confirm whether the constructs aligned with the theory. factor loadings were analyzed to determine which items were valid in measuring each dimension. the criteria used were cfi (0.90), tli (0.90), srmr (0.08), and rmsea (0.08), as recommended by brown (2006). the estimation method for this interval (continuous) data was maximum likelihood (ml) (umar & nisa, 2020), using jasp version 0.18.1.0. to determine the model, researchers use a model with a smaller aic, bic information size as a model with a better fit (kline, 2023; wang & wang, 2019). in addition, the researchers conducted multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (mg-cfa) to examine measurement invariance. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 49 muhammad nurrifqi fuadi et.al (modification of the indonesian academic cyberloafing scale (iacs):...)et.al results the normality assumption after conducting a descriptive analysis on the 65 items of the cyberloafing scale, skewness and kurtosis values were obtained for normality testing. the results indicated that 61 items fell within the skewness range of +2 and the kurtosis range of +7, while 4 items related to gambling did not meet these criteria. once the normality assumption was satisfied, the next step was to conduct confirmatory factor analysis. confirmatory factor analysis in this section, the researchers performed confirmatory factor analysis in two steps. first, analysis process included the multidimensional (61 items) that met the normality assumption. second, the researchers did residual correlation based on modification indices to drop the items that have many correlations with other items per dimensions (umar & nisa, 2020). after that, items with highest factor loading for each dimension had been chosen to adjust with the blueprint. moreover, researchers also consider the goodness of fit indices (gof), resulting in 20 items. table 3 goodness of fit model ꭕ2 df p cfi tli rmsea srmr aic bic multidimensional (61 items) 4589.65 1759 < .001 0.70 0.69 0.08 0.09 37684.93 38141.59 multidimensional (20 items) 286.24 160 < .001 0.96 0.95 0.06 0.05 11469.21 11642.19 second-order (20 items) 306.89 165 < .001 0.96 0.95 0.06 0.06 11479.86 11635.54 based on the goodness of fit results in table 3, the multidimensional model with 61 items exhibited poor fit, with cfi, tli, and rmsea values of 0.70 < 0.90, 0.69 < 0.90, and 0.08 > 0.08. the model showing satisfactory fit indices was the multidimensional (20 items) model, which indicated fit with cfi at 0.96, tli at 0.95, and rmsea at 0.06. although the second order model also shows satisfactory fit indices with cfi= 0.96, tli= 0.95, rmsea= 0.06, the multidimensional model has a better fit although the difference with the second order model is relatively small, and both can be considered quite good depending on the context. furthermore, table 4 shows that the correlation between dimensions is vary (some are too small). therefore, researchers recommend using this scale in a multidimensional model. additionally, figure 1 shows positive factor loading values ranging from 0.51 to 0.97. the overall data indicated z-values greater than 1.96 and p-values less than 0.05, meaning all 20 items support construct validity, with all items being valid for measuring each dimension. table 5 is presented the 20 items based on the goodness of fit indices (gof) that exhibited the highest factor loadings according to the results of the confirmatory factor analysis. 50 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) muhammad nurrifqi fuadi et.al (modification of the indonesian academic cyberloafing scale (iacs):...) figure 1 multidimensional model table 4 interdimensional correlation dimension acce game real shop shar shar 0.71 0.27 0.44 0.64 shop 0.57 0.24 0.48 real 0.59 0.41 game 0.45 acce reliability after identifying the valid items, the researchers reviewed the cronbach's alpha values to assess the reliability or consistency of an instrument or test in measuring a specific concept or characteristic. cronbach's alpha is used to measure the internal consistency of a set of questions or indicators designed to assess the same construct. based on the analysis, the cronbach's alpha values were as follows: 0.73 for sharing, 0.92 for shopping, 0.91 for realtime updating, 0.93 for gaming, 0.81 for accessing online content. however, some research also suggests considering the use of mcdonald’s omega to estimate reliability. this is because in some cases, cronbach’s alpha is often very sensitive with sample size (hayes & coutts, 2020; malkewitz et al., 2023). therefore, the value of mcdonald’s omega for each dimension presented as follows: 0.71 for sharing, 0.91 for shopping, 0.91 for real-time updating, 0.93 for gaming, 0.83 for accessing online content. according to cronbach's alpha and mcdonald’s omega criterion of 0.70, which indicates good internal consistency, all dimensions of cyberloafing demonstrated satisfactory consistency (cortina, 1993). measurement invariance according to putnick and bornstein (2016), measurement invariance assesses whether a construct exhibits consistent psychometric properties across various groups or over different time periods. this is to determine whether the measurement tool yields consistent and valid results that are not influenced by group differences. in this study, the researcher conducts a humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 51 muhammad nurrifqi fuadi et.al (modification of the indonesian academic cyberloafing scale (iacs):...)et.al measurement invariance test on postgraduate and undergraduate groups because these two groups have different academic experiences that may impact their cyberloafing behaviors. table 5 item & factor loading item factor loading factor 1 – sharing (alpha: 0.73; omega: 0.71) saya memosting foto di media sosial (shar2) 0.51 saya menandai teman pada foto yang saya bagikan di media sosial (shar4) 0.63 saya membuka media sosial (shar10) 0.66 saya mem-follow akun media sosial teman saya (shar17) 0.71 factor 2 – shopping (alpha: 0.92; omega: 0.91) saya mengunjungi situs belanja online (shop1) 0.94 saya menelusuri beberapa produk pada situs belanja online (shop2) 0.92 saya menambahkan produk ke keranjang (shop3) 0.83 saya melakukan pembelanjaan online (shop8) 0.73 factor 3 – real time updating (alpha: 0.91; omega: 0.91) saya memastikan jadwal rilis tayangan favorit (real5) 0.86 saya menunggu tayangan favorit di channel tujuan (real6) 0.92 saya me-reload halaman channel untuk menonton tayangan favorit (real7) 0.88 saya memastikan jadwal live streaming (real8) 0.71 factor 4 – gaming (alpha: 0.93; omega: 0.93) saya bermain game online (game1) 0.93 saya membeli item terbaru pada game online yang saya mainkan (game2) 0.69 saya membuka aplikasi game online (game3) 0.97 saya mengupdate fitur terbaru pada game online yang saya mainkan (game4) 0.89 factor 5 accessing online content (alpha: 0.81; omega: 0.83) saya mendengarkan lagu (acce2) 0.77 saya menonton video (acce5) 0.84 saya membaca berita (acce6) 0.69 saya men-download aplikasi (acce11) 0.62 invariance testing or cfa based on specific demographic groups was conducted for postgraduate and undergraduate groups. table 6 presents the results of invariance criteria testing, including configural, metric, scalar, and strict invariance, indicating equal variance. this allows for an accurate comparison in the analysis of cyberloafing behaviors between the two groups. the researchers used cfi (0.90), srmr (0.08), and rmsea (0.08) according to brown (2006). table 6 measurement invariance description ꭕ2 df p cfi tli rmsea srmr model invariance testing multidimensional (20 items) configural 527.37 320 < .001 0.94 0.92 0.07 0.06 metrics 548.42 335 < .001 0.93 0.93 0.07 0.07 scalar 577.95 350 < .001 0.93 0.92 0.07 0.07 strict 632.97 370 < .001 0.92 0.92 0.08 0.08 52 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) muhammad nurrifqi fuadi et.al (modification of the indonesian academic cyberloafing scale (iacs):...) first, configural invariance yielded cfi, tli, and rmsea values of 0.94, 0.92, and 0.07, respectively. this indicates that the factor structure is similar between postgraduate and undergraduate groups. second, metric invariance resulted in cfi, tli, and rmsea values of 0.93, 0.93, and 0.07, respectively, suggesting that the factor loadings are comparable between the two groups. third, scalar invariance yielded cfi, tli, and rmsea values of 0.93, 0.92, and 0.07, indicating that scalar parameters, such as factor loadings and intercepts of the structural equation model, are constant across both groups. lastly, strict invariance provided cfi, tli, and rmsea values of 0.92, 0.92, and 0.08, indicating that the parameters, including factor loadings, intercepts, and residuals, maintain a consistent model structure between the postgraduate and undergraduate groups. discussion the measurement instrument for cyberloafing was initially developed and pioneered by lim (2002) in a work setting. the loafing behavior that disrupted productivity in the workplace eventually spread to the educational field, leading akbulut et al. (2016) to construct a cyberloafing scale within an educational setting. in the context of indonesia, the development of cyberloafing is unique not only because indonesia ranks among the largest internet users with 212.9 million internet users and 167 million social media users as of early 2023, but also due to the shift in educational media trends (kemp, 2023). this study focuses on developing a cyberloafing scale with strong validity and reliability based on the perspectives of indonesian students. the theoretical framework of cyberloafing within an educational setting in indonesia shows similarities to the model developed by akbulut et al. (2016). the five-dimensional multidimensional model is also applicable in the indonesian context with minor modifications. these modifications include (1) the elimination of items related to real-time updates via twitter; and (2) the removal of items representing gambling as part of the gaming/gambling dimension. this suggests that indonesian students no longer engage in cyberloafing via twitter, and gambling behaviors are not well represented by these items. in the sharing dimension, indonesian students' cyberloafing behavior is represented by items indicating content sharing, checking social media, and interacting on social media. this is highly relevant to the current situation, where many students cannot disengage from sharing activities on social media, even during learning sessions. this claim is supported by data from kemp (2023), showing that the social media penetration rate for the age group of 18-35 years is 26.3%, significantly higher than other age groups. furthermore, the shift to online learning during the covid-19 pandemic has transformed the culture and habits of learning activities from paper-based to digital-based formats. this shift has persisted even after the resumption of offline lectures in the post-pandemic period. next, online shopping activities are observed through behaviors such as searching for and purchasing products. these items are relevant to the end-to-end process of online shopping today through various marketplace platforms. considering the high level of consumption, especially among indonesian students, these items are highly applicable to their daily lives (databoks, 2018). furthermore, the behavior of accessing the internet to obtain real-time information on social media is represented by actions such as waiting for favorite shows and live streaming. this differs from akbulut et al.’s (2016) original items, which specifically referenced twitter for real-time updates. this shift is due to the relatively low number of twitter users in indonesia, especially among students, with only 24 million users. in contrast, instagram has 89.15 million users, and tiktok has 109.9 million users (kemp, 2023). the gaming/gambling dimension is represented solely by items indicating online gaming behavior. this finding is noteworthy because all gambling-related items were humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 53 muhammad nurrifqi fuadi et.al (modification of the indonesian academic cyberloafing scale (iacs):...)et.al eliminated. this can be attributed to cultural factors, as indonesian society, particularly students, exhibits high levels of religiosity and attributes gambling as an activity that is prohibited and contradicts both religious and social norms (choirina et al., 2021). this cultural context led to poor data distribution and low factor loading values, resulting in the removal of the gambling items. lastly, accessing online content is represented by behaviors such as listening to music, watching videos, reading online articles, and accessing various applications. this is relevant to the daily habits of indonesian students, who frequently use music streaming platforms like spotify, video streaming platforms like youtube, and other applications to access news. the researcher acknowledges that this study has several limitations related to the demographic characteristics of the participants, which are unevenly distributed, specifically (1) the number of female participants exceeds that of males; (2) postgraduate students are overrepresented compared to undergraduate and diploma students; and (3) the majority of participants are concentrated in the java and bali regions. these disparities may affect the research findings, as internet access habits can vary between genders. similarly, postgraduate students, who are generally more mature, may exhibit different online behaviors compared to undergraduate and diploma students. additionally, differences in culture and telecommunications infrastructure between java and bali and other regions may influence participants' internet usage patterns. conclusion the process of modifying the cyberloafing measuring instrument in the indonesian context was carried out by providing contextualization to the original items and adding new relevant items. based on the goodness of fit indices (gof), the multidimensional model with 61 items was not satisfactory in terms of psychometric properties. on the other hand, the multidimensional model with 20 items demonstrated a satisfactory fit, with all items being valid in measuring each dimension. although the second-order model with 20 items also showed satisfactory fit, the multidimensional model had smaller aic and bic scores, so researchers recommend administering this scale in multidimensional form. additionally, reliability testing using cronbach's alpha and mcdonald’s omega indicated that the cyberloafing dimensions have satisfactory internal consistency. the practical implication of this study is that the modified scale can be used to measure the intensity of cyberloafing among higher education students in indonesia. acknowledgment the authors express sincere gratitude to the instructors and teaching assistants for their invaluable time and insights during the consultation of ideas and research design. additionally, the author extends heartfelt thanks to all participants who willingly took part in this study. declarations author contribution. mnf: idea conceptualization, review literature, data collection, data analysis, method, result and discussion, revision and finishing. rgp: idea conceptualization, review literature, data collection, method, result and discussion, revision and finishing. mb: idea conceptualization, review literature, data collection, introduction, revision and finishing. ff: idea conceptualization, review literature, data collection, introduction, revision and finishing. knm: idea conceptualization, review literature, data collection, introduction, revision and finishing. sr: idea 54 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) muhammad nurrifqi fuadi et.al (modification of the indonesian academic cyberloafing scale (iacs):...) conceptualization, review literature, data collection, method, revision and finishing. afh: idea conceptualization, method, revision, finishing, and supervision and guidance throughout the research process. ww: idea conceptualization, method, revision, finishing and supervision and guidance throughout the research process. funding statement. the authors did not receive any funding support for the research, writing, or publication of this article. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references akbulut, y., dursun, ö. ö., dönmez, o., & şahin, y. l. 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(2022). teaching presence predicts cyberloafing during online learning: from the perspective of the community of inquiry framework and social learning theory. british journal of educational psychology, 92(4), 1651–1666. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12531 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 22 (2), august 2025, 181-194 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1188 the mediating role of resilience between executive function and nonsuicidal self-injury in indonesian adolescents rania khairunnisa, donny hendrawan faculty of psychology, universitas indonesia, jakarta, indonesia corresponding author: donny.hendrawan@ui.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction adolescence is marked by significant changes in biological, psychological, and social development as individuals transition from childhood to adulthood. during this time, not only do family factors influence daily life, but adolescents also begin to view peer groups and other social relationships as important for acceptance (geldard et al., 2016). in this transitional stage, adolescents may encounter new family, social, and individual challenges (krapić et al., 2015; marotz & allen, 2016). with the transitions and changes being experienced, also the adjustments to new developmental stages, the problems faced during adolescence can feel more intense and may lead to issues such as psychosomatic symptoms, anxiety, and stress (nugroho et al., 2023; article info abstract article history received: 6 march 2025 revised: 6 august 2025 accepted: 12 august 2025 adolescence is characterized by significant biological, psychological, and social changes, that bring challenges that may lead to maladaptive behaviors, such as non-suicidal self-injury (nssi). executive function and resilience are the factors that can affect nssi behavior by promoting adaptive responses to challenges. executive function supports emotional regulation and problem-solving, while resilience helps adolescents cope with stress. this study aims to explore how resilience mediates the relationship between executive function and nssi. the teenage executive function inventory, cognitive flexibility scale, child and youth resilience measure-revised, and deliberate self-harm inventory were used in this study. two hundred and eleven adolescents participated, consisting of 104 males and 107 females (sd = 0.501), aged 12-18 years (sd = 1.424). data analysis was conducted using hayes macro process mediation analysis. results indicate resilience partially mediates the relationship between overall executive function and nssi. however, resilience fully mediates the relationship between executive function dimensions separately—working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility—and nssi. these findings underscore the importance of resilience and executive function in understanding nssi behavior among adolescents. moreover, resilience and executive function can be considered by practitioners and parents as key targets for interventions aimed at preventing and reducing the prevalence of nssi. keywords adolescent executive function non-suicidal self-injury resilience mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1188 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 182 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) rania khairunnisa et.al (the mediating role of resilience between executive function and non-suicidal self-injury in…) xie et al., 2020). compared to adults, adolescents are more vulnerable to experiencing negative emotions with greater intensity and more frequent negative moods, especially during early adolescence (dumitrescu, 2015). the various changes during this stage often result in emotional instability, uncommunicativeness, argumentativeness, and impulsivity. as adolescents struggle to cope with these challenges, they may seek maladaptive ways to regulate their emotions, such as substance use (abidin et al., 2025), social withdrawal (putri et al., 2022), and non-suicidal self-injury (hidayati et al., 2023). non-suicidal self-injury (nssi), is often used as a mechanism to alleviate emotional distress. unfortunately, nssi is commonly found to begin during adolescence (agarwal et al., 2020). nssi is defined as behavior that is direct, intentional, and socially disapproved, causing harm to one's body tissue without the intent to commit suicide (nock, 