The main purpose of this study was to examine the hypothesis 1) that “students with higher resiliency, social support and life skills are less likely to be bullied, more likely to cope with bullying effectively, and less likely to suffer negative effects”and the hypothesis 2) that “resiliency, social support, and life skills show positive correlations with each other”.
The study sample was comprised of 619 students in the seventh to the ninth grade from one public junior high school in Niigata city. The data were collected in June 2009, using anonymous and self-administered questionnaires. Valid responses were obtained from 583 students.
The main results were as follows.
1) Twenty-six percent of the subjects reported that they had been bullied a few times a month or once or more a week in the past year. The percentage of girls who had stayed away from school was 10％ and was higher than that of boys (3％). As for “coping strategies for being bullied”, girls tended to choose a passive or asking-for-help type, while boys tended to choose an aggressive or assertive type.
2) The students who had never been bullied in the past year showed significantly higher scores on measures of resiliency, social support, self-esteem, pro-social skills (boys) and goal-setting skills (boys), and lower scores on measures of negative social skills and emotion-focused coping strategies than the students who had experienced various types of bullying in the past year.
3) The students who had experienced less negative effects of being bullied showed significantly higher scores on measures of resiliency, social support (girls), self-esteem (boys), and problem-focused coping strategies (girls), and lower scores on measures of emotion-focused coping strategies (boys) than the students who had experienced more negative effects of being bullied.
4) The students who chose “asking-for-help” type of coping, showed higher scores on measures of resiliency (girls), social support, problem-focused coping strategies (boys), decision-making skills (boys), and goal-setting skills (girls).
5) Many significant partial correlations were found between life skills scales and resiliency scales, and between life skills scales and social support scales, whereas there were few significant partial correlations between resiliency scales and social support scales.
Overall, the results of this study suggest that hypothesis 1 and hypothesis 2 are valid, except for the relationship between resiliency and social support.
The results obtained from this study support the rationale of the idea that activities to enhance student's resiliency, social support, and life skills should be introduced into a comprehensive school bullying prevention program in Japan.
