On-campus bullying of 9th grade students and its impacts on health:An empirical analysis based on China education panel survey / 中国卫生政策研究

ABSTRACT

Objectives: To analyze the prevalence of bullying behavior among students of 9th grade across China in 2016 and to determine the impact of different types of bullying on students’physical and mental health. Methods:This paper adopted the China Education Panel Survey ( CEPS) conducted in 2016 using the sample design of PPS and cluster sampling. The survey population involved students of 9th grade and 8600 of them were respondents of the prepared questionnaire. Opting for the survey questionnaires to collect the basic information from the survey subjects, the study measured and compared the prevalence of physical, verbal, social and cyber bullying observed in 2016. Therefore, impacts of bullying on physical and mental/psychological health of students were respectively examined u-sing multiple OLS regression model and multi-factor sequential logit model. Results: The results of the survey found that during the past academic year, 49. 29% of students suffered verbal bullying, 37. 69% experienced social bull-ying followed by 18. 41% for those who caught physical bullying and finally 14. 08% were cyber bullied. The results of the multiple OLS regression analysis indicated that being bullied was a risk factor for students’ mental health, and social bullying was the most deleterious, followed by verbal bullying. The multi-factor sequential logit model results showed that the risk of illness was higher for students who were bullied than for those who were not bullied and verbal bullying was a notable health risk factor for physical health of students. Conclusions: Currently, verbal bullying is the most prevalent of the existing types of bullying in schools while new problems emerged with cyber bullying. Being bul-lied has a negative effect on both physical and mental health of students. The main risk factor for mental health is so-cial bullying and verbal bullying presents higher risks for physical health of students.