2010). nssi is very common and is more prevalent in adolescents than in other age groups (kądzielaolech et al., 2014; morgan et al., 2017). several studies have shown that the age at which individuals first engage in nssi ranges from 12 to 24 years old, which is included in the range of adolescent age (hidayati et al., 2022; kądziela-olech et al., 2014; kaligis et al., 2021; sabrina & afiatin, 2023). the factors influencing nssi behavior can be categorized into two factors: (1) individual factors (e.g., biological aspects, emotional regulation, self-regulation, psychiatric disorders) and (2) environmental factors (e.g., childhood maltreatment, disrupted emotional relationships) (cipriano et al., 2017; gratz, 2006). on the biological aspect, nssi may be influenced by specific neural pathways that affect an individual's involvement in self-injury, one of which is the neural pathways connected to executive function. executive function is cognitive processes that play a vital role in goal-directed behavior. these processes include the ability to effectively plan actions, keep track of progress, and organize various tasks. together, these skills facilitate structured and purposeful behavior, allowing individuals to navigate complex situations and make informed decisions (diamond, 2013). the executive function consists of three dimensions—working memory (e.g., recalling past experiences and considering different possible outcomes before responding), inhibitory control (e.g., pausing and assessing when facing stressful situation to choose a more appropriate response), and cognitive flexibility (e.g., explore alternative solutions, and remain open to new ideas when facing failures)—that plays a crucial role in shaping adolescent behavior as well as their emotional and social competence. these abilities allow adolescents to be more flexible in responding to environmental conditions, assessing risks, and prioritizing tasks. poor executive function is linked to difficulties in impulse control, meaning adolescents with impaired executive function might have a harder time resisting the urge to engage in self-injurious behavior when faced with stress. furthermore, executive function is crucial for problem-solving and social cognition. deficits in executive function may make it harder for adolescents to navigate social challenges effectively, increasing reliance on nssi as a maladaptive coping mechanism (wang et al., 2023). however, studies linking executive function with nssi have not yielded consistent results. some neuropsychological studies from asian and western countries do report differences between these groups (fikke et al., 2011; wang et al., 2023; zhou et al., 2024). on the other hand, some other studies report no differences in executive function between adolescents who engage in nssi and those who do not (hamza et al., 2015; janis & nock, 2009). meanwhile, studies linking executive function with nssi remain very limited in south east asia countries. these gaps and inconsistencies suggest that additional factors may be necessary to fully explain the relationship between executive function and nssi. stressful situations or decreased adaptive coping skills are often responsible for nssi and subsequent suicidal behavior (guan et al., 2012). individuals need to possess resilience humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 183 rania khairunnisa et.al (the mediating role of resilience between executive function and non-suicidal self-injury in…) to exhibit adaptive behaviors when facing challenging situations. thus, resilience plays a role in providing protection in various ways, such as self-improvement, coping styles, and family cohesion (bloom & holly, 2011; khan & ungar, 2023). a meta-analysis shows an individual's executive function plays a role in shaping their resilience (mecha et al., 2024). individuals with better working memory, help in contextual adaptation, ensuring focus on relevant information during adversity, and enhances problem-solving effectively. executive function also helps to build good resilience by preventing rumination and excessive emotional distress, allowing for better emotional stability in adversity through good inhibitory control. it also allows individuals to shift between different perspectives and reduces emotional distress. thus it enhances the ability to adapt to unpredictable or adverse events, leading to better stress recovery through good cognitive flexibility (mecha et al., 2024; samuelson et al., 2020). furthermore, resilience helps adolescents prevent maladaptive behaviors when facing stressful situations by restoring psychological balance. it enables them to stay calm, overcome challenges, and develop better emotional regulation, reducing the likelihood of using nssi as an emotional escape. resilience also fosters a sense of meaning, strength, and realistic goal-setting, encouraging healthier coping strategies and making self-injury a less appealing option (zorobi et al., 2024). also, structural brain regions, primarily in the right prefrontal area, indicate that mechanisms related to executive control are also involved in mechanisms that build resilience (burt et al., 2016). considering the external factors accompanying adolescent life, having positive relationships with peers during adolescence is associated with positive psychosocial adjustment. additionally, adolescents cannot be separated from family influence. positive family environments, closeness, and attachment to family are also associated with better emotional development, greater resilience, and less involvement in high-risk activities (backes & bonnie, 2019; dumitrescu, 2015). therefore, despite facing risk factors and challenging situations, individuals with good resilience can balance their situations with more adaptive responses (pearce & davis, 2021). in building strategies to help individuals develop good resilience, planning, selfregulation, and adaptability to change are essential. adapting to change and stress requires internal factors within the individual that align with executive function, including inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. executive function strengthens individual resilience and creates a protective layer that helps individuals face everyday challenges (diamond, 2013). previous studies have shown mixed results regarding the relationship between executive function and non-suicidal self-injury (nssi). to address this inconsistency, this study explores the mediating role of resilience in the executive function and nssi relationship, a mechanism that has not been fully examined in prior research. additionally, most studies on executive function, resilience, and nssi have been conducted in western contexts, with limited research focusing on adolescents in southeast asia, particularly indonesia. given that cultural differences may shape emotional regulation, coping mechanisms, and the protective role of resilience, this study aims to fill this gap by examining indonesian adolescents. by doing so, it will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the cognitive and resilience processes involved in nssi behavior. therefore, this study will examine the role of resilience as a mediator between individual executive function and nssi behavior. 184 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) rania khairunnisa et.al (the mediating role of resilience between executive function and non-suicidal self-injury in…) method participants this study comprised 211 participants, 104 males and 107 females (sd = 0.5), aged 12-18 years (sd = 1.42). the participants were students from junior high schools and senior high schools residing in the jakarta, bogor, depok, tangerang, or bekasi areas in indonesia. materials the measurement tools used in this study include the child and youth resilience measurerevised (cyrm-r), which was adapted into bahasa indonesia by borualogo & jefferies (2019). this scale measures indications of resilience within social-ecological aspects, reflecting how an individual interacts with their external environment to build resilience in the face of challenges. it consists of 17 statements on a 5-point likert scale ranging from 1 = not at all to 5 = often. this tool will be scored using a total score, where a higher score indicates greater resilience among participants. the tool has good internal consistency (α = 0.902), indicating its reliability in measuring resilience. this study used the teenage executive function inventory (texi) (thorell et al., 2020) to assess the participants’ executive functions, which measures the dimensions of working memory and inhibitory control. this instrument includes 20 questions, measured on a 5-point likert scale ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. this scale was scored in total score for each dimension, inhibitory control, and working memory. the total score of this scale indicates that the higher the score, the worse the capability of participants working memory and/or inhibitory control. the cognitive flexibility scale (cfs) (martin & rubin, 1995) was used to measure the third dimension of executive function, cognitive flexibility. this scale consists of 12 statements, measured on a 6-point likert scale ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 6 = strongly agree. this scale was reverse-scored, meaning that a higher score indicates poorer cognitive flexibility in participants. the internal consistency of the texi working memory dimension (α = 0.76), inhibitory control dimension (α = 0.78), and cfs (α = 0.68) were tested and found to be reliable. the instrument tool was directly adapted by researchers through the process of translation, expert judgment, and readability testing by adolescent samples. to obtain the total executive function score, the scores from the teenage executive function inventory and the cognitive flexibility scale were combined using the factor score method. additionally, to measure nssi behavior, the deliberate self-harm inventory (gratz, 2001) was used. this tool comprises 17 statements that reflect 17 types of non-suicidal selfinjury behaviors, measured on a dichotomous scale (“yes” or “no”). the tool aims to assess the history of nssi behaviors that participants have engaged in throughout their lives up to the time of completing the questionnaire. the final score of this scale will be a yes or no dichotomous score indicating whether the participants have never done any kind of nssi behavior or have done it at least once in their lifetime. the inventory demonstrates strong psychometric properties, including good internal consistency (α = 0.76). procedure the study was conducted in the recruitment, data collection, and debriefing phase. ethical approval was already obtained from the ethics committee of the faculty of psychology at universitas indonesia (approval number: 250/fpsi.komite etik/pdp.04.00/2023). during humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 185 rania khairunnisa et.al (the mediating role of resilience between executive function and non-suicidal self-injury in…) the recruitment phase, participants were selected through convenience sampling from junior and senior high schools in jakarta, bogor, depok, tangerang, and bekasi. informed consent was obtained from parents or guardians before any data collection began. in the data collection phase, participants were briefed on the study's procedures, confidentiality safeguards, and the voluntary nature of their involvement. participants who consented completed a set of self-report questionnaires via microsoft forms in a classroom setting, with researchers present to monitor and assist as needed. the questionnaire took approximately 30–45 minutes to complete, and participants were encouraged to respond honestly with assurances of confidentiality for their responses. following data collection, participants received a debriefing that provided additional information on the study’s purpose and significance. psychoeducation was also given on mental health and adaptive coping strategies, with participants provided resources for mental health support if needed. data analysis the study conducted a mediation effect test of resilience on the relationship between each dimension of executive function and nssi behavior. before conducting the mediation test, a point-biserial correlation test was performed to examine the relationship between each dimension of executive function and nssi behavior, as the nssi variable is dichotomous. after that, a mediation test was conducted using the process procedure for spss with hayes model number 4 to observe the mediation effect of resilience. additionally, this study examined gender differences in the interaction between variables, using the same analysis but with separate data results the data was collected from 211 participants, consisting of 49.3% male participants and 50.7% female participants (sd = 0.50). the age range of the participants in this study was 12-18 years old (sd = 1.42), with the majority of participants being 14 years old when the data was collected. based on the data obtained, there were no missing values in the processed data. it was found that 50.1% of the total participants in this study had engaged in nssi (non-suicidal self-injury) at least once in their lives, with the majority of those who had engaged in nssi being female (63%; sd = 0.50). see table 1. table 1 description of participants' characteristics sum percentage sd gender male 104 49.30 0.50 female 107 50.70 age 12 7 3.30 1.42 13 39 18.50 14 83 39.30 15 21 10 16 37 17.50 17 18 8.50 18 6 2.80 nssi behavior ever done male 40 36.70 0.50 female 69 63.30 never done male 64 62.70 female 38 37.30 186 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) rania khairunnisa et.al (the mediating role of resilience between executive function and non-suicidal self-injury in…) the total score of executive function and the total score on each dimension indicate that the higher the score, the worse the executive function and its dimensions. according to table 2, the study results show that overall executive function (r(209) = −0.29, p < 0.01), as well as each dimension of executive function—working memory (r(209)= −0.23, p < 0.01), inhibitory control (r(209) = −0.24, p < 0.01), and cognitive flexibility (r(209) = −0.40, p < 0.01)—has a significant negative correlation with resilience. given that higher scores on the executive function measures indicate poorer performance, these results indicate that adolescents with greater executive function impairments may have more difficulty adapting to stressors and employing adaptive coping strategies, potentially making them more vulnerable to psychological distress. table 2 correlation between executive function, resilience, and nssi behavior 1 2 3 4 5 6 m sd executive function 1 0.00 1.00 working memory 0.89** 1 0.00 1.00 inhibitory control 0.91** 0.68** 1 0.00 1.00 cognitive flexibility 0.29** 0.16* 0.18** 1 0.00 1.00 nssi 0.21** 0.16* 0.18** 0.10* 1 0.52 0.50 resilience -0.29** -0.23** -0.24** -0.40** -0.28** 1 0.00 1.00 *significance level of p < 0.05; ** significance level of p < 0.01 in contrast, executive function (r(209) = 0.21 , p < 0.05) and its dimensions —working memory (r(209) = 0.16 , p < 0.05), inhibitory control (r(209) = 0.18 , p < 0.01), and cognitive flexibility (r(209) = 0.10, p < 0.05) has a positive correlation with nssi. this result indicates that the worse the performance of a person's working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, or overall executive function the higher the likelihood of that person engaging in nssi. table 3 the mediation role of resilience between executive function and nssi behavior b se ci 95% p ll ul x = executive function executive function → resilience(a) -0.29 0.07 -0.42 -0.16 0.00 resilience→ nssi (b) -0.53 0.16 -0.85 -0.22 0.00 executive function → nssi (c' direct effect) 0.32 0.16 0.02 0.62 0.04 indirect effect (a × b) 0.15 0.06 0.05 0.30 x = working memory working memory → resilience(a) -0.23 0.07 -0.36 -0.10 0.00 resilience→ nssi (b) -0.57 0.16 -0.88 -0.25 0.00 working memory → nssi (c' direct effect) 0.23 0.15 0.13 -0.06 0.52 indirect effect (a × b) 0.13 0.06 0.04 0.27 x = inhibitory control -0.24 0.07 -0.37 -0.10 0.00 inhibitory control → resilience(a) -0.56 0.16 -0.87 -0.25 0.00 resilience→ nssi (b) 0.26 0.15 -0.03 0.56 0.08 inhibitory control → nssi (c' direct effect) 0.13 0.06 0.04 0.27 indirect effect (a × b) x = cognitive flexibility cognitive flexibility → resilience(a) -0.40 0.06 -0.52 -0.27 0.00 resilience→ nssi (b) -0.63 0.17 -0.97 -0.30 0.00 cognitive flexibility → nssi (c' direct effect) -0.04 0.16 -0.36 0.27 0.78 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 187 rania khairunnisa et.al (the mediating role of resilience between executive function and non-suicidal self-injury in…) indirect effect (a × b) 0.25 0.09 0.11 0.46 table 3 presents the mediating role of resilience in the relationship between overall executive function, its dimensions separately, and nssi behavior. the indirect effect of overall executive function was significant (95% ci [0.053, 0.30]). similarly, the indirect effects of each executive function dimension—working memory (95% ci [0.04, 0.27]), inhibitory control (95% ci [0.04, 0.27]), and cognitive flexibility (95% ci [0.11, 0.46])— also reached significance level. however, the direct effects of working memory (95% ci [0.13, 0.06]), inhibitory control (95% ci [-0.03, 0.56]), and cognitive flexibility (95% ci [0.35, 0.27]) were not statistically significant. in contrast, the direct effect of overall executive function was significant (95% ci [0.02, 0.62]). these findings indicate that each dimension of executive function indirectly predicts nssi behavior exclusively through the mediating role of resilience, indicating resilience as a full mediator. however, overall executive function predicts nssi both directly and indirectly through resilience, indicating partial mediation. this underscores the critical role of resilience in mitigating the impact of executive function deficits on nssi behavior. discussion this study examined the mediating role of resilience in the relationship between executive function, its dimensions, and non-suicidal self-injury (nssi). the findings indicate that overall executive function correlates with and directly predicts nssi, with its combined dysfunction exerting a stronger influence on behavior regulation (wang et al., 2023). viewing executive function as a single construct captures cumulative deficits across cognitive domains simultaneously, impairing emotion regulation and increasing vulnerability to nssi as a maladaptive coping strategy. these impairments disrupt impulse control, cognitive flexibility, and the ability to adopt adaptive coping mechanisms, reinforcing nssi as a repetitive and rigid emotional regulation strategy (fikke et al., 2011). furthermore, when resilience is added as a mediating variable, nssi in adolescents can also be significantly influenced. executive function plays a crucial role in building resilience by enhancing cognitive flexibility and problem-solving skills, enabling individuals to adapt more effectively to stressors. it also strengthens resilience by maintaining goal-directed behavior and regulating emotional responses. this ability allows individuals to function effectively under stress, cope with adversities, and remain focused despite psychological distress (afek et al., 2021; zhang et al., 2019). higher resilience can help someone to reduce anxiety and stress when facing stressful situations. besides that, resilience is also influenced by an individual's surrounding environment such as family and friends that also help someone to regulate negative emotions and enhance adaptive responses to threats (scult et al., 2017). in children and adolescents, executive function and resilience are interrelated and jointly predict social competence, social support, and adaptive coping strategies that are associated with internalizing and externalizing problems (martek et al., 2007; turner et al., 2014; wei et al., 2022). with good resilience, individuals can have better competence and develop adaptive coping that avoids the idea of doing nssi behavior. since executive function consists of three main dimensions—working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility—this study explores the relationship between each dimension and nssi. however, when each executive function dimension is analyzed separately, the predictive power for nssi diminishes and cannot significantly predict nssi. the inability of working memory to predict self-harm in adolescents is possibly due to the complex interplay of cognitive and emotional factors. it indicates that even though working memory is an important cognitive function, it does not itself directly predict self-harming 188 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) rania khairunnisa et.al (the mediating role of resilience between executive function and non-suicidal self-injury in…) behaviors such as nssi, which are often also influenced by emotional distress and cognitive distortions (wang et al., 2023). however, when working memory is linked through resilience, nssi can be significantly predicted. a study indicates that cognitive abilities, including working memory, play a protective role in how individuals respond emotionally to stress. working memory can buffer against the negative effects of stress, helping individuals maintain a more stable emotional state during challenging times (baliyan et al., 2021). good working memory supports resilience by allowing individuals to regulate emotions by assimilating information related to difficult situations, and develop adaptive coping strategies (weiland et al., 2012). therefore a person will be less likely to engage in maladaptive coping behavior such as nssi. the second dimension, inhibitory control, also cannot significantly predict nssi. individuals intentionally engage in self-harm actions not solely due to an inability to resist the presence of a sharp or dangerous item, but because self-injury invokes a rewarding process by alleviating negative emotional states. the coupling between the rewards associated with self-injury and the heightening of reactive inhibition would allow individuals to override their self-preservation instinct (mirabella et al., 2024). as executive function in general, inhibitory control also cannot independently affect the nssi behavior among adolescents, but there are factors like other psychological and social factors that play a big role in the development of nssi behavior (rodman et al., 2017).this result contradicts previous studies’ findings suggesting that inhibitory control in adolescents with nssi is lower than in normal adolescents (marotz & allen, 2016; mozafari et al., 2022). however, this finding aligns with results from a previous study that initiative self-control is better at predicting engagement in desired behaviors, while inhibitory self-control is more effective at resisting unwanted behaviors (deridder et al., 2011). nevertheless, resilience can significantly bridge the relationship between inhibitory control and nssi. resilience positively correlates with non-emotional inhibitory control, which enhances resilience in stressful situations (afek et al., 2021). good inhibitory control enhances resilience by enabling individuals to maintain goal-directed behavior and regulate emotional responses, allowing for better coping with stress and adversity (afek et al., 2021). research also suggests that adolescents with strong social networks that enhance resilience may exhibit better self-control, complicating the relationship between inhibitory control and self-harm behaviors (thompson, 2020). the last dimension, cognitive flexibility, also cannot independently predict nssi in adolescents. research shows that cognitive flexibility, as currently measured, is not significantly related to a history of nssi beyond the presentation of specific psychopathology, such as depression. higher cognitive flexibility may have a protective influence against nssi by mitigating the effects of stress and psychological pain. however, cognitive flexibility does not appear to be a primary mechanism of change in many nssi interventions (chung et al., 2024). in addition, cognitive inflexibility is not significantly related to a history of nssi behavior, possibly because cognitive inflexibility is triggered as a temporary response to distress rather than as a static cognitive characteristic (polancoroman et al., 2015). however, when resilience is added as a mediator variable, the relationship can significantly predict nssi. cognitive flexibility, which involves cognitive appraisal and frontal brain circuits, plays a crucial role in human resilience by reallocating attentional resources between cognitive-emotional regulation and pain perception (yao & hsieh, 2019) cognitive flexibility helps enhance resilience by enabling individuals to adapt their thinking and emotional responses to adversities, facilitating better recovery from stressors (sünbül, 2020). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 189 rania khairunnisa et.al (the mediating role of resilience between executive function and non-suicidal self-injury in…) additionally, the results of this study showed that the majority of adolescent participants had engaged in nssi at least once in their lives. this is consistent with a previous study, which reported that the highest prevalence of nssi behavior occurs among adolescents (morgan et al., 2017). involvement in nssi is significantly associated with feelings of depression and can be considered a strategy for emotion regulation (giletta et al., 2012). nssi also serves as a mechanism for alleviating negative emotions experienced by individuals due to adverse past experiences (kaess et al., 2013). furthermore, nssi is often used as a tool for self-punishment for events or situations that have occurred or actions that the individual has taken (cipriano et al., 2017). among all participants who had engaged in nssi, the majority were female. this finding is consistent with previous research that argued that females are more likely to disclose their nssi behavior than males, leading to higher recorded statistics (bresin & schoenleber, 2015). also, the report shows that females reported significantly higher levels of perceived distress than males. nssi is often used as a coping mechanism for negative feelings associated with depression and anxiety (e.g., sadness, restlessness, feelings of worthlessness), and females are at greater risk of engaging in nssi because they are more likely to experience these symptoms compared to males (lutz et al., 2023). this study has several limitations that should be considered for future research on similar topics. first, the participants in this study were from the jakarta, bogor, depok, tangerang, and bekasi areas. future studies could include a broader range of participants to provide a more comprehensive understanding. second, the nssi scale used in this study was dichotomous, which did not allow for an assessment of the severity of participants' engagement in nssi. future research should consider using a scale that can measure the severity of nssi behavior more comprehensively. conclusion based on this study, only overall executive function could significantly predict non-suicidal self-injury (nssi) behavior in adolescents. meanwhile, each dimension separately could not predict nssi in participants. the role of resilience as a mediator variable is critical in explaining this relationship. each dimension of executive function separately—working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility, could only predict nssi when resilience is taken into account. resilience helps bridge the impact of executive function on nssi by enhancing adolescents' ability to manage negative emotions and respond adaptively to stressful situations. these findings highlight the importance of intervention that targets determinants of resilience and executive function, as well as prevention efforts for nssi, especially among adolescents who are vulnerable to psychological problems. acknowledgment the authors thank the participants involved in this research. declarations author contribution. the first author contributed to designing the study, collecting data, analysing the results, and writing the article. the second author contributed to directing the research topic, supervising the study, consulting on data analysis, and reviewing the article manuscript. funding statement. ui-utm bilateral strategic matching fund from universitas indonesia has fully funded the research with funding number nkb-1183/un2.rst/hkp.05.00/2023. 190 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) rania khairunnisa et.al (the mediating role of resilience between executive function and non-suicidal self-injury in…) conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest in this article's research, authorship, and publication. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references abidin, f. a., prathama, a. g., 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(2024). the relationship between resilience, loneliness, and non-suicidal self-injurious behavior among adolescents in johor bahru. international journal of academic research in business & social sciences, 14(2), 1714–1726. https://doi.org/10.6007/ijarbss/v14-i2/20967 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 22 (2), august 2025, 197-208 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas http://doi.org/ 10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1582 peer interaction in school as a mediator between adolescent selfesteem and coping strategies alif muarifah1, fitriana oktaviani2 1faculty of teacher training and education, universitas ahmad dahlan, indonesia 2department of psychology, telkom university, indonesia corresponding author: alif.muarifah@bk.uad.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction the term coping strategy often refers to an individual’s way of managing their emotion and behaviors when addressing stressful internal and external demands (stephenson & delongis, 2020). this process is also common among adolescents, who frequently face a range of stressors during this developmental period. coping strategies are classified as problemfocused, addressing stressors directly, or emotion-focused, regulating emotional responses. these strategies are essential for managing developmental and social challenges affecting emotional and behavioral functioning. article info abst ract article history received:30 june 2025 revised:26 august 2025 accepted:28 august 2025 coping strategies help manage stress in challenging social contexts, especially for adolescents facing unique developmental challenges. their effectiveness depends on context, individual traits, social responses, and sociocultural factors. this study aimed to examine the model of adolescents’ coping strategies in the social context, viewed from the peer interaction in school, affected by adolescents’ selfesteem. 530 senior high school students were involved as participants. there were 245 male students and 285 female students aged between 15 and 18 years old (m= 16.52, sd=0.673) in five schools in bantul. coping strategy, peer interaction, and self-esteem scales were developed to collect data. data were analysed using partial least squares-structural equation modelling (pls-sem) with smartpls 4. the model exhibited a good fit and showed that adolescents’ coping strategies were affected by self-esteem and mediated by peer interaction. this study demonstrated the significant effect of selfesteem on peer interactions among adolescents. adolescents may possess a good coping strategy when having good peer interaction and self-esteem. further findings indicate that most participants’ problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies, peer interaction, and self-esteem were categorized as the low and high category. however, the low category of each variable needs to be considered keywords adolescent, coping strategies, peer interaction self-esteem mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas http://doi.org/%2010.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1582 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 196 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) alif muarifah et.al (peer interaction in school as a mediator between adolescent self-esteem and coping strategies….) while problem-focused coping is generally associated with more adaptive responses, many adolescents tend to rely on emotion-focused strategies. adolescents with problemfocused coping strategies tend to have more adaptive ways to address problems and have better perceptions when facing stressful situations (özer & korkman, 2022). prior study in cibinong, west java, indonesia, reported that 71.9% of 341 adolescents employed emotionfocused coping strategies such as avoiding and ignoring problems, withdrawals, and hiding problems (novitasari & hamid, 2021). meanwhile, other studies reported that 50-72% of 384 adolescents in indonesia engaged in destructive coping mechanism, such as hopelessness, self-harm, suicidal intention, showing eating and sleeping disorder, uncontrolled anger, giving up, and doing nothing (kaligis et al., 2021). these studies demonstrate that a few adolescents in indonesia still find it difficult to effectively cope with conflicts in their life. the problem of adolescent coping strategies in indonesia, especially at school age, needs further attention, especially since coping strategies are related to adolescent academics performance (cao et al., 2021; gustems-carnicer et al., 2019; shih, 2015), considering that the results of the pisa (program for international student assessment) assessment of indonesia's academic achievement in 2018 ranked sixth from the bottom (mccomas, 2014). previous research found that students who engage in less cognitive avoidance and more problem-focused coping achieve higher academic performance (gustems-carnicer et al., 2019). active coping strategies are usually problem-solving or task-oriented, which would help students refocus their minds, exert more effort to overcome challenges, or develop a pathway to do better in class (cao et al., 2022). when facing or experiencing stress, students with active coping strategies have the potential to improve their academic performance, whereas students with denial coping strategies lack the desire to succeed academically (cao et al., 2022). other research showed that students who applied engagement and support seeking coping strategies when facing academic challenges showed lower levels of academic burnout (shih, 2015) it is important for an adolescent to have a proper coping strategy. it is also necessary to scrutinise factors supporting one’s coping strategies. previous studies show that one’s coping strategy is spiritual and social support from parents and friends online (defina & rizkillah, 2021), perception (solicha & amalia, 2022) and hospitality community with scheduled activities such as monthly recitation, substance use counselling, and free medical treatment (kurniawan, 2018). in addition, the previous study suggests that peer support is associated with an increase in effective coping (richard et al., 2022). therefore, to attain peer support, interactions between peers are necessary. peer relationships develop during interactions between individuals in groups whose members have similar average ages and psychological development (oktaviani et al., 2023). previous studies have shown that peer interaction contributes to one's coping strategies (graber et al., 2016; oktaviani et al., 2023; yoo, 2019). a study of 505 college students in jakarta found that peer relationships enhance students' coping strategies, students received high levels of trust and insight from their peers (oktaviani et al., 2023). a study in england involved 409 adolescents and showed that friendship quality might enhance a adaptive coping style and minimize disengaged and externalizing coping style, meaning that a close friendship may serve as a proper mechanism for improving coping skills (graber et al., 2016) another study in 517 south korean high school students reported that peer relationship might, directly and indirectly, affect one’s self-esteem, behavior focused-coping, and humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 197 alif muarifah et.al (peer interaction in school as a mediator between adolescent self-esteem and coping strategies….) emotion focused-coping styles (yoo, 2019). to conclude, good peer interaction tends to improve adolescents’ coping strategies. while the previous study showed that peer interaction positively affects self-esteem (yoo, 2019), we assumed that self-esteem may positively affect peer interaction based on cultural differences and individuals’ condition. our assumption was supported by a metaanalysis study based on longitudinal data, which found that self-esteem affects peer interaction by 0.07. although the effects are small, this supports the possibility that a person displays perceived signs that convey their internal self-evaluation to others, thereby shaping social relationship patterns other assumptions on cultural differences affecting the selfesteem role in peer interaction are supported by (lestari, 2017), who conducted a study on adolescents in malang and found that self-esteem directly contributed to peer interaction and indirectly through the moderating role of shyness. the finding shows that adolescents with higher self-esteem tend to have better peer relationships and a broader social environment. in contrast, individuals with lower self-esteem find it more difficult to build a relationship (lestari, 2017). a previous study conducted by lestari (2017) took place in malang with a javanese cultural background, similar to the cultural background of participants in this study. shyness in lestari (2017) represents one of the effects of shame culture, one of the most important norms in javanese culture (muttaqin & saputra, 2019). one’s self-esteem is related to their confidence in skill, ability, and social relationships (abdel-khalek, 2016). the level of an individual's self-esteem may positively influence his/her social relationships (marshall et al., 2014). meta-analytical study shows that self-esteem affects one’s behavior and further affects social relationships (harris & orth, 2020). in other words, one’s perceived ability to build social relationships may affect how he/she interact with his/her friends. the term self-esteem refers to an individual’s self-evaluation, made and maintained by the individual regarding themselves (abdel-khalek, 2016). self-evaluation is pivotal in determining how individuals feel, think, and behave. negative views on oneself, one’s self, situation, and the future may cause individuals to have a negative orientation to a problem (özer & korkman, 2022). individuals are different in terms of stable self-esteem and response to stimuli; a person's level of self-esteem often correlates with other life outcomes (westfall, 2020). previous studies have reported the effect of self-esteem on coping strategies (meida & ariana, 2021; özer & korkman, 2022). adolescents with higher selfesteem may overcome challenging situations with positive attitudes, whereas adolescents with lower self-esteem tend to exhibit defensive attitudes due to a limited repertoire of positive attitudes us research on 76 adolescent victims of childhood emotional abuse in indonesia showed that the better the adolescents self-esteem, the more effective the coping strategies they applied (meida & ariana, 2021). it can be concluded that self-esteem contributed to coping strategies. based on the description above, it could be concluded that self-esteem and peer interaction may affect one’s coping strategies and self-esteem contribute to one's peer interaction. this study may extend the existing body of knowledge on coping strategies, considering that developing self-reliance and peer relationships are among important developmental tasks (güroğlu, 2022). in addition, this study may serve as further consideration for schools in developing mental health programs and educators in dealing with students' problems with their peers. this study specifically aims to test the theoretical model of the role of peer interaction in relationship between self-esteem and coping 198 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) alif muarifah et.al (peer interaction in school as a mediator between adolescent self-esteem and coping strategies….) strategies. no studies have examined the mediating role of peer interaction in the relationship between self-esteem and coping strategies. in addition, the research enriches previous literature, more research has been conducted on the effects of peer interaction on self-esteem instead of self-esteem on peer interaction. it also addresses the limitations of (harris & orth, 2020) research, showing that self-esteem has lower effects on peer interaction compared to romantic relationships and parents. this study proposed several hypotheses: h1: self-esteem positively affects coping strategies. h2: peer interaction positively affects coping strategies. h3: self-esteem positively affects peer interaction h4: peer interaction mediates the relationship between self-esteem and coping strategies. method participants as many as 530 senior high school students, 15-18 years of age (m =16.52, sd = 0.79) participated in this study (245 male students, 285 female students). they were recruited from five schools in bantul regency, yogyakarta province, indonesia. the sampling technique used was convenience sampling, based on the availability and accessibility of the research