Parenting styles and social competencies in prediction of conflict management strategies of youths in Serbia

Conflicts are inevitable aspects of human behavior, but the lack of skills for constructively dealing with them contributes to many individual and social problems. Therefore, it is important to understand the factors that may contribute to a different approach to conflict situations. The study aimed to explore how the perception of parental styles and personal social competencies predict the conflict management strategies of young adults in Serbia. We have included parental styles based on the assumption that the parental model of communication could have impact on modeling social behavior of youths. Method: The sample included 288 participants (69% females), aged 18 to 30 years (M = 21.54, SD = 2.80). The applied inventories were The Dutch Test of Conflict Handling –DUTCH, reduced on three factors: Cooperative (α = .88), Competitive (α = .72), and Defensive conflict management strategy (α = .72); Multidimensional Social Competence Scale which included empathy (α = .87), emotional regulation (α = .81), verbal conversation skills (α = .78) and non-verbal skills (α = .87), and EMBU scale for parenting style - authoritarian (α = .87), permissive (α=.80), and democratic styles (α = .82). The hierarchical multiple regression analyses were applied with gender, age, and parental styles (first step) and social competencies (second step) as predictors and conflict management strategies as criterion variables. Results: The first model was the significant predictor of Cooperative strategy [F (5,277) = 3.955, p < .01, R2 = .07], but no individual variables (gender, age, or parental style) reached the significance. The social competencies had stronger predictive power (F (10,272) = 16.416, p < .001, R2 = .38) where each of them were significant: empathy (β = 0.20, p < .01), verbal communication (β = 0.21, p < .01), nonverbal communication (β = 0.22, p < .01) and emotional regulation (β = 0.25, p < .001). Parental styles didn’t predict the Defensive strategies [F (5,277) = 0.145, p = .981, R2 = .00]. At the same time, social competencies, although significantly contributing, explained just 7% of the variance [F(10,272) = 2.214, p < .05, R2 = .07], where only empathy had some predictive power (β = 0.20, p < .05). Competitiveness was significantly predicted in the first model [F(5,277)= 4.267, p&lt;.01, R2 = .07], with gender (β = 0.13, p < .05), age (β = -0.157, p < .05), and democratic parenting style (β = 0.19, p < .01) as significant predictors .The second model had stronger predictive power [F(10,272) = 5.650, p < .001, R2 = .17], with verbal communication skills (β = -0.21, p < .01) and emotional regulation (β = -0.15, p < .05) as negative predictors. Conclusion: All social communication competencies predict Cooperativeness, but they are not strong predictors of Defensiveness, while low verbal and emotional regulation skills predict Competitiveness. Parental styles explained the lower level of variance in predicting all conflict management strategies which could result from the subjective perception of the parental style of their children.