Who Are Being Bullied? – An Empirical Study on the Influence Factors of School Bullying among Chinese Middle School Students

This study used a large-scale random sampling survey data called Regional Assessment of Education Quality (RAEQ) organized by Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessment toward Basic Education Quality in 2014. The school bullying phenomenon is described from the perspective of middle school students who were bullied. Regression is used to estimate the effects of academic achievement, self-esteem, interpersonal relationship and pro-social behavior on the different types of school bullying. And the differences between urban and rural areas among the influence factors were also compared. The conclusions are as follows. First, the average frequency of verbal bullying is the highest, relational bullying is in the middle level, and physical bullying is the lowest. Second, boys are more likely to suffer school bullying weighted more in verbal and physical bullying. Third, those who are single-parent, migrant, left behind and rural origin are more vulnerable to various types of bullying. Interestingly, students from single-parent families are more likely to suffer relational bullying, while migrant and rural children are more likely to get verbal bullying. Fourth, the level of self-esteem has a U-shaped relationship with the frequencies of all kinds of school bullying, and it is more significant and clear in the relational bullying. Fifth, interpersonal relationship, including parent-child, peer-peer, and teacher-student relationship can affect the school bullying significantly, and the peer relationship has a bigger effect on the relational bullying for urban students compared with rural ones. Therefore, parents, teachers and schools should pay more attention to and even interfere with the potentially bullied students to prevent and control school bullying.