ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1606721
Heterogeneity of Dormitory Interpersonal Conflict Coping Style and its Negative Emotional Characteristics among College Students: Based on Latent Profile Analysis
Provisionally accepted
- Huaibei Normal University, Huaibei, China
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Background Dormitory interpersonal conflict coping style has an important impact on the quality of college students' dormitory interpersonal relationships and emotional experiences. Still, previous studies have ignored the individual differences among college student groups, making it difficult to effectively classify these groups from the perspective of dormitory conflict coping style. This study aims to explore the potential categories of conflict coping styles in college students' dormitories and their demographic characteristics, and to analyze the emotional differences among college students in different types of dormitory conflict coping groups, with the expectation of providing theoretical references for improving interpersonal relationships in college students' dormitories. Methods A convenience cluster sampling method was used to select 1,408 college students from a university in Anhui Province, China, to conduct an online survey. The Dormitory Interpersonal Relationship Questionnaire, the Dormitory Interpersonal Conflict Coping Style Questionnaire, and the Depression-Anxiety-Stress Scale Short Chinese Version were used for the investigation. First, we used "individual-centered" latent profile analysis to explore the categories of dormitory interpersonal conflict coping style; second, we used multifactorial binary logistic regression to explore the relationship between demographic variables and the potential categorization of dormitory interpersonal conflict coping style; and lastly, we used a difference-in-differences test to explore the emotional characteristics of different dormitory interpersonal conflict coping style groups. Results: The dormitory interpersonal conflict coping style group of Chinese college students was divided into two potential categories: the positive coping group (85.01%, 1197 students) and the negative coping group (14.99%, 211 students). The results of binary logistic regression analysis showed that gender, grade, and type of specialty were all correlated with dormitory interpersonal conflict coping style in college: male students , senior students , and non-literature and history majors were more likely to choose negative responses to interpersonal conflicts in the dormitory (all P<0.05). The positive coping group scored significantly lower on negative emotions than the negative coping group. Conclusion: There is significant group heterogeneity in the dormitory interpersonal conflict coping style of Chinese college students. Schools should guide college students to choose appropriate interpersonal conflict resolution strategies to create positive interpersonal relationships in dormitories.
Keywords: dormitory interpersonal relationships, interpersonal conflict coping style, latent profile analysis, College student, Negative emotions
Received: 06 Apr 2025; Accepted: 25 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Pan, Zhao, Lv, Xu and Zhu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xiaoyun Zhao, Huaibei Normal University, Huaibei, China
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