The bullying in Korea has become a major social issue. The negative influence of bullying victimization can be found in various aspects expanding from psychological, physical, adjustment issues to extreme case of suicidal ideation. The anger, an indiv...
The bullying in Korea has become a major social issue. The negative influence of bullying victimization can be found in various aspects expanding from psychological, physical, adjustment issues to extreme case of suicidal ideation. The anger, an individual's emotional characteristic, and implicit theory, an individual's cognitive characteristic, should be studied to confirm and prevent suicidal ideation caused by bullying victimization.
Hence, the purpose of the study was to identify the mediating effect of anger and the moderating effect of implicit theory found in the relation between bullying victimization and suicidal ideation. The participants were 495 middle school students (1st grade ~ 3rd grade). The data was analyzed with Pearson's correlation, Structural Equation Modeling(SEM) by SPSS 23.0 and Amos 24.0.
The results of the study are as follows:
First, there were significant correlations among bullying victimization, suicidal ideation, anger, and implicit theory. Second, the examination of structural relation among the major variables showed that all the paths were statistically significant, and the result indicated that the mediating effect of anger between bullying victimization and suicidal ideation was significant. Third, the multi-group analysis has been used to investigate the difference of the structural relationship among major variables of entity/incremental groups. When the path coefficients of both entity/incremental groups were compared, the entity theory group had partial mediation effect of anger between bullying victimization and suicidal ideation, whereas the incremental theory group only had direct path of bullying victimization to suicidal ideation.
In conclusion, these results showed that reducing bullying victimization is very important in preventing suicidal ideation of middle school students. If, however, victimization is not reduced or completely eradicated in reality intervention by controlling anger or transforming entity theory into incremental theory would be important. Especially, in case of incremental theory group, influence of victimization that directly predicts suicidal ideation is weakened compared to that of entity theory group and mediating effect of anger is not significant. Thus, intervention that transforms entity theory into incremental theory would be effective.