How does school bullying influence adolescent social adaptation? a serial mediation model of school connectedness and self-disclosure

TL;DR

This study explores how school bullying affects adolescents' social adaptation through personal and environmental factors.

Contribution

It introduces a novel serial mediation model linking school bullying to social adaptation via self-disclosure and school connectedness.

Findings

Bullying reduces self-disclosure, which weakens school connectedness.

Lower school connectedness leads to poorer social adaptation in adolescents.

Both individual and environmental factors mediate bullying's impact on adaptation.

Abstract

School bullying has become an important social problem among adolescents, it can influence the growth of individual, yet understanding of the impacts of school bullying is limited. The present study determined to investigate whether and how school bullying can influence adolescent social adaptation.

Structural equation modeling was used to assess the hypothesized model. A sample of 434 Chinese adolescents (56.9% females), with an average age of 13.07 years (SD = 0.93), participated the survey.

The present study combined self-disclosure and school connectedness into a serial mediation model, highlighting the role of individual and environmental factors in the outcomes of school bullying.

These findings suggest that adolescents who engage in bullying are less likely to disclose personal information, which in turn hinders their sense of belonging at school, ultimately impairing their positive social adaptation. The results highlight the interplay between individual (self-disclosure) and environmental (school connectedness) factors in the outcomes of school bullying. Both limitations and implications are discussed in the end.

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