The Effect Of School Bonding On Sense Of Meaning In Life Among Secondary School Boarders: A Moderated Chain Mediations

In recent years,boarding schools have been vigorously developed and Students’ parents are paying more and more attention to high quality teaching,many students from rural areas or other places are sent to schools with relatively concentrated educational resources,so boarding has become the best choice for many students.However,boarders are separated from their parents for a long time and lack of emotional support may lead to some psychological crises.Especially,the sense of meaning of life,as one of the basic motivations of individuals,is an important positive psychological quality of individuals.The lack of sense of meaning will bring bad psychological problems of individuals.Family is one of the sources of their sense of meaning.After leaving the warmth of family,their sense of meaning in life may decline.In addition,teenagers are in the period of the establishment of self-identity,their evaluation of their own value and ability is unstable,and there will be confusion and lack of sense of meaning.Self-determination theory points out that the satisfaction of relationship will promote the generation of individual sense of meaning.The emotional connection between boarding students and school is one of the important sources of emotional compensation for boarders.It is also one of the important relationships for boarders and will promote the development of students’ sense of meaning.Therefore,this study takes sense of meaning of life as dependent variable and school bonding as independent variable to understand the formation mechanism of sense of meaning of life of boarding students.The relevant theories of gratitude and the theories of psychological resources show that gratitude and psychological capital play an important role in the formation of the sense of meaning in life.Meanwhile,core self-evaluation,as a personality structure,may affect the formation of the sense of meaning.Therefore,this study introduces gratitude and psychological capital,two variables in positive psychology,discusses the mechanism of promoting the development of students’ positive psychology,and examines the moderating effect of personality traits such as core self-evaluation,so as to provide targeted suggestions for individuals with different personality characteristics and appropriately cultivate dominant personality traits.In this study,1300 boarding students in middle and high schools were taken as the research object,and the school bonding,psychological capital,gratitude,sense of life meaning and core self-evaluation of boarding middle school students were measured by issuing questionnaires.SPSS22.0 was used to sort out and analyze the data.The results are as follows:(1)For boarding middle students,The level of their school bonding can positively predict the level of their sense of meaning in life.(2)For boarding middle students,their gratitude has a partial mediating effect between school bonding and sense of meaning of life.(3)Boarding middle students’ psychological capital plays a partial mediating role between school bonding and sense of meaning of life.(4)For middle students who boarding at school,gratitude and psychological capital play a partial mediating role between school bonding and sense of life meaning.(5)Core self-evaluation plays a moderating role in the chain mediation,influencing the predictive relationship between school bonding and gratitude: under high core self-evaluation,the positive predictive effect of school bonding on gratitude was significantly greater than that under low core self-evaluation.This study draws the following conclusions: school bonding can directly affect boarders’ sense of meaning in life,or indirectly through gratitude,psychological capital,gratitude and psychological capital.Core self-evaluation regulates the simple mediation of school bonding-gratitude and psychological capital,as well as the chain mediation of school bonding-gratitude,psychological capital and sense of meaning in life.The results of this study have important implications for middle school boarding schools.For boarding students,due support from teachers and peers should be given to them in school,so that they can have more sense of belonging in school,so as to promote the enhancement of students’ sense of meaning in life.Of course,it can also promote the enhancement of students’ sense of meaning by cultivating students’ quality of gratitude and accumulating positive psychological capital.In the process of training,students’ core self-evaluation can be appropriately improved to promote the positive impact of school bonding on gratitude.