subjects. instruments the research instruments were developed based on the theory that supported each variable. validity testing was conducted using construct validity by examining factor loading values and average variance extracted. reliability testing was conducted using internal consistency techniques by examining cronbach's alpha and composite reliability values. the coping strategies scale was developed based on theories stated by ver (carver & connor-smith, 2010; lazarus & folkman, 1984). this 46-item scale comprising two parts: 1) problem-focused coping strategies, which included active coping, planning, suppression of competing activities, restraint, and seeking social supports, and 2) emotionfocused coping strategies which included four indicators: escapism, minimization, selfblame, and positive reappraisal. the scale used a 7-point likert scale, ranging from 1 (represents low-intensity behavior) to 7 (high-intensity behavior). the coping strategies scale was deemed to be valid and reliable, indicated by cronbach's alpha 0.84, composite reliability 0.84, and average variance extracted (ave) 0.56. the peer interaction scale was developed following the theory proposed by mussen et al. (1990), consisting of thirty-three items with several indicators, namely a) tolerance, b) flexibility, c) enthusiasm, d) being energetic, e) reasonable behaviors, and f) positive urge. it applied a 7-point likert scale, ranging from 1 (low-intensity behavior) to 7 (high-intensity behavior). the peer interaction scale was found to be valid and reliable, indicated by cronbach's alpha 0.88, composite reliability 0.88, and average variance extracted (ave) 0.51. the self-esteem scale was developed based on theories stated by (baumeister et al., 1993; coopersmith, 1967; dutton & brown, 1997). indicators of self-esteem comprised a) self-management, (b) responsiveness and adaptiveness, c) self-evaluation, d) competence and achievement, e) self-capacity, and f) adherence to values. this 35-item scale used a 7point likert scale, in which 1 represents low intensity, and 7 represents high intensity. the humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 199 alif muarifah et.al (peer interaction in school as a mediator between adolescent self-esteem and coping strategies….) self-esteem scale was stated to be valid and reliable, indicated by cronbach's alpha 0.82, composite reliability 0.83, and average variance extracted (ave) 0.59. procedures this study was approved by universitas ahmad dahlan, yogyakarta provincial government, regional education agency, and the schools. we asked school counsellors to identify students who could participate in this study. they were recruited based on several criteria, i.e., 11th-grade students living together with parents whose educational background was at least senior high school. once participants were recruited, we set schedules for data collection. we visited schools and distributed scales to students. four research assistants and five school counsellors helped students to respond to the scale. students in this study also signed an informed consent form. we explained the purpose and procedures for responding to the instrument and told them that their data and responses were kept confidential. data were collected in two months, and each participant received a voucher worth at idr 50,000 (approximately usd 3.30) for their participation. data analysis descriptive statistical analysis was applied to describe each variable, specifically for coping strategies described by type, i.e., problem-focused coping strategies and emotion-focused coping strategies. the mediating role of peer interaction in the relationship between selfesteem and adolescents’ coping strategies was examined using partial least square structural equation modeling (pls-sem) with smart-pls 4. the pls-sem analysis comprised two stages. in the first stage, the inner model was evaluated using r-square (r2) value, predictive relevance (q2), standardized root mean square residuals (srmr), and goodness of fit (gof) index). the following formula was used to estimate the predictive relevance: q2 = 1 – [(1r2 1) x (1r2 2)] meanwhile, gof index was estimated using the following formula: gof =√ (mean communality x mean r2). in the second stage, hypotheses were tested using bootstrapping method. hypotheses were supported if the p-value < 0.05. the mediation effect was examined based on the variance accounted for (vaf), estimated using the following formula: vaf = indirect effect / (direct effect + indirect effect) a vaf value higher than 80% represent full mediation, the score between 20% and 80% represent partial mediation, and a score less than 20% indicates no mediation (hair et al., 2021). results descriptive analysis three categories, including low, medium, and high, were used to describe the distribution of data characteristics based on levels. problem-focused coping strategies exhibited a score range of 35-17, while emotional-focused coping strategies exhibited a score range of 21138. the peer interaction and self-esteem showed a score range of 45-225 and 53-234, respectively. both problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies, peer interaction, and self-esteem of most participants were in the low and high category. however, the low category of each variable needs to be considered, as more than 36% of participants were in 200 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) alif muarifah et.al (peer interaction in school as a mediator between adolescent self-esteem and coping strategies….) the low category. these findings were consistent with the categories of several indicator variables, which dominated by low and high categories. the problem-focused coping indicator with the most participants in the low category was seeking social support (34.72%). while the emotion-focused coping indicators, namely escapism, minimization, and self-blame, constitute maladaptive coping for most participants in adequate to high categories, and positive reappraisal refers to adaptive coping for 39% of participants in low categories. other findings revealed that peer interaction and self-esteem indicators with the most participants in the low category were tolerance (34.91%), flexibility (34.34%), and responsiveness and adaptiveness (33.58%). table 1 presents descriptive data. table 1 descriptive analysis result mean sd low adequate high f (%) f (%) f (%) problem-focused coping 100 27.41 204 (38.49) 126 (23.70) 200 (37.74) emotion-focused coping 84.4 22.41 195 (36.79) 162 (30.57) 173 (32.64) peer interactions 133 37.11 198 (37.36) 141 (26.60) 191 (36.04) self-esteem 142 39.11 198 (37.36) 125 (23.58) 207 (39.06) problem-focused coping active coping 20.31 7.02 161 (30.38) 193 (36.42) 176 (33.21) planning 19.90 7.15 173 (32.64) 179 (33.77) 178 (33.58) suppression of competing activities 20.08 7.50 181 (34.15) 165 (31.13) 184 (34.72) restrain coping 19.89 7.20 182 (34.34) 173 (32.64) 175 (33.02) seeking social support 19.82 7.19 184 (34.72) 173 (32.64) 173 (32.64) emotion-focused coping escapism 24.41 8.59 164 (30.94) 190 (35.85) 176 (33.21) minimization 24.17 9.02 173 (32.64) 178 (33.58) 178 (33.58) self-blame 20.02 7.17 168 (31.70) 196 (36.98) 166 (31.32) positive reappraisal 15.77 5.80 207 (39.06) 164 (30.94) 169 (31.89) peer interactions tolerance 24.09 9.24 185 (34.91) 161 (30.38) 184 (34.72) flexibility 23.73 8.95 193 (36.42) 163 (30.75) 174 (32.83) enthusiasm 24.16 9.09 175 (33.02) 174 (32.83) 181 (34.15) being energic 24.36 8.89 177 (33.40) 159 (30) 194 (36.60) reasonable behaviours 16.05 5.82 172 (32.45) 190 (35.85) 168 (31.70) plan activities 20.30 7.62 166 (31.32) 181 (34.15) 183 (34.53) self-esteem self-management 24.09 9.01 176 (33.21) 155 (29.25) 199 (37.55) responsive and adaptiveness 23.88 9.05 178 (33.58) 167 (31.51) 185 (34.91) self-evaluation 25.01 8.82 152 (28.68) 170 (32.08) 208 (39.25) competence and achievement 24.85 8.97 158 (29.81) 169 (31.89) 203 (38.30) self-capacity 20.26 7.34 176 (33.21) 162 (30.57) 192 (36.23) adherence to value 23.83 8.75 163 (30.75) 186 (35.09) 181 (34.15) inner model evaluation the research model was evaluated based on r2 (r-square), q2 (predictive relative), srmr (standardized root mean square residual), and gof (goodness of fit) index. the coping strategies and peer interaction exhibited an r2 score of 0.99 and 0.96, respectively. the score indicated that self-esteem and peer interaction affected coping strategies by 99.5%, while humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 201 alif muarifah et.al (peer interaction in school as a mediator between adolescent self-esteem and coping strategies….) self-esteem affected peer interaction by 96%. the developed structural model was proven to be relevant, as supported by q2 of 0.99 (q2 > 0). an srmr value of 0.04 (srmr < 1.00) indicated a good fit. the gof value of 0.63 (gof> 0.36) proved that the theoretical model could depict the effect of exogenous variables on the mediating and endogenous variables. the inner model analysis shows that the proposed model exhibited a good fit. figure 1 below presents the final version of the proposed model. figure 1 final model hypothesis the hypothesis analysis result showed h1 is supported by self-esteem positively affects coping strategies. h2 is supported by peer interaction positively affects coping strategies, and h3 is supported by self-esteem positively affects peer interaction. h4 is supported, whereas peer interaction mediates the relationship between self-esteem and coping strategies. the effect of self-esteem on coping strategies exhibited a significant increase after being mediated by peer interaction. the mediation test showed that peer interaction has an indirect effect, indicated by vaf of 0.868 (vaf > 0.80). the following table 2 displays the hypothesis analysis result. table 2 hypothesis analysis result path coefficients t value p values direct effect self-esteem -> coping 0.13 7.81 0.000 peer interactions -> coping 0.87 52.96 0.000 self-esteem -> peer interactions 0.98 571.66 0.000 indirect effect self-esteem -> peer interactions -> coping 0.85 53.53 0.000 total effect self-esteem -> coping strategies 0.98 634.37 0.000 202 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) alif muarifah et.al (peer interaction in school as a mediator between adolescent self-esteem and coping strategies….) correlation between variable indicators the analyzed results found that each variable indicator had a positive correlation. the results of the analysis between coping indicators and peer interaction indicators showed that planning, restraint coping, and self-blame had the highest relationship with tolerance. escapism had the highest correlation with flexibility, and positive reappraisal has the highest correlation with positive urge. both active planning and minimization had the highest correlation with being energetic, while suppression of competing activities and seeking social support had the highest correlation with self-capacity. other correlation test results between coping indicators and self-esteem indicators found that active coping, planning, suppression of competing activities, minimization, and positive reappraisal have the highest relationship with self-management. meanwhile, escapism and minimisation have the highest correlation with responsiveness and adaptiveness, and restraint coping has the highest correlation with competence and achievement. table 3 presents correlation test results. table 3 pearson’s correlation between variable indicators peer interaction self-esteem p1 p2 p3 p4 p5 p6 s1 s2 s3 s4 s5 problem-focused coping active coping 0.56 0.55 0.51 0.57 0.54 0.56 0.59 0.55 0.55 0.56 0.53 planning 0.59 0.52 0.55 0.55 0.55 0.54 0.58 0.57 0.56 0.57 0.51 suppression of competing activities 0.56 0.54 0.51 0.53 0.59 0.57 0.58 0.57 0.55 0.53 0.52 restrain coping 0.56 0.54 0.53 0.54 0.55 0.53 0.57 0.54 0.52 0.58 0.50 seeking social support 0.52 0.53 0.54 0.57 0.58 0.55 0.62 0.58 0.53 0.57 0.51 emotion-focused coping escapism 0.42 0.51 0.46 0.47 0.49 0.49 0.48 0.51 0.46 0.49 0.44 minimization 0.57 0.53 0.49 0.57 0.54 0.53 0.58 0.55 0.52 0.54 0.52 self-blame 0.56 0.47 0.46 0.49 0.50 0.49 0.51 0.53 0.50 0.47 0.51 positive reappraisal 0.56 0.50 0.54 0.57 0.55 0.57 0.56 0.51 0.54 0.56 0.56 discussion the following research results explained that self-esteem contributed to coping strategies. this result suggests that the better the self-esteem of adolescents, the better the coping strategies they can use to deal with their problems. adolescents with high self-esteem tend to perceive situations as controllable and react with strategies aimed at changing the cause of the problem (lane et al., 2002; özer & korkman, 2022). in contrast, adolescents with low self-esteem tend to perceive difficult tasks as beyond their control and consequently tend to use emotion-focused strategies to reduce negative feelings associated with stressors (lane et al., 2002). this finding supported earlier research that explained a significant and positive relationship between self-esteem and coping strategies in aydin (turkey) and indonesia (meida & ariana, 2021; özer & korkman, 2022). the analysis result proved that self-esteem positively affected peer interaction. selfesteem derived from self-evaluations may affect relationship outcomes such as satisfaction, trust, and intimacy (harris & orth, 2020). once adolescents’ express beliefs related to themselves, it shapes social relationships such as being open, tolerance, willing to help, or enthusiasm. this finding supports a previous study by lestari (2017) showing that high selfhumanitas: indonesian psychological journal 203 alif muarifah et.al (peer interaction in school as a mediator between adolescent self-esteem and coping strategies….) esteem positively affects peer interaction. it also suits the javanese cultural background in which this study took place. hat many adolescents still exhibited low self-esteem and peer interaction, which was possibly accounted for by the significant influence of javanese shame culture (muttaqin & saputra, 2019). the previous study also reported that shyness may affect the relationship between self-esteem and peer interaction. however, improper expression of shyness can potentially lead to fear, disbelief, and low self-esteem (chilton, 2012). another finding shows that peer interaction exhibits a strong effect on coping strategies. this explains that the higher the adolescents peer interaction, the better their coping strategies. in adolescence, peer relationships gain more complexity. concurrent with the growing importance of peers comes an increase in the complexity of the peer system; friends' opinions provide an important impact on individual decisions (scholte & van aken, 2006). good peer interaction promotes an adaptive coping strategies (graber et al., 2016). and develops active problem-solving skills (mota & matos, 2013). this study supports previous findings in portugal (mota & matos, 2013), england (graber et al., 2016), and south korea (yoo, 2019), showing that peer interaction positively affects coping strategies regardless of the cultural background. the study’s result proved that the theoretical model fitted the empirical data, demonstrating the mediating role of peer interaction in the relationship between self-esteem and coping strategies. these relationships have not been extensively studied. this result showed that the theoretical model could depict the effect of all exogenous variables on the mediating and endogenous variables in this study. it also shows that the effect of self-esteem on coping strategies increases when peer interaction serves as the mediating variable. this result indicates that a higher level of self-esteem may influence adolescents’ peer interaction. good peer interactions may also improve their coping strategies. self-esteem refers to the selfevaluation that individuals make and maintain about themselves (abdel-khalek, 2016). self-evaluation forms a crucial part of determining an individual's feelings, thoughts, and actions, which can influence social relationships (harris & orth, 2020), and the selection of coping strategies (meida & ariana, 2021; özer & korkman, 2022). in other words, the selfesteem that a person feels in building social relationships can influence the way they interact with their friends. positive peer relationships provide crucial emotional support, helping adolescents feel less alone and more capable of managing their feelings (butler et al., 2022). they can also learn new coping skills by watching how their peers handle stress and conflict (utami, 2024). the research findings found that tolerance was positively correlated with planning, restraint coping, and self-blame. this describes how tolerance had positive and negative impacts on participants. tolerance is being lenient with negative interference and embracing disagreeable differences (verkuyten & kollar, 2021). tolerance reflects self-control to prevent unwanted behavior (verkuyten et al., 2020), in line with planning and restraint coping which involves self-control in responding to stressful internal and external demands (carver & connor-smith, 2010). in addition, tolerance could put a psychological burden on individuals since it could be used as an avoidance method due to fear of offending other more dominant people and could result in negative affect and lower well-being (verkuyten et al., 2020). besides, the participant's javanese cultural background was another contributor to tolerance being positively related to self-blame. javanese culture, especially in bantul, yogyakarta special region province, holds the principles of isin (being ashamed), wedi (afraid of engaging in wrongdoing), and sungkan (deference) (diananda, 2021). this 204 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) alif muarifah et.al (peer interaction in school as a mediator between adolescent self-esteem and coping strategies….) principle leads to shyness, fear, and discomfort when behaviors are perceived to be incompatible with others or norms (prasanti, 2013). according to this study, problem-focused and emotional-focus coping, peer interaction, and self-esteem of most participants were categorized as low and high. this shows that, most participants use problem-focus coping properly but also tend to use emotional-focus coping, possess decent peer interaction and self-esteem, but several participants need to improve their peer interaction and self-esteem in line with the category of coping indicators, namely escapism, minimization, and self-blame were categorized as low and high, while several adolescents also had positive reappraisal and seeking social support in the low category. this indicates that a few adolescents in this study had difficulty seeking social support and struggled to understand the wisdom behind their problems, leading to a tendency to avoid problems, deny the existence of problems, or blame themselves unnecessarily. as a transitional period, adolescents begin to spend less time with their parents and more time with their peers, sharing their problems with them more (papalia et al., 2010). adolescents are starting to make increasingly independent decisions about how to explore the world, but with a very limited experience base, it is enough to create confusion and difficulties for adolescents (mclaughlin et al., 2015), so they tend to use emotionfocused coping. these findings support several previous studies, the of high-category of problemfocused coping strategies was in line with the results of a previous study with a javanese cultural background in kroya, central java, which found 217 middle school students used adaptive coping with a focus on integrity, growth processes, learning, and goal attainment (agustin et al., 2022). the finding of the high category of emotion-focused coping strategies, in line with study in cibinong, west java found that most high school students in cibinong, west java employed emotion-focused coping strategies such as avoiding and ignoring problems, withdrawals, and hiding problems (novitasari & hamid, 2021). other previous studies show that adolescents from various regions in indonesia engage in destructive coping mechanisms, such as avoiding problems (92%), self-harm (46%), suicidal intention (57%), showing eating and sleeping disorders (88% and 92%), uncontrolled anger (70%), giving up and doing nothing (75%) (kaligis et al., 2021). this study implied the need for special attention to developing adolescents’ selfesteem, considering that many adolescents exhibited low self-esteem, which may lead to low peer interaction and coping strategies. parents’ active role is pivotal in developing adolescents’ character to improve their self-esteem. meanwhile, the school may help improve students' self-esteem by developing a program that includes the active role of peers. better levels of peer interaction encourage adolescents to employ adaptive coping strategies throughout academic challenges. developing positive peer interactions in the classroom is crucial to this effect. further findings indicate that some adolescents have difficulty seeking social support and positive appraisal. schools can help provide social support in the form of attractive guidance counselling programs so that adolescents can confide in teachers and have alternatives for help. this study was limited to participants in bantul, and hence future studies are recommended to involve broader regions with different norms and cultures from javanese ones. it also examined only problem and emotion-focused coping strategies. therefore, future studies are recommended to scrutinize other types of coping strategies with a more comprehensive analysis. this study focused on personal factors and peer relationships in humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 205 alif muarifah et.al (peer interaction in school as a mediator between adolescent self-esteem and coping strategies….) school, future research may develop the contribution of parents and school management to coping strategies. conclusion this study suggests that peer interaction in schools provides a mediating influence on the relationship between self-esteem and coping strategies. therefore, positive peer interaction enhanced the contribution of self-esteem to coping strategies. this research also discovered that problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies, peer interaction, and selfesteem of most participants were in the low and high category. however, the low category of each variable needs to be considered. acknowledgment we want to express our gratitude to ahmad dahlan university for supporting and funding this work under the supported professorship candidate research grant. declarations author contribution. conceptualization: a.m. data curation, a.m and f.o. formal analysis: a.m. investigation: a.m. and fo. method: a.m. validation, a.m. and f.o. visualization: f.o. writing original draft preparation: a.m. writing, review and editing: a.m., and f.o. