Establishing Provisional Norms for the Contextually Modified Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale for Married Individuals

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21305925

Anwista Ganguly¹, Aparajita Chakraborty², and Atanu Kumar Dogra³ (State Aided College Teacher, Maharani Kasiswari College, Kolkata, Kolkata, West Bengal¹, Department of Psychology, Maharani Kasiswari College, Kolkata, West Bengal¹, Department of Psychology, Amity University, Kolkata, Kolkata, West Bengal²,  and Department of Psychology, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, Kolkata, West Bengal³)

The development of population-specific norms is important for the applicability of a psychological measure, which is contextually adapted for understanding a specific emotional perspective. The present study aimed to establish a provisional normative reference for a previously adapted marital-contextualized Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (Gratz & Roemer, 2004) which is contextualized based on the views of Bengali married individuals. The contextually-modified 36-item scale, consisting of six dimensions of emotional dysregulation in marital perspective, was administered to 317 participants (106 males & 211 females) in the previous study. The instrument demonstrated satisfactory psychometric properties, including a good internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = .87) and acceptable validity indices (Ganguly et al., 2024). With the help of the findings of the same group of samples, the provisional norms were developed separately for male and female groups using the Mean ± 1 Standard Deviation method. For males, scores below 91 were categorized as low, scores 92126 as average, and scores above 127 as high emotional dysregulation. For females, a score below 95 is indicated as low, 96132 average, and above 133 is considered a high level of marital emotional dysregulation in relationships. This gender-based normative range would help to interpret context-specific emotional regulation difficulties within the marital relationship framework. The current study structured a normative framework to increase the applicability of the modified scale in research and in different applied settings. The findings stressed the Bengali population -embedded norm development as it is improving the applicability of the tools in marital contexts.