Do parental relations impact on involvement in bullying? A preliminary investigation into the relations between bullying and parental relations self-concept

Christine-Mizell (2003) proposes that one of the factors which attribute to low self-concept in children is the damaging interactions and poor relationships children have with their parents. Only recently has literature suggested that bullying may be linked to a child's perceived self-concept specifically in the domain of parental relations (Eden, 1999). The present study aims to enhance bullying research by: (a) providing an overall critical literature review of the area; (b) investigating the multidimensional nature of the bully/victim process and its core determinants (parental relations self-concept); and (c) providing further understanding of the mediating factors which influence the bully/target cycle. This study explores the relation of one multidimensional domain of self-concept (parental relations) and bullying using the Adolescent Peer Relations Instrument - Bully/Target (Parada, 2000) and the Self-Description Questionnaire II-Short (SDQII-S)(Marsh, Ellis, Parada, Richards, & Heubeck, 2005). Participants include student's from a co-educational secondary school (N = 106) from Years 7 (n = 35), 8 (n = 24), and 9 (n = 47). A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted on the data. Although the CFA resulted in a poorly fitting model due to the small sample size, correlations were noted among factors which revealed significant negative relations between involvement in bullying (in terms of bullying others and being bullied) and the parental self-concept factor. Future research would benefit with larger sample size to clarify the validity of these results.