Middle Eastern Journal of Disability Studies

Abstract
Background & Objectives: Psychological wellbeing is an effort to grow and develop to realize a person's potential in a variety of dimensions rooted in the development of personality. Assessing defective mechanisms and effective coping can pave the way for understanding psychological wellbeing, one of the best conditions for such assessments in anxiety disorders, particularly social anxiety disorder. In line with the evolution of adolescence and in accordance with the psychoanalytic approach, another step is attaining the psychological wellbeing of cohesion in the identity of Ego. During identification, adolescents develop their identity through emotional engagement with their relatives, especially their parents. According to the articles mentioned above, this research aimed to develop a psychological wellbeing model for adolescents with social anxiety based on defensive styles, ego identity status, and parent–child relationship.
Methods: This research was a correlational study. The statistical population of this study comprised male senior high school students studying in Tehran City, Iran, in the 2017–2018 academic year. The sample also included 250 students with social anxiety selected with a multistage cluster sampling method. In this way, first, among the 22 districts of Tehran, districts 3, 5, and 16 were randomly selected, and then 3 schools were chosen from each district and 5 students from each school. The inclusion criteria included informed consent, an age range of 15–18 years, and a minimum score of 40 in the Social Phobia Inventory (Connor et al., 2000). The exclusion criteria included reluctance to continue cooperation and lack of completion of the questionnaires by participants. The participants completed the Defense Style Questionnaire (Andrews et al., 1993), the Psychological Wellbeing Scale (Ryff & Keyes, 1995), The Ego Identity Questionnaire (Keraskian, 2016), The Parent–Child Rating Scale (Fine et al., 1983), and The Social Phobia Inventory (Connor et al., 2000). To analyze the descriptive data and structural equation model, SPSS version 24 software and AMOS version 24 were used.
Results: The results showed that the parent–child relationship directly and indirectly affects psychological wellbeing (p<0.05). Regarding the direct path, the direction of the relationship is positive. Thus, with the increase in the score of the parent–adolescent relationship, the score of the child's psychological wellbeing also increases (β=0.16, p<0.05). The indirect effect consists of two paths. The first path, the parent–adolescent relationship increases defense mechanisms (β=0.24, p<0.01), and defense mechanisms increase identity (β=0.22, p<0.01), and finally, identity decreases psychological wellbeing (β=–0.29, p<0.01). Regarding the second path, the parent–adolescent relationship had a positive effect on identity (β=0.28, p<0.01), and increasing the score of identity styles causes psychological wellbeing to decrease (β=–0.29, p<0.01). Also, the fit indices show a good fit of the model with the data (GFI=0.98, CFI=0.93, AGFI=0.89, IFI=0.94, RMSEA=0.07, CMIN/df=2.61).
Conclusion: The findings emphasize the important role of defense mechanism variables, ego identity status, and parent–child relationship in adolescents psychological wellbeing of adolescents with social anxiety. Therefore, an important contribution can be considered for these variables in the design of psychological interventions.