Factor Structure of the Affective Style Questionnaire in Flemish Adolescents

Emotion regulation plays an important role in both healthy and problematic adolescent psychological functioning. Emotion regulation tendencies can be assessed with the Affective Style Questionnaire (ASQ; Hofmann & Kashdan, 2010), but its validity in Dutch speaking adolescents has not been investigated so far. Two methods, namely traditional confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the recently developed exploratory structural equations modeling (ESEM), were compared to examine the dimensional structure of the ASQ in a Flemish adolescent sample (N = 1,601). Although, as expected, the ESEM-model fit the data better than the CFA-model, the fit indices indicated that both models did not have an acceptable fit. With a shortened version of the ASQ, model fit improved substantially, but only the ESEM solution provided a good fit. The ESEM results support the use of the adapted ASQ to effectively assess the affective styles of concealing, adjusting and tolerating in Dutch-speaking adolescents.