The mediating role of interpersonal forgiveness in the relationship between students' differentiation and social competence

This study aimed to investigate the mediating role of interpersonal forgiveness in the relationship between differentiation and students' social competence. The present study is descriptive correlation and is a kind of structural equation modeling. The statistical population of this study included female students of the University of Tehran with all degrees in 2020. In order to collect data, 378 of them participated in the convenience sampling method and answered the questionnaires in an online survey. Data were collected using the Social Competence Questionnaire; SCQ (Parandin, 2006); Differentiation of Self Inventory; DSI (Skowron & Schmitt, 2003) and Interpersonal Forgiveness Scale; IFS (Ehteshamzadeh et al., 2011). Data were analyzed by structural equation modeling using SPSS-24 and AMOS-24 software. The pathway coefficients of differentiation on interpersonal forgiveness (β=0.635, P=0.001) and interpersonal forgiveness on social competence (β=0.649, P=0.001) were significant (P<0.05); But the direct path of differentiation on social competence was not significant (β=0.149; P=0.122). The results of the Bootstrap test showed that the indirect path of differentiation on social competence was significant with the mediating role of interpersonal forgiveness (β=0.412, P=0.001) (P <0.05). Overall, it can be concluded that interpersonal forgiveness plays a fully mediating role between the differentiation and social competence of female students.