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding statement. this work was funded by universitas ahmad dahlan professorship candidate research grant conflict of interest. the authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. additional information. no additional information is available for this paper. references abdel-khalek, a. m. 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(2020). the negative implications of being tolerated: tolerance from the target’s perspective. perspectives on psychological science, 15(3), 544–561. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619897974 westfall, r. s. (2020). self‐esteem, theory of. in b. j. carducci, c. s. nave, & c. s. nave (eds.), the wiley encyclopedia of personality and individual differences: clinical, applied, and cross‐cultural research (pp. 381–385). wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118970843.ch63 yoo, c. (2019). stress coping and mental health among adolescents: applying a multidimensional stress coping model. children and youth services review, 99, 43–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2019.01.030 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 22 (2), august 2025, 143-156 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print) humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1222 quality of work life, anchor virtues, and work engagement: the moderating role of workload dhiatira biananda apsari, bagus riyono faculty of psychology, universitas gadjah mada, yogyakarta, indonesia corresponding author: bagus@ugm.ac.id this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction work engagement has consistently been a critical issue in various organizations due to its recognized importance as a fundamental concept for enhancing workplace well-being (bakker, 2011). saxena and srivastava (2015) assert that work engagement has become one of the primary challenges that must be effectively managed to achieve organizational goals. accordingly, frank et al. (2004) emphasize that work engagement should be a core strategy for involving employees at all levels to ensure long-term success. work engagement refers to a positive, fulfilling mental and emotional state in relation to one’s work, characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption (hakanen et al., 2006). vigor represents high energy levels, mental resilience while working, willingness to work persistently, and enthusiasm in overcoming obstacles. dedication reflects full involvement articl e inf o abstract article history received: 8 january 2025 revised: 22 june 2025 accepted: 3 july 2025 work engagement is a critical issue across organizations due to its vital role in enhancing workplace well-being. this study examines the impact of quality of work life and anchor virtues on work engagement, with workload as a moderating variable, among civil servants (pns) at the national land agency (bpn) in district x. a total of 101 active civil servants participated in this quantitative study. data were collected using the utrecht work engagement scale (uwes), the quality of work life scale, the anchor personality inventory (focusing on anchor virtues), and the subjective workload assessment technique (swat) scale. structural equation modeling (sem) was conducted using smart pls version 3.0 to evaluate measurement models, test hypotheses, and analyze structural relationships. the findings reveal that workload moderates the relationships between quality of work life, anchor virtues, and work engagement. specifically, the relationship between quality of work life and work engagement strengthens under high workload conditions. conversely, the effect of anchor virtues on work engagement weakens as workload increases. these results highlight the complex dynamics of workload as a moderator and underscore the importance of quality of work life and anchor virtues in fostering work engagement among civil servants dedicated to public service keywords anchor virtues civil servants quality of work life work engagement workload mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1222 mailto:bagus@ugm.ac.id https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 144 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) dhiatira biananda apsari et.al (quality of work life, anchor virtues, and work engagement:…) in work with a sense of significance, enthusiasm, inspiration, pride, and challenge. absorption is characterized by full concentration and joy in one’s work, where employees feel time passes quickly and it is difficult to detach themselves from their work (leiter & bakker, 2010). according to gorgievski & bakker (2010), employees with high work engagement perform better than their less-engaged peers. engaged employees exhibit high energy, effectively contribute to task completion, and feel capable of meeting job demands (schaufeli & bakker, 2004). they are more likely to take the initiative to assist colleagues in solving problems and willingly share information (schaufeli, 2012). in the context of civil servants (pns), work performance directly impacts public trust in government services (rohmatiah & amadi, 2019). similarly, gallup (2016) found that the average engagement rate among government employees is 29% at the national level and 17% at the regional level, with the latter categorized as actively disengaged. engagement levels in the public sector (33%) lag behind those in the private sector (36%) (lavigna & basso, 2020). however, public sector employees are often among the most disengaged workers compared to other sectors (dale carnegie training, 2012). a common occurrence is that, after officially becoming civil servants, certain behaviors emerge that tarnish the image of pns as a whole (sitorus & primanita, 2024). this is in line with the statements given by civil servants at the national land agency (bpn) of regency x, who were previously interviewed. the phenomena experienced by the civil servants at bpn regency x indicate that the issue of work engagement has become a critical area for improvement. as reflected in the first aspect of work engagement—vigor—an issue identified among bpn employees in regency x is the presence of employee behavior that indicates fatigue at work and a sense of stagnation. in the dedication aspect, behaviors indicating a lack of enthusiasm for work are evident, such as the number of employees arriving late for the morning assembly. lastly, in the absorption aspect, some employees show a lack of attention to their tasks and a desire to finish work quickly without considering the quality of the outcomes. this is further supported by the study which found that the bpn office of regency x still needs to improve the timeliness of its services conducted (yanuariza & novitaningtyas, 2021). officers are expected to be more punctual in completing their tasks and in finalizing the ptsl (complete systematic land registration) certification process in accordance with the applicable standard operating procedures (sop). employees who directly interact with clients or the public are particularly critical to ensuring work engagement. these employees must dedicate their time and efforts to provide optimal satisfaction to clients and the public (dale carnegie training, 2012). given its significance, research on work engagement is crucial to improving both employee welfare and organizational productivity. bakker and demerouti (2008) propose the job demands-resources (jd-r) model, which identifies three factors influencing work engagement: job resources, job demands, and personal resources. these factors are interrelated, with job resources being particularly important when job demands, such as high workloads, increase. the jd-r model posits that job and personal resources can predict engagement levels, especially under high job demands (bakker & demerouti, 2008). employees engaged in their work are driven not just by intrinsic motivation but by genuine enjoyment of their work (gorgievski & bakker, 2010). in the jd-r theory, it is stated that the higher a person’s personal resources, the more likely they are to experience alignment between their personal goals and intrinsic motivation (judge et al., 2005). humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 145 dhiatira biananda apsari et.al (quality of work life, anchor virtues, and work engagement:…) in this study, work engagement is hypothesized to be enhanced through job resources, specifically quality of work life (qwl). qwl was selected because it can increase work engagement by 35%-40%, depending on the organizational context (ishfaq et al., 2022). riyono et al. (2022) describes qwl as an organizational culture that balances psychological well-being and employee productivity. unlike previous studies, this research examines the relationship between qwl and work engagement in the specific context of the national land agency (bpn) in regency x, focusing on the public sector. qwl is believed to enhance work engagement by encompassing aspects such as trust, care, respect, learning, and contribution (riyono et al., 2022). trust fosters a sense of security and value among employees. care ensures employees feel appreciated. respect motivates employees to excel in their work. learning opportunities enable employees to achieve their best. lastly, the collective willingness to contribute to organizational progress plays a vital role in boosting engagement. an employee’s personality significantly influences work engagement (ongore, 2014). riyono (2012) suggests that psychological stability is shaped by individual anchors. anchors represent personal values that guide behavior, including virtues, self, others, and material orientations (riyono, 2012). virtues, namely principles based on virtuous values. self, namely all self-qualities that are used as a guide for individuals. others, namely something outside a person that is used as a guide for an individual. materials, defined as all kinds of valuable materials and objects that are used as a mainstay for individuals (riyono, 2020). employees with stable anchor virtues embody goodness, truth, and compassion in their work and lives (hardono, 2021). these values encourage behaviors that benefit organizational goals. this study focused on virtues because of individuals with anchor virtues tend to create a more supportive organizational climate because their behavior is oriented toward goodness and noble values. those who rely on virtues as their anchor also tend to exhibit emotional stability (hardanti & riyono, 2022). in this study, workload is examined as a job demand. according to the jd-r model (bakker & demerouti, 2017), job demands such as workload act as moderators in the relationship between job resources and work engagement and between personal resources and work engagement. workload encompasses time load, mental effort, and psychological stress (reid & nygren, 1988). workload refers to a set of duties or responsibilities given to employees within a designated period, requiring them to complete the tasks using their skills and capabilities (yaningsih & triwahyuni, 2022). variations in perceptions of workload influence its impact on engagement (elfitasari & mulyana, 2020). to strengthen the theoretical basis of the hypothesis, relevant studies were included to support the role of workload as a moderating variable. for instance, abualigah et al. (2021) demonstrated that workload moderates the relationship between religiosity and work engagement, indicating its potential to influence how personal or psychological resources impact work-related outcomes. this evidence provides a theoretical justification for investigating workload as a moderator in the present study. this study positions job demand as a moderator based on the jd-r model, which suggests that high job demands can weaken or strengthen the effects of personal and organizational resources on work engagement (bakker & demerouti, 2007). unlike previous studies that examined qwl or virtues independently, this research integrates both constructs and tests the moderating role of job demand to offer a more nuanced understanding of how employees stay engaged under varying levels of work pressure. this study offers a novel perspective by examining the role of workload as a moderating variable in the relationship between qwl and work engagement, as well as between anchor virtues and work engagement, particularly within the context of public 146 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) dhiatira biananda apsari et.al (quality of work life, anchor virtues, and work engagement:…) sector employees at the national land agency (bpn) in regency x. the purpose of this research is to investigate how qwl influences work engagement, moderated by workload and anchor virtues influence work engagement, moderated by workload. helping the national land agency (bpn) understand the factors that influence employee work engagement, thereby enabling the development of more effective policies to improve. thus, we propose two hypotheses: (h1) qwl influences work engagement, moderated by workload; (h2) anchor virtues influence work engagement, moderated by workload method this research was conducted using a non-experimental quantitative approach to the survey method. the data were analyzed using structural equation modelling (sem) with smartpls version 3.0, including the bootstrapping technique to test hypotheses. pls-sem was chosen because the relatively small sample size allows for analysis using this method, as pls-sem is indeed suitable for studies with limited samples. in addition, pls-sem can be applied to models with high complexity, involving multiple constructs and numerous indicators. this study uses questionnaires to measure four variables (work engagement, quality of work life, anchor virtues, and workload) in the research sample. data were collected between october 18th and november 1st, 2024, through a google form distributed via broadcast message. participants the participants of this research consist of 101 active civil servants working at the national land agency (bpn) in regency x. the sampling method used in this study is a population study. descriptive information on the participants’ demographic characteristics is presented in table 1. table 1 participants' demographic data demographics category frequency percentage gender male 60 59% female 41 41% education high school 10 10% diploma 17 17% undergraduate 58 57% postgraduate 16 16% age 20-30 years 10 10% 31-40 years 30 30% 41-50 years 30 30% 51-60 years 31 30% working period 1-6 years 33 33% 7-12 years 42 42% >12 years 26 26% instruments work engagement. utrecht work engagement scale (uwes), developed by schaufeli and bakker and translated by rosa and riyono (2014), was used to measure work engagement. this instrument consists of 15 items. responses are based on a 5-point likert scale, ranging from 1 to 5, where 1 indicates "never" and 5 indicates "always." the validity test in this study used aiken’s v with 12 raters, resulting in scores between 0.83 and 0.98. the reliability humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 147 dhiatira biananda apsari et.al (quality of work life, anchor virtues, and work engagement:…) coefficient in this study, as measured by cronbach’s alpha, was 0.89. an example question from this item is "when i wake up in the morning, i feel excited to go to work". quality of worklife. quality of work life scale, developed by riyono (2012), was used to measure quality of work life. this instrument consists of 25 items. responses are based on a 5-point likert scale, ranging from 1 to 5, where 1 indicates "never" and 5 indicates "almost always." the validity test in this study used aiken’s v with 12 raters, resulting in scores between 0.77 and 0.96. the reliability coefficient in this study, as measured by cronbach’s alpha, was 0.92. an example question from this item is “trusted to maintain confidentiality in my work”. anchor personality. anchor personality inventory (api), which focuses on anchor virtues, was developed by riyono (2020) to measure anchor virtues. this instrument consists of 10 items. responses are based on a 5-point likert scale, ranging from 1 to 5, where 1 indicates "strongly disagree" and 5 indicates "strongly agree." the validity test in this study used aiken’s v with 12 raters, resulting in scores between 0.81 and 0.94. the reliability coefficient in this study, as measured by cronbach’s alpha, was 0.91. an example question from this item is “when i experience failure, i always try to see the lesson behind it”. workload. swat (subjective workload assessment technique) scale, developed by agustiningrum (2016) based on gary b. reid’s theory, was used to measure subjective workload. this instrument consists of 18 items. responses are based on a 5-point likert scale, ranging from 1 to 5, where 1 indicates "strongly disagree" and 5 indicates "strongly agree." the validity test in this study used aiken’s v with 12 raters, resulting in scores between 0.83 and 0.94. the reliability coefficient in this study, as measured by cronbach’s alpha, was 0.93. an example question from this item is “tasks often come one after another without a break”. data analysis the hypothesis testing in this study was conducted using sem data analysis techniques with smartpls version 3.2.9. before testing the hypotheses, the researcher carried out an evaluation of the measurement model (outer model) and the structural model (inner model). for hypothesis testing, the researcher used the bootstrapping analysis technique with a significance level of 95% (α = 0.05) and a t-table value of 1.96 (two-tailed). results measurement model (outer model) in terms of the validity, in this study, the loading factor values for all variables are > 0.7, indicating that the research can proceed to the next analysis stage. the outer loading values for quality of work life range from 0.82 to 0.89, anchor virtues loading factor values range from 0.85 to 0.94, work engagement loading factor values range from 0.71 to 0.81, and workload loading factor values range from 0.78 to 0.93. these results suggest a strong relationship between the variables, reinforcing the reliability of the measures used in the study. consequently, further analyses can be conducted to explore the underlying connections and implications of these findings in workplace settings. this indicates that the data gathered is robust enough to warrant deeper investigation. such analyses could reveal valuable insights into how these factors interact and affect employee experiences. see figure 1 148 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) dhiatira biananda apsari et.al (quality of work life, anchor virtues, and work engagement:…) figure 1 measurement model (outer model) table 2 shows that all variables have an ave value > 0.50, indicating