Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Open Access Thesis
Department
Psychology
First Advisor
Sayward Harrison
Abstract
Bullying is a growing concern in China, yet few measures have been validated to assess different types of bullying among Chinese children. Despite a wealth of evidence on the negative effects of bullying victimization, how gender influences the experience of specific bullying behavior is under-examined. The present study thus aims to adapt and validate the initial BullyHARM scale, as well as explore the predictive validity of six types of bullying for male and female Chinese youth. BullyHARM has previously been shown to be a reliable scale for measuring six bullying domains (i.e., physical, verbal, social/relational, cyber, property, sexual) among children in the United States (US). BullyHARM-China was developed by a bilingual team of researchers using forward-backward translation to achieve cultural and linguistic adaptation. There were 394 middle school students from Beijing, China participating in this study to assess the psychometric properties of the new BullyHARM-China scale. All children completed mental health measures, which included a measure of symptoms of depression. Results of confirmatory factor analysis suggest the final 21-item scale displays strong internal consistency. Consistent with findings from the US, the first-order model of six factors (i.e., six bullying subscales) displays the best fit to the data. Our findings suggest that BullyHARM-China is a reliable tool for measuring bullying victimization among Chinese students. Results also support that bullying victimization predicts depressive symptoms, but male students experiencing physical and sexual bullying were found to have a higher risk for depression than female counterparts. Implications for future studies and anti-bullying programs are discussed. Keywords: Bullying, school bullying, China, measurement, scale validation, mental health, gender, depression
Rights
© 2024, Jingyi Yang
Recommended Citation
Yang, J.(2023). Measuring School Bullying Experiences Among Chinese Middle School Students: The Structural and Predictive Validity of Bullyharm-China. (Master's thesis). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/7528