| Recently,frequent incidents of school violence have been spotted,which becomes a severe concern to the society.The main purpose of this study is to examine the impact and mechanism of school violence on children’s mental health in the context of China.Based on the stress process model,we aim to establish an integrated conceptual framework to verify the direct relationship between school violence and children’s mental health,and to clarify the mediating effect of social support and self-esteem underlying the direct mechanism.Data are collected through a multi-stage cluster random sampling in Huai’an City,Jiangsu Province,East Mainland China.A total sample of 746 children from 4-9 grades are collected(response rate 87.9%),with an average age of 11.85(SD=1.739),52.8%male.The Multidimensional Peer-Victimization Scale,Mental Health Well-being Scale,Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support,and the Rosenberg’s Self-esteem Scale are used to measure the core variables in this study.Structural Equation Modeling(SEM)is implemented in Amos 21.0 to conduct the data analysis and test the hypothetical model.The result of the measurement model shows a good model fit(χ2=63.659,df=23,p<.001,CFI=0.987,RMSEA=0.049).The standardized factor loadings of the observation variables range between 0.666 and 0.927,which means that all of the index variables effectively reflected the intrinsic structure of the latent variable.The structural model also validates a good fit index(χ2=286.824,df=93,p<.001,CFI=0.958,RMSEA=0.053),which means the hypothetical model proposed in this study was supported by the empirical analysis.The overall model accounts for 47.2%of the variance in children’s mental health.The results demonstrate that school violence is negatively correlated with childrens mental health(β=-0.124,p<.001);In addition,self-esteem and social support play an intermediary role between school violence and children’s mental health.Specifically,school violence is negatively correlated with social support(β=0.243,p<.001),and social support is positively related to children’s mental health(β=0.459,p<.001),therefore,the reduction of social support would adversely affect children’s mental health.With respect to self-esteem,there is a negative correlation between school violence and children’s self-esteem(P=-0.124,p<.001),and a positive association between self-esteem and children’s mental health((3=0.324,p<.001),that is,the decline of children’s self-esteem can impair children’s mental health.This study has important theoretical and practical contributions.Theoretically,we establishes an integrated conceptual framework to explain the association among school violence,social support,self-esteem and children’s mental health.This study expands the stress process model by clarifying the influencing path of school violence on children’s mental health in the Chinese social context.Practically,this research can provide implications for social policies and evidence-based social work,which is beneficial to reduce school violence and protect children’s mental health. |
