Socioeconomic Status, Dependent Personality and Nail Biting Behavior Among Adults: Evaluation of Structural Relationship

The main objective was to investigate the socioeconomic status and dependent personality as the predictor of nail biting among adults. A sample of 101 adults that nail bit was selected from Sialkot city that aged above 19 to 75 years using purposive sampling from government and private educational institutes and local communities. The socioeconomic status and nail biting measured in the demographic form asking information about income, education, profession and do you nail bit. Further, dependent personality was checked with Dependent Personality Disorder scale Urdu version (Shahzadi & Bano, 2018). Results showed that there is significant predictive relationship present between these two variables on samples (N= 101), R= .432 which indicates a moderate correlation. The R2= .187 which indicated that 1.8% variation in the dependent variable, can be explained by the independent variable. Adjusted R-square a modify form of R-square which is also 1.7 variation in data. Descriptive results of this study showed that these two variables from sample (N= 320) are co-occur only in (N= 101) participants with 31.5 percentage generally in both male and female of Sialkot city. Structure Equation Modeling was used for the analysis of data. The model fit summary indicated the p value of .000 which indicates that socioeconomic factors and dependent personality was the significant predictor of nail biting among adults. All the model fit indices were also in the best prescribed limits as Chi-square/df (1.106), Goodness of Fit Index (.976), Adjusted Goodness of Fit Index (.940), Comparative Fit Index (.974) and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (.033). Furthermore, the income regression estimate indicates that when income, profession and dependent personality goes up by 1 standard deviation, the nail biting goes up by 0.21, 0.12 and 0.4 standard deviations respectively whereas in case of education, it goes up by 1 standard deviation and the nail biting behavior goes down by .09 standard deviations. Conclusion: In conclusion, the socioeconomic status and dependent personality was the significant predictor of nail biting behavior among adults.