The purpose of the present study was to investigate mitigative factors of bullying by differences between bully-followers, bystanders, and victim-defenders. Outsiders' involvement in bullying situation was examined. And the discriminant functions to d...
The purpose of the present study was to investigate mitigative factors of bullying by differences between bully-followers, bystanders, and victim-defenders. Outsiders' involvement in bullying situation was examined. And the discriminant functions to differentiate bully-followers, bystanders, and victim-defenders found out. Mitigative factors of bullying consist of prosocial moral reasoning, empathy, assertiveness, necessity for helping, risk burden, moral disengagement and frustration.
A total of 344 5th, 6th grade students of elementary schools and first grade students of middle schools(159 boys and 185 girls) participated in this study. They were classified into one of the three types of outsider; bully-follower, bystander and victim-defender.
The major findings are as follows;
① Over a half of the sample in this study(65.4%) were involved in bullying by either actively reinforcing(bully-followers; 6.4%) or passively observing(bystanders; 59.0%), and 34.6% of the sample were found to be defenders of the victims.
② With regard to relationships between mitigative factors and types of outsider, ANOVAs revealed that victim-defenders had higher prosocial moral reasoning than bully-followers and higher empathy than bystanders as well as bully-followers. ANOVAs also revealed that victim-defenders had lower risk burden, moral disengagement and frustration than bully-followers. Furthermore, bystanders had lower moral disengagement and frustration than bully-followers. These findings suggested that prosocial moral reasoning, empathy, risk burden, moral disengagement and frustration might play a significant role in mitigating bullying behaviors.
③ Multiple discriminant analysis yielded a function containing 3 variables(empathy, risk burden, prosocial moral reasoning), which was 50.0% accurate in classifying the sample into one of the three types of outsider. Empathy and prosocial moral reasoning play a key role in predicting victim-defenders and risk burden plays a key role in predicting bully-followers or bystanders.
Implications of the findings were discussed in light of the importance of development of an intervention program that focuses on outsider.