Relationship Among Being Bullied,Attendanc, Academic Achievement, And School Life Satisfaction Of Junior High School In Grade One

Bulling in public schools is a pressing issue in modern education. Certainly, bullying also known as peer harassment, peer abuse, or peer victimization is not new to schools. However, recently, with the increased concern about violence in schools, the topic has garnered a great deal of research. Educators and the public at large have become interested in studying the danger that bullying can cause for both the victims themselves and the attackers as well. Researchers are scrambling to understand the consequences of peer victimization for both victim and attacker, and clearly, the impacts are physical, psychological, and even academic in nature.While the literature on peer victimization has grown significantly over the last twenty years, much of the research has focused on the causes of peer victimization, and the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of peer victimization prevention programs. However, there are many other facets to the peer victimization problem that need to be examined.Survey data from a study of students of junior high school in grade one from Zhejiang Province, Jiangxi Province, and Shanghai (n=1791) were used to estimate structural equation models in which being bullied types were hypothesized to have significant relationships with both school life satisfaction and attendance. Then, school life satisfaction and attendance variables were hypothesized to have significant effects on achievement (measured as grade point average). School life satisfaction was viewed as a multi-faceted construct. Four different types of being bullied variables (verbal being bullied, physical being bullied, exclusion being bullied, and cyber-being bullied,) were combined to form a latent measure for being bullied that was expected to predict absenteeism and school life satisfaction. In addition, school life satisfaction was expected to act as a mediating variable between the peer victimization latent variable and absenteeism. A model treating peer victimization and school life satisfaction as latent variables fit the data well. However, the peer victimization latent variable was not statistically significantly predictive of absenteeism as was hypothesized.Other paths between endogenous and exogenous variables, statistically significant, had relatively strong path coefficients suggesting that school life satisfaction does largely impact attendance for students of junior high school in grade one, at least for the sample taken from this study. In fact, the path coefficient between school life satisfaction and attendance was weak. In conclusion, the relationships between peer victimization, school life satisfaction, and attendance were simply not as strong as hypothesized. However, the structural equation models did demonstrate that school engagement mediates the effect of peer victimization on attendance. A suggestion for further study would be to examine the "school avoidance" component of the study; perhaps, an attendance variable would be more significantly impacted by peer victimization for older students who have less parental influence on their daily attendance. In addition, a longitudinal study with more measures of student behaviors across time might better capture the effect of peer victimization on the various school behavior variables.