Online Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Adolescents: Development and preliminary validation

Emotion regulation when using the Internet is an increasingly important way to secure effective social functioning for adolescents. To develop a measure of emotion regulation for adolescents with reference to the network community and examine its reliability and validity, we recruited 535 young people as participants and performed item analysis, identification degree analysis, exploratory factor analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis. Our results showed that the online emotion regulation of adolescents comprised the following 4 dimensions: positive emotion seeking, negative emotion experience, interpersonal emotion support, and mood awareness. Cronbach’s α coefficient and the test-retest reliability met the benchmark psychometric standards, and the confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that the scale had a good fit. Our results indicated that the developed scale was a valid and reliable measure of adolescents’ online emotion regulation.