Abstract

• The purpose of this study is to investigate attachment styles and social competence of high school students. Stratified random sampling technique and quantitative approach was used in this study. A total of 658 high school students (330 male and 328 female) from six basic education high schools in Yangon Region and Rakhine State participated in this study. In this study, four attachment styles were measured with Attachment Style Questionnaire (ASQ) conducted by Van Oudenhoven, Hofstra and Bakker (2003). It includes 24 items (7 items for secure attachment style, 5 items for fearful attachment style, 7 items for preoccupied attachment style and 5 items for dismissing attachment style) in which each item is rated with a five-point Likert scale. The Multidimensional Social Competence Scale (MSCS) developed by Trevisan, Tafreshi, Slaney, Yager and Iarocci (2018) was used to measure social competence of high school students including 77 items (11 items for social motivation, 11 items for social inferencing, 11 items for demonstrating empathic concern, 11 items for social knowledge, 11 items for verbal conversation skills, 11 items for nonverbal conversation skills and 11 items for emotion regulation) with five-point Likert scale. Alpha reliability for ASQ and MSCS revealed at 0.545 and at 0.77 respectively. Although there were no significant associations between high school students’ attachment styles and gender, age and Grade, it was found that attachment styles were significantly associated with schools and region at 0.001 level. There was significantly associated with high school students’ attachment styles and cooperation in group activities at 0.01 level. The results of independent samples t-test revealed that there were significant differences on social competence with gender and cooperation in group activities at 0.01 level and with region at 0.001 level. And regarding the Grade and age, there were no significant differences on social competence. Again, ANOVA results showed that there was a significant difference on social competence among schools at 0.001 level. Finally, there was a significant association between high school students’ attachment styles and social competence level at 0.001 level. The findings of this study will be desired for parents, teachers and counsellors to help the high school students have secure attachment style and support them to develop social competence.