Physical bullying is considered as one of the most harmful forms of school bullying, posing threats to individuals' physical and psychological well-being, educational achievement, and healthy development. However, most existing studies have treated school bullying as a whole, and neglected mechanisms underlying physical bullying. The bioecological model, which explores the interaction effects between individual features and ecological systems on individuals' social behaviors, provides an appropriate theoretical framework to explain physical bullying. In the bioecological model, individuals' aggressive attitudes, low self-control, authoritarian family parenting, and teacher apathy have been found to be significant predictors of school bullying. Based on this theoretical framework, the current study built a dual moderated mediation model, providing a systematic understanding of physical bullying and offering evidence-based implications for bullying prevention and intervention programs. Moreover, the study introduced a novel method of moderation analysis, the Polynomial Curved Surface Fitting (PCSF) approach, which can visualize models with dual moderation effects in 3D space.
The Revised Bully/Victim Questionnaire, the Short Version of Parental Authority Questionnaire, the Aggression Attitudes Scale in Authoritative School Climate Survey, the Low Self-Control Scale, and the Teacher Apathy Scale were used. The cluster sampling method was adopted to recruit 6638 students from a vocational high school in Shandong Province. A total of 5806 individuals (Mage = 15.75 ± 0.81 years old, 34.7% females) finally participated in this research, resulting in a response rate of 87.5%. Mediation analysis was conducted using SEM with 5000 draw BC Bootstrap. The significance of moderation effects was tested using multivariate linear regression. For single-moderation analysis, the Johnson-Neyman analysis was adopted. The PCSF approach was used to analyze the dual moderated mediation effect.
The results showed that authoritarian parenting directly predicted physical bullying. Mediation analysis suggested that individuals' aggression attitudes significantly mediated the relationship between authoritarian parenting and physical bullying. Moderation analysis further revealed that individuals' low self-control significantly moderated the impact of authoritarian parenting on aggression attitudes, with a higher level of low self-control leading to a greater positive effect of authoritarian parenting on aggression attitudes. Additionally, teacher apathy significantly moderated the effects of authoritarian parenting and aggression attitudes on physical bullying, with a higher level of teacher apathy contributing to greater positive effects of authoritarian parenting and aggression attitudes on physical bullying. Moreover, low self-control and teacher apathy significantly moderated the indirect effect of authoritarian parenting on physical bullying, with higher levels of low self-control and teacher apathy leading to greater levels of the mediation effect. The mediation effect increased nonlinearly under the dual moderation effects of low self-control and teacher apathy.
The current study not only provides theoretical and practical contributions to understanding physical bullying, but also introduces the PCSF analysis for the models with dual moderation effects. The findings suggest that individual, family, and school domains can interactively predict physical bullying. Family's authoritarian parenting is the primary predictor, which can directly predict physical bullying even after controlling the mediation effect of individuals' aggression attitudes. The risk factors of individual characteristics (e.g., low self-control) and school settings (e.g., teacher apathy) can amplify the mediation effect, showing a nonlinear growth tendency. From a practical perspective, reducing individuals' aggression attitudes and authoritarian parenting while improving individuals' self-control skills and teachers' classroom management skills may effectively reduce physical bullying. From a methodological perspective, the introduction of the PCSF approach has overcome the technical limitations of the Johnson-Neyman approach, providing researchers with opportunities to investigate complicated models with dual moderation effects.
Key words
physical bullying /
authoritarian parenting /
aggressive attitudes /
self-control /
teacher apathy /
PCSF
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