어머니의 양육행동이 남녀 아동의 또래괴롭힘 방어 및 방관행동에 미치는 영향

The Effects of Mother’s Parenting Behaviors on Defender and Outsider Behaviors of Children: Focusing on the Mediation Effects of Empathy in Children

The present study tested the mediation effects of children s empathy in the relationship between mothers parenting behaviors and the defender and outsider behaviors in bullying situations. Participants were 284 fifth and sixth graders attending four elementary schools located in Seoul and Gyeonggi-do, Korea. Descriptive statistics, Pearson s correlation, path analysis, and bootstrapping were employed in the analysis. The main results were as follows: First, the cognitive and affective empathy differed as a function of gender in children. Second, the mediation effect of the empathy were found to be significant only for boys. As for the defender behavior, significant parallel mediation-effects were observed for both types of empathy. However, for the outsider behavior, only the partial mediation effect of the affective empathy was found to be significant. The findings would provide fundamental information on which preventive and interventional measures are built in the attempt to reduce school-bullying in Korea.