that the variables in this study can be considered valid. therefore, the convergent validity of all variables in this study has been fulfilled. table 2 average variance extracted (ave) score variables average variance extracted score (ave) score description quality of work life 0.99 valid anchor virtues 0.81 valid work engagement 0.58 valid workload 0.75 valid table 3 shows that all variables used in this study have composite reliability values > 0.60 and cronbach's alpha > 0.60, indicating they are reliable. table 3 composite reliability and cronbach’s alpha score variables cronbach’s alpha composite reliability quality of work life 0.99 0.99 anchor virtues 0.98 1.00 work engagement 0.95 0.95 workload 0.98 0.98 moderating effect quality of work life*workload 1.00 1.00 moderating effect anchor virtue *workload 1.00 1.00 structural model (inner model) the results show that 75.5% of the variance in work engagement can be explained by the combination of quality of work life, anchor virtues, and workload, as indicated by an rhumanitas: indonesian psychological journal 149 dhiatira biananda apsari et.al (quality of work life, anchor virtues, and work engagement:…) square (r²) value of 0.755. this suggests that the model has a strong explanatory power, with only 24.5% of the variance attributed to other factors not included in this study. the rsquare value in this study is considered strong, indicating that the independent variables have a strong influence on the dependent variable. table 4 f square score (f2) work engagement quality of work life 0.14 anchor virtues 0.09 workload 0.22 quality of work life* workload 0.07 anchor virtues*workload 0.10 the f-square values are shown in table 4. a value of 0.02 or higher but less than 0.15 indicates a small effect, a value of 0.15 or higher but less than 0.35 indicates a moderate effect, and a value of 0.35 or higher indicates a large effect. quality of work life and anchor virtues have a small effect on work engagement, while workload has a moderate effect on work engagement. additionally, when workload is used as a moderating variable, the effect of quality of work life on work engagement is small. similarly, when workload is used as a moderating variable, the effect of anchor virtues on work engagement is also small. the current study aimed to examine how quality of work life influences work engagement, moderated by workload, and how anchor virtues influence work engagement, moderated by workload. the significance level used is 95% (α = 0.05) with a t-table value of 1.96 (two-tailed). the results of the bootstrapping calculations in this study can be seen in figure 2. figure 2 path coefficient based on table 5, the strength of the relationships and p-values are the effect of quality of work life on work engagement has a coefficient value of 0.38 and a p value of 0.00. this indicates that quality of work life has a positive impact on work engagement. it can be 150 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) dhiatira biananda apsari et.al (quality of work life, anchor virtues, and work engagement:…) interpreted that every 1-point increase in quality of work life leads to a 0.35 increase in work engagement. the effect of anchor virtues on work engagement has a coefficient value of 0.18 and a p value of 0.00. this demonstrates that anchor virtues positively influence work engagement. it can be interpreted that every 1-point increase in anchor virtues results in a 0.18 increase in work engagement. the effect of workload on work engagement has a coefficient value of 0.43 and a p value of 0.00. this signifies that workload positively affects work engagement. it can be interpreted that every 1-point increase in workload leads to a 0.43 increase in work engagement. the interaction between quality of work life and workload on work engagement has a coefficient value of 0.18 and a p value of 0.02. this indicates that the effect of quality of work life on work engagement is positively moderated by workload. it can be interpreted that every 1-point increase in the interaction between quality of work life and workload results in a 0.18 increase in work engagement. the interaction between anchor virtues and workload on work engagement has a coefficient value of -0.17 and a p value of 0.00. this means that the effect of anchor virtues on work engagement is negatively moderated by workload. it can be interpreted that every 1-point increase in the interaction between anchor virtues and workload results in a 0.17 decrease in work engagement. table 5 path coefficient hypothesis original sample t statistics p value conclusion quality of work life⭢ work engagement 0.35 3.24 0.00 accepted anchor virtue ⭢ work engagement 0.18 3.04 0.00 accepted workload ⭢work engagement 0.43 3.59 0.00 accepted moderating effect quality of work life *workload ⭢work engagement 0.18 2.31 0.02 accepted moderating effect anchor virtue *workload ⭢work engagement -0.17 2.97 0.00 accepted the results demonstrated significant relationships between the predictor variables and work engagement. quality of work life had a positive and significant effect on work engagement (β = 0.35, p = 0.001), indicating that an increase in perceived quality of work life is associated with higher levels of engagement. anchor virtues also showed a positive effect (β = 0.18, p = 0.002), suggesting that stronger endorsement of anchor virtues contributes to greater work engagement. additionally, workload had a significant positive effect on work engagement (β = 0.43, p < 0.001), indicating that, within this context, higher workload may be associated with increased engagement. regarding interaction effects, the moderation analysis revealed that workload positively moderated the relationship between quality of work life and work engagement (β = 0.18, p = 0.02). this suggests that the positive impact of quality of work life on engagement becomes stronger when workload is high. in contrast, workload negatively moderated the relationship between anchor virtues and work engagement (β = −0.17, p = 0.003), implying that the beneficial effect of anchor virtues on engagement weakens under higher workload conditions. see table 5 thus, the result support both research hypotheses. for h1, quality of work life was found to have a significant positive effect on work engagement, this means that better quality of work life is associated with higher levels of work engagement. moreover, this relationship is positively moderated by workload, indicating that the positive effect of quality of work life on work engagement becomes stronger when workload increases. for h2, anchor humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 151 dhiatira biananda apsari et.al (quality of work life, anchor virtues, and work engagement:…) virtues also showed a significant positive influence on work engagement. however, the moderation effect of workload on this relationship is negative, meaning that as workload increases, the positive effect of anchor virtues on work engagement weakens. these findings confirm that workload plays a moderating role in both relationships, strengthening the effect of quality of work life on work engagement, but reducing the effect of anchor virtue on work engagement. discussion the purpose of this study is to determine whether quality of work life affects work engagement with workload as a moderator, and whether anchor virtues influence work engagement, also moderated by workload. based on the research findings, the first hypothesis (h1) is accepted. this indicates that quality of work life plays a role in enhancing work engagement, and its effect is influenced by workload. the results show that quality of work life has a positive impact on work engagement. this is supported by research conducted by kanten and sadullah (2012), which found a significant relationship between quality of work life and work engagement. as explained by bakker (2011), work engagement is strongly influenced by job resources, and quality of work life is one such resource. riyono (2012) identifies five key aspects of quality of work life (i.e., trust, care, respect, learning, and contribution) that encourage employee engagement by creating a sense of being valued and supported. the interaction effect shows that workload, as a moderating variable, strengthens the relationship between quality of work life and work engagement among civil servants at the national land agency (bpn) in district x. under high workload conditions, the role of quality of work life in enhancing work engagement increases. under moderate workload, the influence still increases, but at a slower pace. under low workload, the influence of quality of work life on work engagement decreases. overall, this indicates that the role of quality of work life on work engagement increases in line with the increase in workload. this finding is in line with bakker and schaufeli (2008), who suggested that job resources, including quality of work life enhance work engagement, especially when job demands, including workload are high. institutions that foster quality of work life in the workplace can improve employee engagement by providing essential elements such as: trust and responsibility in their roles, opportunities for learning, involvement in valuable contributions, appreciation from supervisors and peers, and mutual care among colleagues. all of these contribute to psychological well-being and help employees find meaning in their work (gupta & sharma, 2018). with strong quality of work life, increased workload is no longer viewed negatively but rather as a challenge that fosters engagement, as employees feel adequately resourced to handle it. as stated by bakker & demerouti (2007) in the jd-r model, when employees have sufficient resources, high job demands can actually increase engagement by motivating employees to contribute more. additionally, high workload that is positively received and perceived as a challenge can further enhance employee involvement in their work. research by schaufeli and bakker (2004) emphasized that work engagement is not solely tied to light job conditions but also depends on how employees perceive and manage demands, provided they have enough job and personal resources. the national land agency (bpn) in district x is responsible for public service tasks related to land matters. the workload related to public service demands at institutions like bpn can place significant pressure on employees. however, with good quality of work life, 152 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) dhiatira biananda apsari et.al (quality of work life, anchor virtues, and work engagement:…) this workload can be managed as a challenge to overcome. for civil servants at bpn district x, this is crucial since the high demands of public service require strong engagement to ensure optimal service delivery. when quality of work lifeis well-established, civil servants at bpn district x can maintain high engagement levels even under increasing workload, which in turn will positively impact the quality of services provided to the public. similarly, the second hypothesis (h2) is also accepted, indicating that personal virtuebased values, the anchor virtues affect work engagement and are influenced by workload. the findings reveal that anchor virtues have a positive effect on work engagement. as stated by bakker and demerouti (2007), personality traits influence an individual’s work engagement, and in this study, anchor virtues represent such traits. these personal characteristics can encourage individuals to contribute optimally. research by riyono (2020) indicates that individuals attain greater stability when they use virtues as their personal anchor. the stability of an anchor reflects an individual's capacity to cope with life challenges. when individuals anchor themselves in virtues rooted in goodness, those values guide them toward positive behavior. consequently, individuals with anchor virtues are inclined to engage in behaviors that benefit their organization. individuals with anchor virtues tend to cultivate a harmonious, supportive, and dynamic work environment while avoiding conflict. this enables smoother coordination and greater contribution at work (hardanti & riyono, 2022). work engagement is also influenced by personal resources (bakker, 2011), and anchor virtues fall into this category. however, the interaction effect shows that workload, as a moderator, weakens the role of anchor virtues in work engagement. under high workload conditions, the role of anchor virtues in influencing work engagement among civil servants at bpn district x decreases. under moderate workload, the role increases, but not significantly. under low workload, the influence of anchor virtues on work engagement increases. overall, this indicates that the role of anchor virtues in work engagement tends to decrease as workload increases. according to (riyono & himam, 2011), anchors represent a personality structure. they are considered a personality structure because they reflect behavioral patterns that demonstrate a person’s orientation toward values such as virtues (riyono, 2012). characteristics within anchor virtues—such as kindness, meaning, love (riyono, 2012), as well as empathy and integrity—serve as foundations for employees in carrying out their daily tasks that help employees feel more connected and find meaning in their work. however, in high workload contexts, the positive impact of anchor virtues on engagement may diminish or even reverse.this is supported by the jd-r model, which states that personal resources help individuals manage job demands and influence work engagement. unfortunately, this area has not been widely researched. in this study, anchor virtues as personal resources were shown to increase work engagement. riyono (2020) argues that anchors have characteristics that provide internal stability across various life situations. in the workplace, individuals with anchor virtues are more stable when facing high job demands. however, they may prefer to maintain work-life balance rather than push themselves beyond their limits to meet excessive demands, which they perceive as detrimental to their engagement. this is consistent with bakker and sanz-vergel (2013), who noted that job demands can become obstacles for individuals. in the case of civil servants at bpn district x, considering that it is the largest district and faces more complex demands and cases than other areas, employees may perceive their workload as particularly high. this creates a difficult work environment where the positive influence of anchor virtues on work engagement can diminish or even reverse when job demands are overwhelming and personal resources are insufficient to compensate. humanitas: indonesian psychological journal 153 dhiatira biananda apsari et.al (quality of work life, anchor virtues, and work engagement:…) practical recommendations from this study to improve the quality of work life can be implemented through several key aspects. in terms of trust, leaders are encouraged to build confidence in their subordinates by delegating more challenging tasks that align with employees’ competencies. for example, unit leaders at the bpn (national land agency) in district x can regularly assign specific responsibilities—such as handling land disputes or managing land archive systems—to high-potential employees. these tasks should be matched with the employees’ competencies and previous performance evaluations, allowing them to feel empowered without feeling overwhelmed. an evaluation and feedback system should also be established upon task completion to provide recognition and guidance for further development. for the respect aspect, institutions should cultivate values that encourage mutual respect and appreciation among employees. this can be done by establishing a peer appreciation program, where employees can nominate their colleagues for monthly awards based on values such as respect and teamwork. in terms of care, recognition and appreciation should be given to employees who are able to handle a high workload while still delivering satisfactory service to the public. this can be assessed using relevant key performance indicators (kpis) such as the number of land case files completed on time, citizen satisfaction levels (measured through surveys), or the ability to resolve complex land cases. regarding learning, the institution can provide training facilities to support employee development, such as communication training to improve service delivery and it training in line with the ongoing digital transformation at bpn. for the contribution aspect, employees should be provided with a forum where they can directly share their ideas related to organizational problem-solving. this can be facilitated by creating participatory spaces that allow employees to offer innovative ideas and solutions for operational challenges, thereby increasing their sense of ownership and engagement within the organization. another practical recommendation relates to the influence of anchor virtues on work engagement, moderated by workload. it is essential for institutions to clearly communicate organizational goal setting to employees. in high workload situations, it becomes particularly important for the institution to define clear and achievable goals and communicate them effectively to all employees. ultimately, wellstructured goal setting reflects an individual’s commitment to their objectives. with clear goals, each employee is expected to better understand their priorities and direction, which in turn helps focus their efforts and increases their sense of engagement with their work. the limitation of this study lies in the use of workload as a moderator variable in the relationship between quality of work life and work engagement. this is because the main focus of the study was not on employees’ perceptions of workload. theoretically, an ideal workload is not necessarily high or low, but rather one that matches an individual’s capacity and competence. however, in this study, the measurement of workload did not fully capture this alignment; instead, it focused more on intensity (whether the workload was light or heavy), which may have led to findings that appear less logical. for future research, it is recommended either to remove workload as a moderating variable or to develop a more accurate measurement that reflects the appropriateness of workload relative to individual capacity. conclusion this study demonstrates that workload can moderate the role of quality of work life on work engagement among civil servants at the national land agency (bpn) in district x. when the workload is high, the influence of quality of work life on work engagement increases significantly. under moderate workload conditions, the influence of quality of work life still 154 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) dhiatira biananda apsari et.al (quality of work life, anchor virtues, and work engagement:…) increases, but at a slower rate. however, when the workload is low, the influence of quality of work life on work engagement tends to decrease. this study also proves that workload moderates the role of anchor virtues on work engagement among civil servants at bpn district x. when the workload is high, the effect of anchor virtues on work engagement weakens. under average workload conditions, the influence of anchor virtues increases, although not significantly. when the workload is low, the role of anchor virtues in enhancing work engagement increases. acknowledgment the authors thank the participants for their contributions to this research. declarations author contribution. the first author contributed to designing the study, collecting data, and writing the manuscript draft. the second author contributed to supervising the design study, consulting on data analysis, reviewing the manuscript, and finalising the manuscript. funding statement. the authors did not receive funding for research and manuscript writing. and publication of this article. conflict of interest. the authors declare no conflict of interest that can influence this study. references abualigah, a., davies, j., & harrington, s. 