Victimization and Bullying in Taiwan

Abstract

The present study, conducted in Taiwan, sought to link some elementary and middle school students’ bullying to factors in their social status, social support, direct and indirect bullying victimization, and positive and negative affect. We obtained the secondary dataset from the Survey Research Data Archive, Academia Sinica. Survey data were collected during 2012 from students in grades 5, 7, 8, and 9; of 853 students who filled out the questionnaire, 711 were included in our study’s final sample. Our study found a strong relationship between bullying victimization and bullying perpetration. Therefore, intervention programs seeking to interrupt the implied cycle of bullying could boost their effectiveness by focusing on school children’s capacity to feel empathy for victims of bullying and by developing ways to reduce children’s vengeful feelings toward bullies.