Impact of Bullying Victimization on Chinese College Students’ Suicidal Tendency: The Moderating Effect of Teachers’ Emotional Support and Family Support

Abstract

Objective

To explore the influence of bully victims on the suicidal tendencies of college students, and the moderating role of teacher emotional support and family support in the relationship between bully victims and college students’ suicidal tendencies, in order to provide a reference for the effective intervention of college students’ suicide behavior.

Methods

Based on a survey of 15,560 college students. Multiple stepwise regression and Interaction analysis explore the impact of the bully victimization on college students’ suicidal tendencies and the moderating role of family support and teacher emotional support in the relationship between the bully victim and college students’ suicidal tendencies.

Results

This study found that the Suicidal Tendencies score of college students was 19.79 points, indicating that some college students have a risk of suicidal tendencies; secondly, verbal bullying (β = 0.084, P <0.001), physical bullying (β = 0.222, P <0.001) and social relationship bullying (β = 0.122, P <0.001) have a positive and significant impact on the suicidal tendencies of college students; in addition, family support and teacher emotional support have a significant regulatory effect on the bully victim and college students Suicidal Tendencies and family support. The regulating effect was significantly higher than that of teacher emotional support.

Conclusion

Chinese college students have the risk of suicidal tendencies; peer bullying victimization is an important reason for affecting college students’ suicidal tendencies, teacher emotional support is a protective factor for bully victims to affect college students’ suicidal tendencies, and family support has a significant moderating effect on the bully victim and college students’ suicidal tendencies. Therefore, it is necessary to actively adopt home-school linkage and home-school communication to reduce campus violence and increase the psychological resilience of college students.

Keywords:

• bully victim
• teachers’ emotional support
• family support
• suicidal tendencies
• college students

Data Sharing Statement

The data sets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Ethics Approval and Consent to Participate

This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Kangda College of Nanjing Medical University (2022-01) and all participants signed informed consent.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank all the participants, assistants, and researchers for their contribution to this study.

Disclosure

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant numbers 72274023), Social Science Project of the Ministry of Education of China (Grant Numbers 22YJA890037), Fujian Provincial Department of Education 2021 Young and Middle-Aged Teachers Education Research Project (Grant Numbers JAS 21710) The sponsors of the project had no role in the study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, and writing the manuscript.