Self-compassion and social support as predictors of psychological symptoms of high school students during the pandemic

At various times in human history, there have been events that have affected the whole world. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has had an impact worldwide, is a breaking situation that causes severe threats to people's physical health and lives. Individuals in different developmental stages have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and adolescents are one of them. The aim of this study is to determine whether the social support and self-compassion perceived by high school students predict a decrease in their psychological symptoms during the pandemic period. In this study, which was conducted in the relational model, the convenience sampling method was used as the sampling method. Of the 478 students who participated in the study, 285 were female, 190 were male, and 3 participants did not specify their gender. Brief Symptom Inventory, Self Compassion Scale Short Form, Perceived Social Support Scale, and personal information form developed by the researcher were used to collect data in the study. Analyzes were made using the SPSS 25.0 program. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to determine the predictive power of self-compassion and perceived social support for psychological symptoms. ANOVA test was applied to determine whether there was a significant difference between the scores obtained from the scales and the categorical variables. In the study, the relationships between parametric variables were analyzed with t-Test. In addition, in the study, the level of significance was accepted as .05. After the analyses, it was found that gender, communication with parents, academic achievement during the pandemic period, self-compassion and the community sub-dimension of perceived social support predicted psychological symptoms. The findings were discussed, and recommendations were made for both practitioners and researchers. Keywords: Self-compassion, perceived social support, psychological symptom, COVID-19 Pandemic