In the current research, the associations between household socio-demographic characteristics including family migrant status (migrants/non-migrants), hukou status (urban/rural hukou), parental/maternal education level, and living arrangements were explored in relation to four bullying-related constructs. Results indicated that the aforementioned demographic factors were closely related to adolescents’ bullying behaviors at school. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research study to systematically examining the relations between family demographics and bullying-related constructs.
This study found that migrant status (migrants/local residents) was the only sociodemographic factor associated with bullying witnessing, with adolescents from migrant families observing more incidents of bullying at school. Previous research has also shown that migrant adolescents do not have equal access to various social welfare services (i.e. entrance to public schools and health care) compared to their urban counterparts, and they are also more likely to experience peer exclusion or discrimination [31]. Previous evidence showed that individuals who witnessed bullying scenarios were more likely to get involved in bullying than counterparts [32]. Together with the current results, it could be suggested that the disadvantages faced by migrant adolescents may render them more susceptible to school bullying. Further research is required to explore the impact of migrant status on bullying in schools to better understand this finding.
As hypothesized, being migrants, holding rural hukou, and low parental education levels were positively associated with the risk of being bullies (or bully/victims). This result is consistent with previous findings which show that having a low household income and low parental social statuses are predictive of delinquency during adolescence [33]. Migrant adolescents may hold different social norms than their local counterparts, and intolerance to customary differences may instigate a bully environment in schools. Research further shows that bullying behaviors may have different implications for rural and urban adolescents. As shown in the current study and several previous studies, a large proportion of internal-migrants in China are from rural areas [23]. Because of this, there is a noticeable difference in bullying perception between rural and urban adolescent. A large proportion of rural adolescents (especially males) regard bullying others as a status symbol (i.e. masculine capital), while urban adolescents usually interpret bullying as an act of “lack of self-restraint” and “rudeness” [34]. This differentiation in social values may also explain why migrant adolescents were more likely to be bullies in this study. In addition, adolescents who have a less educated father (but not mother) were also more likely to be bullies in this study. Parental education level has long been regarded as an important socio-economic factor, considering the significant effect of socio-economic characteristics on adolescents’ social behaviors; the association between fathers’ education level and bullying may partly be due to fathers’ dominant role in maintaining the family’s socio-economic status, which the child mimics [35].
Contrary to our original hypothesis, adolescents who lived with their grandparents did not have a higher or lower likelihood of being bullies. This result is inconsistent with some of the previous research that suggests cohabitating with grandparents could be positively associated with adolescents’ social adjustments. Previous research [11] evaluated how grandparents’ involvement, but not living only with grandparents, could affect the possibility of involvements in bullying for adolescents. However, the family dynamics could be quite different when grandparents’ are only involved with the child’s upbringing, but not living with the child. The child living only with their grandparents could possibly explain the inconsistency presented in research results. Future studies are required to clarify the role of grandparents in preventing or exacerbating bullying at school, with special care paid to exploring the differences in family composition (living with grandparents and parents, living only with grandparents, living with parents and receiving care from grandparents).
It is important to note that all the aforementioned family demographic characteristics were not associated with a high risk of being victims of bullying. Bullies (or bully/victims) are different from victims in terms of behavioral patterns. Bullying perpetration (or perpetration-victimization) has been conceptualized as “being proactively aggressive”, referring to “… cold blooded and goal-directed bullying behaviors” [36]. Looking at the current results of this study, adolescents from disadvantageous families had a higher risk of being proactive rather than reactive bullies. Further research is needed to explore the different relations between family demographics and proactive or reactive bullying at school.
In our study, adolescents from migrant families also had a higher likelihood of negatively reacting to those being bullied (e.g. teasing). According to previous research [37], adolescents with better social skills (such as high empathy, high self-control etc.) are more likely to intervene and provide help when they witness bullying scenarios. Therefore, having better social skills might explain the association between family economic status and intervention as a bystander. The results from our study are consistent with previous findings that adolescents from low economic backgrounds have a higher rate of delinquency [35]. Adolescents then with highly-educated parents are less likely to experience negative emotions (i.e. fear of school) than their counterparts. This indicated that both parental and maternal education levels could be a protective factor against bullying.
There are several limitations to the current research. First, all participants were from Suzhou, an economically advantageous city in Eastern China. Considering the main focus is on socio-demographic factors, such sampling methods may render the results prone to selection bias. Second, considering the cross-sectional nature of the current research, only correlations between bullying and the demographic factors could be explored. Longitudinal design should be adopted in future studies to examine causal relationships between the two constructs. Third, the measurements of some bullying-related constructs were simplified for concision. For example, only two forms of bullying (i.e. verbal/physical) were measured in the current research, with other forms, such as cyber-bullying and social isolation being unexamined. Also, the widely recognized features of school bullying (such as intention and power imbalances) were not considered appropriately in the current research. Participants may misunderstand the complex concept of bullying. For example, they could possibly regard some conflicts without power imbalances (e.g. arguments or fights) as bullying behaviors, which is not the aim of the current research. Future studies should explore how family demographic factors relate to a wide range of different forms of bullying, with a more accurate definition. Considering the complexity of behavioral patterns of bystanders, the current categorization (non-reaction, positively intervening, and negatively intervening) may not capture all possible ways of intervening behaviors in a bullying scenario. Also, among all the possible consequences of being bullied, we only adopted “fear of bullied” as the indicator. Although fear of being bullied has been identified as the most direct consequence of school bullying, other long-term consequences (such as depression and maladjustment) should further be incorporated in future research.
Finally, the current research adopted a non-anonymous survey format during data collection. Anonymous survey format is the preference for most existing studies on bullying, with the assumption that participants may reveal more truthful answers when personal information is not required. However, previous evidence on how anonymity might influence research validity is mixed. Some researchers propose that an anonymous survey could encourage participants to “exaggerate or make irresponsible responses” [38]. There is also evidence showing that results from anonymous and non-anonymous bullying surveys were not statistically different [39, 40]. O’Malley and colleagues [41] found that the assurance of confidentiality (but not anonymity) could be sufficient to obtain good validity, which was the practice in this study. Based on these results, the effects of anonymity could be mixed. Anonymity should be taken into consideration and multi-methods (i.e. peer-nomination, teacher assessment) should be used to evaluate bullying experiences in future studies.