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(2021). quality of service in the comprehensive systematic land registration program at the sleman district land office. jpap: jurnal penelitian administrasi publik, 7(2), 104–115. https://doi.org/10.30996/jpap.v7i2.3650 humanitas: indonesian psychological journal vol. 22 (2), august 2025, 127-142 issn: 2598-6368(online); 1693-7236(print humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1344 empowering leadership and innovative work behavior in start-up companies: mediating role of proactive personality rifdah hanandra, pundani eki pratiwi faculty of education and psychology, universitas negeri semarang, semarang, indonesia corresponding author: pundani@mail.unnes.ac.id article i nfo abst ract article history received: 17 march 2025 revised: 4 june 2025 accepted: 5 july 2025 today, some start-ups in indonesia have failed in their development, one of the reasons is that they didn’t really present innovative solutions to answer society’s needs. therefore, an appropriate innovation strategy is needed. this study aims to determine the influence of empowering leadership on innovative work behavior through the mediating role of proactive personality. this research used a quantitative approach with a cross-sectional survey design. the subjects in this study were 200 startup employees in the jabodetabek area with a purposive sampling technique, who are aged 20-40 years old, and minimum of one year of work experience. the research instruments used are janssen’s innovative work behavior scale, amundsen & martinsen’s empowering leadership scale, and bateman & crant’s proactive personality scale. the analysis technique used is the macro process by hayes. the outcome demonstrates that the innovative work behavior of start-up employees in the jabodetabek area is influenced by empowering leadership, which is also mediated by the employees' proactive personality. this research implies that leaders who apply empowering leadership provide more flexibility for employees, so they are likely to be more proactive, which can indirectly increase their innovative work behavior in carrying out work roles and tasks in the company. keywords empowering leadership, innovative work behavior proactive personality start-up innovation this is an open access article under the cc by-sa license. introduction today, indonesia's creative industry sector is known to be growing, one of which is characterized by the proliferation of start-ups. start-ups are companies that refer to technology and information-based businesses (ferdiansyah & permana, 2022). reporting from katadata.co.id, data from start-up ranking states that the number of start-ups in indonesia as of january 2024 is 2562 start-ups (databoks, 2024). however, despite the large number of start-up companies in indonesia, some of them still fail. some of the startups in indonesia that are known to have failed include pegipegi, rumah.com, ula, lummo, jd.id, cohive, qlapa, dishserve, bananas, fabelio, tumbasin.id, mobile premiere league, beres.id, uangteman, and many more (bisnis tekno, 2023). as stated by the minister of communication and information, rudiantara, one of mailto:humanitas@psy.uad.ac.id http://journal1.uad.ac.id/index.php/humanitas https://doi.org/10.26555/humanitas.v22i1.1344 mailto:pundani@mail.unnes.ac.id https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 128 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) rifdah hanandra et.al (empowering leadership and innovative work behavior in start-up companies:… ) the causes of start-up failure is that the success rate of start-ups in indonesia is still relatively low, which is only five percent (merdeka, 2019). furthermore, 12 main reasons affect start-up failure, which is insufficient funds (38%), a lack of market (35%), a decline in competition (20%), a lack of a business strategy (19%), policy or legal concerns (18%), pricing concerns (15%), an inappropriate team (14%), an untimely product or inadequate marketing (10%), a subpar product (8%), disputes between the team and investors (7%), a failed pivot (6%), and burnout (5%) (cb insights, 2021). not only that, the bureau of labor statistic (bls) report also found that around 50 percent of startups fail in the first four years of building a business, 18 percent fail due to cost issues, and 19 percent of startups fail due to intense business competition reported by (merdeka, 2019) the tight competition in today's increasingly competitive business world is certainly a challenge for start-up companies to maintain their position. therefore, an innovation strategy is needed as innovation itself is the main key to the success of a start-up (salamzadeh, 2015). this is because the existence of innovation can create a competitive advantage, produce something that cannot be done by others, do things better, and introduce new services that are superior, cheap, and fast to answer market demand (aziz & samad, 2016). as reported by wartaekonomi.co.id, a digital economy observer who is also the ceo of pt duta sukses dunia, yudi candra, revealed that many start-up companies in indonesia have failed because they did not really present innovative solutions to answer the needs of society (warta ekonomi, 2019). therefore, the consideration of start-up companies to use the right innovation model strategy is important so that companies can win market competition and minimize the risk of failure. several previous studies and empirical evidence conclude that the ability of a company to deliver innovative products/services is related to innovative work behavior (de jong & den hartog, 2008; janssen, 2000; scott & bruce, 1994; unsworth & parker, 2002). innovative work behavior is characterized by a behavior that intentionally creates, introduces, and implements new ideas in order to provide benefits to the work group or organization/company (janssen, 2000). a recent study highlighted that organizations that fail to innovate risk losing their competitiveness and may eventually be forced out of the market (shanker et al., 2017). in contrast, organizations that continuously innovate are more likely to achieve higher levels of performance and long-term success (ogbonnaya & valizade, 2018). employees who demonstrate innovative work behavior are more capable of quickly and accurately recognizing new work conditions, as well as proposing original ideas to improve the quality of services or products offered (afsar et al., 2018). this is why innovative work behavior is also a critical factor for organizations in achieving competitive advantage, delivering optimal performance outcomes, and ensuring longterm sustainability in order to succeed in a competitive environment (amalia & wulansari, 2017; dayanti & yulianti, 2023; yulita et al., 2022). therefore, innovative work behavior is a necessary and vital behavioral attribute for employees, particularly in start-up companies that face numerous demands and are in the process of growth amid today’s competitive technological business landscape (dayanti & yulianti, 2023; puspita et al., 2022; savitry et al., 2021). innovative work behavior is generally impacted by two factors, which are individual factors and organizational factors (li & zheng, 2014). on the organizational factor, leadership is believed to hold an important role in employee innovative work behavior because a leader is capable of shaping attitudes and creating conditions that foster the emergence of employees' innovative work behavior (javed et al., 2019; j. wu & lin, 2018). previous studies have explored the influence of various leadership styles, such as transformational, authentical, and ethical leadership, on innovative work behavior (ashfaq et al., 2021; yamak & eyupoglu, 2021; yeap, 2023). however, what sets empowering leadership apart is it has a focus on fostering independence and self-direction in employees, which is why empowering leadership is considered one of the most humanitas indonesian psychological journal 129 rifdah hanandra et.al (empowering leadership and innovative work behavior in start-up companies:… ) promising leadership approaches, as its core elements are known to actively encourage and promote innovative work behavior (biemann et al., 2015; cheong et al., 2016). empowering leadership is characterized as a leadership approach where a leader shares authority with their team members and offers growth and motivational assistance to boost their self-esteem, drive, and capacity for independence at work (amundsen & martinsen, 2014). a leader who implements empowering leadership will delegate more authority to their employees, encourage them to be responsible for their work, encourage them to make decisions independently on the autonomy given, and be willing to guide, share information, and ask for input from their employees (sharma & kirkman, 2015). empowering leadership has also been shown in several studies to be a predictor of innovative work behavior. empowering leadership has been shown to influence innovative work behavior in various sectors, ranging from the education sector, service sector, pharmaceutical industry sector, small and medium enterprise sector, to start-up company sector (gkorezis, 2016; hassi et al., 2022; rao et al., 2019; wihuda et al., 2017; yusuf & etikariena, 2023). furthermore, it is believed that innovative work behavior itself is a complex phenomenon, which depends on individual psychological characteristics and contextual/organizational attributes (riaz et al., 2021; scott & bruce, 1994). therefore, quite a lot of research in this leadership field combines contextual attributes and individual psychological attributes, both in the form of moderator or mediator variables, in predicting innovative work behavior (gkorezis, 2016; hassi et al., 2022; wihuda et al., 2017). since individuals possess distinct personality traits, these differences significantly influence organizational performance (sagha et al., 2017). to effectively operate in a dynamic and uncertain environment, organizations need to cultivate proactive behavior among employees, as this can significantly enhance their ability to remain competitive (fuller & marler, 2009). proactive personality is a consistent propensity for proactive conduct (bateman & crant, 1993). in other words, a proactive personality describes an individual's propensity to display proactive behavior. proactive personality is an individual's attitude that is profit-oriented, has initiative, dares to do something diligently, and is responsible for everything that is done to make changes to their environment (seibert et al., 1999) additionally, prior studies have shown that proactive personalities influence innovative work behavior (li et al., 2017; windiarsih & etikariena, 2017). a proactive personality has a positive impact on innovative work behavior in teachers. according to these findings, teachers who possess a proactive personality are more likely to exhibit innovative work behavior (li et al., 2017). there is also a significant relationship between proactive personality and innovative work behavior in bumn x (windiarsih & etikariena, 2017). this study explains that the innovative work behavior displayed by 24% employees comes from the employees' initiative to take advantage of existing opportunities, to make changes to their work environment to be more effective, which will then bring benefits to themselves or to the company. in addition, other literature has also found a positive impact of empowering leadership on proactive behavior in a company (singh & rangnekar, 2020; wang & yang, 2021). a leader who applies this empowering leadership style can increase employees' intrinsic motivation by sharing power with their employees and supplying support to them, where this intrinsic motivation will in turn encourage employees' proactive behavior because it can increase role orientation, broad self-efficacy, core task ability, and proactive goal-attempt behavior (singh & rangnekar, 2020). thus, the benefits of a proactive personality are also relevant in the high-tech corporate sector, such as start-up companies, due to rapid changes in technology and market preferences that require companies to be responsive and active to face challenges (torres et al., 2017). furthermore, several previous studies have demonstrated that proactive personalities can mediate the effects of specific leadership philosophies on innovative work behavior (ashfaq et al., 2021; yamak & eyupoglu, 2021; yeap, 2023). as said from trait activation theory (tett & burnett, 2003), personality traits such as proactivity are most likely to manifest when individuals are placed in environments that invite, support, and reward such behaviors. a leader has the ability 130 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) rifdah hanandra et.al (empowering leadership and innovative work behavior in start-up companies:… ) to create a supportive work environment where employees feel empowered and are encouraged to act independently, which in turn motivates them to put in greater effort and take on more responsibility in their roles (avolio et al., 2004). as a result, leadership support boosts employees’ proactive drive and encourages them to engage in proactive behaviors within the workplace (wu & parker, 2017) empowering leadership could create the psychological and structural conditions necessary for proactive personality to flourish by delegating authority, encouraging autonomous decision-making, and fostering participation in problem-solving, which this form of behavior could activate proactive tendencies (amundsen & martinsen, 2014; sharma & kirkman, 2015). through this activation, employees with proactive personalities are more likely to engage in innovative work behavior (mubarak et al., 2021). moreover, when empowered, such individuals are more likely to identify opportunities for improvement and take bold actions that can transform products, services, and processes, which is a hallmark of proactivity and innovation (li et al., 2017; yadav et al., 2023). therefore, along with the massive and intense start-up competition today, this research is considered important and interesting to conduct with the hope that the research results that will be obtained can provide benefits for start-up companies to remain able to survive and compete with competitors through increasing employee innovative work behavior. method research design this research used a quantitative approach whose analysis focuses on numerical data/numbers, which will be processed by statistical methods (azwar, 2021). the research design used in this research is a cross-sectional survey type of explanatory research. this research is conducted only once within a specific period and uses research instruments to collect numerical data, which is then analyzed using statistical methods before the results are reported and compared with previous studies to determine whether they support existing findings or provide discoveries (budiastuti & bandur, 2018). meanwhile, it is referred to as explanatory research because this study focuses on the causal relationships between the variables being investigated through testing previously proposed hypotheses (hartono, 2018). participants the participants in this study were start-up employees in the jabodetabek area (i.e., the greater jakarta area in indonesia, encompassing jakarta, bogor, depok, tangerang, and bekasi), totalling 200 people, obtained through the purposive sampling technique based on these criteria: 1. start-up employees in the jabodetabek area 2. aged 20-40 years old 3. employees who work in a start-up that has been operating for at least one year 4. employees who have had one year (minimum) of work experience in the company among these criteria, the specific consideration for the researcher is startup employees who work in the jabodetabek area, as the context of this research focuses on startup companies, and this region was selected because, according to data from the indonesian creative industry society for information and communication technology (mikti) in 2021, the majority of startup companies are concentrated in this geographical area, representing 39.59% of all startups (databoks, 2022). data collection was conducted through various online platforms such as twitter, instagram, linkedin, and whatsapp. the demographic data of participants are shown in table 1. the demographic data shows that the majority of respondents are female, and the education level is dominated by a humanitas indonesian psychological journal 131 rifdah hanandra et.al (empowering leadership and innovative work behavior in start-up companies:… ) bachelor's level. then, this study’s respondents were mostly in the age range of 20-25 years, and the majority of respondents' job levels were in staff/assistant positions. in addition, out of a total of 200 respondents who work in start-ups in the jabodetabek area, the majority of respondents have work experience in the range of 1-3 years, with the most work locations dominated in the jakarta area. as for the field of business itself, the majority of respondents work in start-ups in the field of e-commerce and education. also, most of the respondents in this study work in start-ups classified as ponies, cockroaches, and centaurs. table 1 demographic data of participants category frequency percentage gender male 68 34% female 132 66% age 20-25 years old 112 56% 26-30 years old 70 35% 31-35 years old 14 7% 36-40 years old 4 2% education level senior high school 46 23% diploma 5 2.5% bachelor 140 70% master 9 4.5% position manager 17 8.5% supervisor/coordinator 22 11% specialist/analyst 40 20% staff/assistant 121 60.5% work experience 1-3 years 139 69.5% 4-6 years 47 23.5% 7-9 years 10 5% 10-12 years 2 1% >12 years 2 1% work locations jakarta 154 77% bogor 5 2.5% depok 5 2.5% tangerang 24 12% bekasi 12 6% business food & beverage 19 9.5% e-commerce 44 22% finance 19 9.5% health 14 7% education 40 20% travel & accommodation 11 5.5% agriculture & livestock 9 4.5% property 6 3% logistics 11 5.5% transportation 4 2% others 23 11.5% classification cockroach 50 25% ponies 52 26% centaurs 48 24% unicorn 37 18.5% decacorn 11 5.5% hectocorn 2 1% 132 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) rifdah hanandra et.al (empowering leadership and innovative work behavior in start-up companies:… ) instruments the innovative work behavior scale is the tool utilized in this study to measure innovative work behavior (janssen, 2000). this tool measures idea generation (e.g., “generating new ideas for difficult issues”), idea promotion (e.g., “acquiring approval for innovative ideas”), and idea implementation (e.g., “transforming innovative ideas into useful applications”). it is divided into 3 dimensions and 9 items. the level of innovative work behavior of one individual is considered high when the obtained total scale score is high, and low when the obtained total scale score is low. the empowering leadership scale is the tool utilized in this study to assess empowering leadership (amundsen & martinsen, 2014). this instrument comprises 2 dimensions, which was broken down into 8 aspects and 18 items that measure delegating (e.g., “my leader gives me power”), initiative (e.g., “my leader encourages me to take initiative”), goal-focus (e.g., “my leader is concerned that i reach my goals”), efficacy support (e.g., “my leader listens to me”), inspiring (e.g., “my leader conveys a bright view of the future”), coordinating (e.g., “my leader discusses shared affairs with me”), modelling (e.g., “my leader lets me see how he/she organizes his/her work”), and guidance (e.g., “my leader shows me how i can improve my way of working”). the level of the leader’s empowering leadership is considered high when the obtained total scale score is high, and low when the obtained total scale score is low. the proactive personality scale is the tool utilized in this study to gauge proactive personality (bateman & crant, 1993). this unidimensional tool consists of four indicators, each of which is divided into sixteen items that assess the individuals' ability to scan for opportunities (e.g., "i excel at identifying opportunities"), demonstrate initiative (e.g., "if i see something i don't like, i fix it"), take action (e.g., "i love to challenge the status quo"), and persevere until they achieve closure by enacting change (e.g., "when i have a problem, i tackle it head-on”). the level of an individual’s proactive personality is considered high when the obtained total scale score is high, and low when the obtained total scale score is low. all three scales have been translated into indonesian by a sworn translator and have been tested for content validity through expert judgement by an industrial and organizational psychology practitioner. content validity refers to the extent to which the items in an instrument accurately represent the entire area or content domain that the instrument is intended to measure (purwanto, 2016). establishing content validity requires a critical and careful examination to determine whether the content and objectives measured by the instrument truly represent the defined domain. table 2 item discrimination index scale item discrimination index innovative work behavior scale 0.58 – 0.82 empowering leadership scale 0.47 – 0.80 proactive personality scale 0.50 – 0.79 this evaluation is usually carried out by experts in the field, through a process known as expert judgement, to decide whether the instrument can be considered valid. after expert judgement, several items underwent minor revisions, such as sentence simplification