Modeling the Interrelationship of Learned Resourcefulness, Self-Management, and Affective Symptomatology

Self-regulatory skills models are important explanatory constructs for many societal applications. However, little research exists on the relative influence of different self-regulatory skills models for specific applications, with all relevant constructs considered simultaneously. This study evaluated the contributions of the self-regulatory models of learned resourcefulness and self-management to the outcome variable of affective symptomatology. Specifically, structural equation modeling was used to test whether learned resourcefulness accounts for additional variance in affective symptomatology when taking self-management into consideration. Results indicated that both learned resourcefulness and self-management accounted for a large proportion of variance in affective symptomatology, and the model in which the path between learned resourcefulness and affective symptomatology was constrained to zero provided the best fit of the data, tentatively suggesting that learned resourcefulness did not seem to add much value in terms of predicting affective symptomatology when in the presence of self-management. Implications for self-regulatory skills theory and models are discussed.