The Explanatory Model of the Relationship between Attachment to God and Parents and Quality of Life of Poorly Supervised and Neglected Girls through the MediatingRole of Self-Compassion

Being a crucial concept, quality of life bears special significance in our life. Research indicates that this construct is influenced by several variables. As there is no explicit consensus on explaining the factors influencing the quality of life, including attachment to parents, attachment to God, and self-compassion, this study was conducted to investigate the pattern of relations between attachment to parents, attachment to God, and self-compassion and quality of life of poorly supervised and neglected girls.

The research was a correlational study with structural equation modeling. The study population included all 9 to 19-year old girls in the 24-hour daycare centers of Welfare Organization of Tehran province in 2019. The study sample consisted of 241 girls out of this population who were selected by simple random sampling. World Health Organization Quality of Life-BREF (WHOQoL-BREF) (1996), Muslim Spiritual Attachment Scale (M-SAS) (Ghobari Bonab & Hadadi Kouhsar) (2011), Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment-Revised (IPPA-R) (Armsden & Greenberg, 1987) and Self- Compassion Scale (SCS) of Neff (2003) were used to gather the data. AMOS software was used to analyze the structural relationships between variables.

Findings showed that attachment to parents (p<0.001, β = 0.56) and self-compassion had a significant positive direct effect on the quality of life (p <0.001, β = 0.52). Attachment to God had no significant direct effect on the quality of life (p> 0.05, β = 0.03), but attachment to God and attachment to parents had a significant positive effect on the quality of life through the mediating role of self-compassion with the amounts of (p <0.001, β = 0.29) and (p <0.001, β = 0.34), respectively.

Results showed that self-compassion can play a mediating role in the relationship between attachment to God and attachment to parents and quality of life.