The purposes of this study were to ascertain the results of the pilot study conducted at one junior high school and to test the hypothes is 3 on a large-scale survey.
Hypothesis1: Students with higher resiliency, social support and life skills are less likely to be bullied, more likely to cope effectively with bullying, and less likely to suffer negative effects.
Hypothesis2: Resiliency, social support, and life skills show positive correlations with each other.
Hypothesis 3: The roles of resiliency, social support, and life skills as buffering factors are different in the process through which negative effects of bullying become more serious.
The study sample was comprised of 2,751 students in seventh to ninth grade from eight public junior high schools in Niigata and Hiroshima cities. The data were collected between October and December 2009, using anonymous, self-administered questionnaires. Valid responses were obtained from 2,460 students.
The main results were as follows.
1) According to the results of univariate analysis, the students who had never been bullied in the past year, who had experienced less negative effects of bullying, and who chose “asking-for-help" type of coping showed higher scores on measures of resiliency, social support and life skills. However, “aggressive" type of coping showed higher scores on measures of resiliency and life skills unlike the results in the pilot study.
2) Many significant partial correlations were found between resiliency and life skills, and between social support and life skills, whereas there were few significant partial correlations between resiliency and social support.
3)According to the results of multiple logistic regression analyses, social support “friends" and “teacher", self-esteem “peer", “family" and “global" were significantly associated with a decreased risk of having experienced various types of bullying, whereas resiliency “self-disclosure", undesirable social skills and emotion-focused coping strategy were associated with an increased risk of such experiences. Self-esteem “peer" and “family"were significantly associated with a decreased risk of having suffered negative effects of bullying, whereas emotion-focused coping strategy was associated with an increased risk.
The results of this study almost support hypotheses 1 and 2, as in our previous small-scale pilot study, although there were some differences from the pilot study. The present results also suggest that hypothesis 3 is reasonable.
The present study suggests the importance of activities to enhance students' social support and life skills, especially family-related self-esteem, in a comprehensive school bullying prevention program in Japan.