and changes in word choices. the three scales also went through the item discrimination index test with the corrected item-total correlation approach, for which humanitas indonesian psychological journal 133 rifdah hanandra et.al (empowering leadership and innovative work behavior in start-up companies:… ) the limit of criteria for the item selection is r ≥ 0.3 (azwar, 2021). furthermore, the researcher also used the cronbach alpha technique in spss 21 for windows for assessing the reliability of each instrument. when an instrument has a cronbach’s alpha (α) value of ≥ 0.70, this instrument is considered reliable (siyoto & sodik, 2015). table 2 shows that the innovative work behavior scale has discriminant power ranging from 0.58 to 0.82, making it suitable for use. furthermore, in testing the item's discriminant power of the empowering leadership scale, it is known that the discriminant power ranges from 0.47 to 0.80, making it also suitable for use. finally, the proactive personality scale has discriminant power ranging from 0.50 to 0.79, indicating it is also suitable for use. thus, the 3 scales are considered able to be used. table 3 cronbach’s alpha scale cronbach’s α innovative work behavior scale 0.91 empowering leadership scale 0.95 proactive personality scale 0.94 table 3 shows that the reliability analysis using cronbach's alpha demonstrates that all 3 scales exhibit excellent internal consistency. the innovative work behavior scale achieved a cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.91, the empowering leadership scale demonstrated the highest reliability with a cronbach's alpha of 0.95, and the proactive personality scale showed excellent reliability with a cronbach's alpha of 0.94. all 3 instruments are highly reliable for measuring their respective constructs and are suitable for research purposes. data analysis to test the hypothesis, this study used an analysis technique, which is t h e macro process bootstrapping technique (hayes, 2012). macro process allows researchers to see if there is an interaction effect and its effect on just one process. the effect between variables can be declared significant if the p-value > 0.05. meanwhile, the effect of mediation is declared significant if the range between bootllci and bootulci is not equal to 0 (zero). results table 4 provides the regression coefficient (α), significance levels (p-values), and the lower and upper ci (confidence interval) for each predictor. empowering leadership was an important predictor of proactive personality (α = 0.40, p < 0.05). proactive personality was also a significant predictor of innovative work behavior (α = 0.32, p < 0.05). and empowering leadership was also a significant predictor of innovative work behavior (α = 0.09, p < 0.05). moreover, it was found that empowering leadership also has an indirect effect on innovative work behavior through the mediation of proactive personality (α = 0.12, ulci 0.07; llci 0.19). the results show that the coefficient of the indirect effect between empowering leadership and innovative work behavior is 0.12, with a confidence interval ranging from 0.07 for bootllci (lower level for ci) to 0.19 for bootulci (upper level for ci). based on these results, since the confidence interval between bootllci and bootulci does not include zero, the indirect effect is statistically significant, which means that empowering leadership has an indirect effect on innovative work behavior through the mediation of proactive personality. figure 1 shows the mediation effect of proactive personality on the relationship between empowering leadership and innovative work 134 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) rifdah hanandra et.al (empowering leadership and innovative work behavior in start-up companies:… ) path (b) β(b)=0.32 p<0.001 proactive personality empowering leadership innovative work behavior path (a) β(a)=0.40 p<0.001 behavior. table 4 results of bootstrapping techniques macro process path variable β t 95% ci p lower upper a’ empowering leadership → proactive personality 0.40 7.82 0.30 0.50 0.00 b’ proactive personality → innovative work behavior 0.32 8.93 0.25 0.39 0.00 c’ empowering leadership → innovative work behavior 0.09 3.34 0.04 0.15 0.00 a*b empowering leadership → proactive personality → innovative work behavior (indirect effect) 0.12 0.07 0.19 figure 1 results of bootstrapping techniques macro process path (a*b) β(a*b)=0.12 path (c) β(c)=0.22 p<0.001 path (c’) β(c’)=0.09 p<0.001 notes: –––– direct effect ------indirect effect path a: direct effect of empowering leadership on proactive personality path b: direct effect of proactive personality on innovative work behavior path c: total effect of empowering leadership on innovative work behavior path c’: direct effect of empowering leadership on innovative work behavior path a*b: indirect effect of empowering leadership on innovative work behavior through the mediation of proactive personality table 5 shows that 23.64% of proactive personality was explained by empowering leadership, 44.39% of innovative work behavior was described by empowering leadership and proactive personality together, and 21.84% of innovative work behavior was explained by empowering leadership. this means that empowering leadership contributes to proactive personality by 23.64%, while the remaining 76.36% is influenced by other variables. furthermore, the combined influence of empowering leadership and proactive personality on innovative work behavior is approximately 44.39%, with the remaining 55.61% being attributed to other factors or variables. specifically, empowering leadership alone can predict the emergence of innovative work behavior by 21.84%, whereas the humanitas indonesian psychological journal 135 rifdah hanandra et.al (empowering leadership and innovative work behavior in start-up companies:… ) remaining 78.16% is predicted by other variables. table 5 coefficient of determination variables r r-sq p empowering leadership → proactive personality 0.48 0.23 0.00 empowering leadership & proactive personality → innovative work behavior 0.66 0.44 0.00 empowering leadership → innovative work behavior 0.46 0.21 0.00 discussion the study's findings indicate that innovative work behavior among start-up employees in the jabodetabek region is positively impacted by empowered leadership. the main characteristics of empowering leadership lie in the provision of autonomy support and development support by leaders to their employees (amundsen & martinsen, 2014). autonomy support is reflected in how leaders influence employees’ motivation at work— for instance, by delegating tasks to allow employees to make independent decisions related to their responsibilities, coordinating with employees to enhance goal-oriented effectiveness, encouraging them to use their initiative, demonstrating interest, trust, and confidence in their ability to complete tasks, and fostering an inspiring work atmosphere through inspirational communication. meanwhile, development support is evident in how leaders guide and provide training for employees to help them improve their skills and competencies. through the supports provided in empowering leadership, employees are not constrained by a rigid leadership style, allowing them greater freedom to explore in the workplace, exhibit creative behavior, feel more confident and motivated to innovate, and perform their tasks more innovatively, ultimately enhancing work quality (chow, 2018; dehghani et al., 2014; gkorezis, 2016; özarallı, 2015). employees who feel involved in decision-making processes also tend to find greater meaning in their work, which in turn motivates them to develop innovative solutions to problems (choi et al., 2016). this aligns with the characteristics of start-up companies, which are typically highly innovationdriven in order to remain competitive and grow rapidly. so, it is important for a start-up to have employees who have highly innovative work behavior so that the company can gain more benefit from every opportunity that exists and can afford to produce new products, processes, or services that can answer market needs. the results of this study support the prior findings that innovative work behavior is significantly positively impacted by empowering leadership (yadav et al., 2023). it is known that through empowering leadership, employees get the opportunity for the autonomy given to work independently, so as to create a suitable work environment to find the innovative solutions needed. the findings of this study are further supported by another study, which found that innovative work behavior among employees is directly impacted by empowering leadership (riaz et al., 2021). in this case, leaders who give their employee’s opportunity to work independently, those employees will be better able to take initiative, carry responsibility, and manage work tasks to achieve organizational goals, all of which are included in the characteristics of innovative work behavior. this study’s results also reveal that empowering leadership has a positive influence on proactive personality in start-up employees in the jabodetabek area. a person's innate personality or character also influences how easily they are influenced by other forces, one of the outside variables that may have an impact in this situation is the leadership 136 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) rifdah hanandra et.al (empowering leadership and innovative work behavior in start-up companies:… ) style that leaders employ (hofmann & jones, 2005). personality traits such as proactivity are most likely to manifest when individuals are placed in environments that invite, support, and reward such behaviors (tett & burnett, 2003), which in this context is in a workplace that implements empowering leadership. many leader behaviors that are part of empowering leadership, such as encouraging employees to participate in decisionmaking and giving autonomy from bureaucratic restrictions, indicate to employees that their leaders trust them and give them opportunities for personal growth and development (lee et al., 2018). these conditions also provide a sense of impact, autonomy, competency, and meaningfulness for employees, which can encourage them to use their potential to the fullest by taking initiatives and creating positive alterations in their work roles (kim & beehr, 2016; wong & giessner, 2018). the desire to create positive alteration in work is closely related to the characteristics of a proactive personality, which is associated with a person's active efforts to influence change in their environment to be more effective (delle & amadu, 2016). the existence of this proactive personality leads employees to always look for solutions when they are experiencing a challenge (wang et al., 2017). this is because proactive employees equip themselves with good coping behavior in handling certain situations (mubarak et al., 2021). thus, the application of empowering leadership in the workplace can contribute to increasing employees' proactive personality through the empowerment support provided. the results of this study are consistent with a prior study, which showed that employee proactivity is positively impacted by empowering leadership (singh et al., 2023). this is because employees feel they have power over the work autonomy given by their leaders, who apply an empowering leadership style so that they tend to engage in proactive behavior. in addition, this study also supports another findings that empowering leadership has a direct effect on employee proactive work behavior (wang & yang, 2021). additionally, this study showed that innovative work behavior among start-up employees in the jabodetabek area was positively impacted by proactive personality. based on the organizational perspective, the existence of this proactive personality give an essential role in increasing the creativity and novelty of employee thinking in offering useful new ideas because employees who have proactive personality are good at seeing opportunities, being able to take initiative, taking risks, and being persistent, so they are less concerned about their work, more receptive to innovation, resilient to stress, and have positive views of their efficacy (han et al., 2014; pan et al., 2021). employees with proactive personalities are known as risk-takers who are highly committed and creative (mubarak et al., 2021). they consider complex situations as personal challenges, in solving them, this behavior also leads to their innovative work behavior in the workplace. the company itself also needs innovation to remain able to contend with its competitors (ullah et al., 2023). this research also proves that a proactive personality can be a predictor of the emergence of innovative work behavior in the workplace. furthermore, earlier research has shown that proactive personalities have a considerable favorable impact on employees' innovative work behavior, which supports these findings (ullah et al., 2023). according to the findings, the primary personality trait that encourages employees to engage in innovative work behavior is a proactive personality. in addition, these findings are also in line with prior research that proactive personality has a direct positive effect on employee innovative work behavior (mubarak et al., 2021). these findings show how the work environment affects the emergence of innovation, so they recommend that companies prepare an environment that can ignite employees' proactive personality, which will then help foster their innovative work behavior. moreover, a proactive personality has been shown to mediate the relationship between empowering leadership and innovative work behavior among start-up employees in the jabodetabek area. these results showed that empowering leadership can indirectly boost innovative work behavior through proactive personality, in addition to having a humanitas indonesian psychological journal 137 rifdah hanandra et.al (empowering leadership and innovative work behavior in start-up companies:… ) direct impact on it. this is because the employees get adequate freedom from their leaders who apply empowering leadership, so they show more desire to complete work tasks based on their exploration and initiative (gkorezis, 2016). this is consistent with the empowerment theory, which holds that psychological empowerment that cultivates a sense of impact, autonomy, competency, and meaningfulness can boost employees' intrinsic motivation to take initiative and make positive changes in their work roles in order to fully utilize their potential (kim & beehr, 2016; wong & giessner, 2018). on the other side, based on trait activation theory (tett & burnett, 2003), personality traits such as proactivity are most likely to manifest when individuals are placed in environments that invite, support, and reward such behaviors. in other words, when employees are placed in an environment that gives them a sense of autonomy and feels empowered, it can boost them to be more proactive in continuously innovating. employees with a proactive personality are able to be active in their work roles, identify opportunities, show personal initiative, and persist in their desire to make constructive changes in the work environment (crant, 1995). then, these proactive actions encourage employees to explore, create, and implement new ideas (javed et al., 2019). additionally, this encourages the innovative spirit of employees, which shows up in the form of creative work practices. therefore, when leaders adopt empowering leadership, employees feel empowered by the support they receive, which is why proactive personalities can operate as a mediator in the relationship between empowering leadership and innovative work behavior. then, it increases their intrinsic motivation to carry out a series of proactive actions such as seeking new opportunities, showing initiative, taking risks, and making persistent efforts to change and make their work environment as optimal as possible. employees with proactive personalities are therefore less worried about their work, more receptive to innovation, resilient to stress, and have positive views of their abilities. this ultimately results in an increase in their innovative work behavior at work. thus, the flexibility provided by leaders through empowering leadership is able to make employees more proactive, which can indirectly simultaneously increase their innovative work behavior in carrying out work roles and tasks in the workplace. this finding is in line with the prior research, which examines some specific leadership philosophies on innovative work behavior with mediation of proactive personality, including transformational leadership (ashfaq et al., 2021), ethical leadership (yeap, 2023), and authentic leadership (yamak & eyupoglu, 2021). this finding is in line with the three prior studies that provide results that proactive personality is able to provide a mediating role in the influence of certain leadership styles on innovative work behavior. thus, it can be concluded that other leadership styles besides authentic leadership, transformational leadership, or ethical leadership can influence employees' innovative work behavior through the mediation of proactive personality, namely the empowering leadership style. while prior studies have explored transformational, authentical, and ethical leadership as antecedents of innovative work behavior through proactive personality (ashfaq et al., 2021; yamak & eyupoglu, 2021; yeap, 2023). this study uniquely positions empowering leadership within that framework. it adds to the academic discourse by identifying a previously underexplored mediating role of proactive personality in the empowering leadership and innovation linkage. it means that these findings provide new theoretical contributions related to the topic of the influence of empowering leadership on innovative work behavior through the mediating role of proactive personality. practically, the study’s findings can be a guide for leaders to foster and enhance employees’ innovative work behavior in the workplace. in the competitive and fast-paced world of start-ups, placing or training leaders with an empowering leadership style can be a strategic decision. these leaders catalyze both proactivity and innovation, enhancing organizational agility and performance (mubarak et al., 2021; wang & yang, 2021). 138 issn 2598-6368 (online) / issn 1693-7236 (print) rifdah hanandra et.al (empowering leadership and innovative work behavior in start-up companies:… ) leaders also could foster a work culture that values autonomy, competence, and empowerment, because when employees feel empowered and psychologically safe, they are more likely to proactively generate novel ideas and persist in implementing them (crant, 2000; kim & beehr, 2016). the scale used in this study is not adapted, but the result of translation from the original scale, so it does not yet have construct validity. future researchers who are interested in raising similar research topics can further consider adapting the measuring instrument first, the innovative work behavior scale, the empowering leadership scale, or the proactive personality scale, so that it could be more accurate and representative in producing research data and can be used regularly for future researchers. in addition, the context of the start-up sample in this study is limited to the jabodetabek area, and the findings may not be fully generalizable to start-ups in other regions outside the jabodetabek area. therefore, future research is encouraged to consider a broader geographical scope in order to obtain results that are more representative and comprehensive. conclusion according to this study, a proactive personality acts as a mediator between empowering leadership and innovative work behavior. this study implicated that leaders who apply empowering leadership provide more flexibility for employees, so they are likely to be more proactive, which can indirectly increase their innovative work behavior in carrying out work roles and tasks in the company. acknowledgment. the author would like to express gratitude to all parties involved in this research, especially to the participants who were willing to contribute and also to the institutions and experts within them who have provided support for this research. declarations author contribution. the first author is responsible for conducting research and writing manuscripts for scientific papers. the second author is responsible for guiding research and manuscript writing, as well as funding. funding statement. the second author funded this research. conflict of interest. the author declares no conflict of interest. additional information. there is no additional information for this paper. references afsar, b., cheema, s., & bin saeed, b. 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