School Bullying, Mental Health, and Wellbeing in Adolescents: Mediating Impact of Positive Psychological Orientations
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School Bullying, Mental Health, and Wellbeing in Adolescents: Mediating Impact of Positive Psychological Orientations Gökmen Arslan 1,2
& Kelly-Ann
Allen 3,4 & Ahmet Tanhan 5,6
Accepted: 5 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract School bullying is a serious psychosocial problem due to its detrimental effects on youth school functioning and adjustment. The present study explored the effects of victimization and perpetration experiences on positive psychological orientations, mental health problems, and subjective wellbeing in high school students. Participants of the study included 456 adolescents studying in two public high schools in a city of Turkey. They were 52.5% (239) female and 47.5% (217) male, and their ages ranged between 13 and 19 years (M = 15.53, SD = 1.13). Findings from the analyses indicated that adolescents in victim and perpetrator groups reported significantly fewer positive psychological orientations, diminished subjective wellbeing, and greater emotional and behavioral problems compared with their non-involved peers. Further outcomes revealed that positive psychological orientations mediated the link between school bullying and mental health problems as well as wellbeing, suggesting the importance of these constructs in developing effective intervention strategies to prevent school bullying and promote youth mental health and wellbeing in school settings.
* Gökmen Arslan [email protected] Kelly-Ann Allen [email protected] Ahmet Tanhan [email protected]
1
Faculty of Education, Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy Unıversity, Burdur, Turkey
2
International Network on Personal Meaning, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
3
Faculty of Education, Monash University, Clayton, Australia
4
The Centre for Positive Psychology, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia
5
Faculty of Education, Adıyaman Unıversity, Adıyaman, Turkey
6
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA
G. Arslan et al.
Keywords School bullying . Positive psychological orientation . Mental health problems .
Subjective wellbeing . Adolescence School bullying is a serious public health problem because of its detrimental effects on youth adjustment and wellbeing, as well as school functioning (Huang and Cornell 2015). Bullying is defined as a form of aggressive harmful behavior that is exhibited repeatedly over a period of time, and is characterized by a peer power differential (Olweus 2010; Renshaw et al. 2016). Although bullying behavior is a worldwide public health problem among children and adolescents, prevalence rates vary across countries. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD 2017) documented bullying prevalence in OECD countries as ranging between 9.3% and 30.6%; around 19% of adolescents reported any type of bullying behavior in Turkey. Given the pervasiveness of bullying around the world, it is critical to identify factors related to increasing adolescent mental health and wellbeing in the context of bu
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