Sports Participation and School Victimization: The Mediating Role of Social Relationship Quality Among Chinese Adolescents

Background/Purpose: School victimization is a global public health concern associated with a range of negative health and psychosocial outcomes. While some theories propose that sports participation may reduce adolescents’ risk of victimization, empirical findings remain inconsistent. This has led to explorations of potential psychosocial mediating mechanisms, such as the quality of social relationships. Although a prior model has explored this mediating pathway to bullying perpetration, it is unclear whether the same applies to victimization.

This study aims to examine the indirect pathways from sports participation to school victimization as mediated through adolescents’ social relationship quality. Also, this study tested whether there exist sex differences in these interrelationships. Moreover, it explored whether theoretical models developed for bullying perpetration were equally applicable to understanding school victimization.

Methods:

Data and measurement: This study utilized data from OECD’s 2019 Study on Social and Emotional Skills and included 7,194 Chinese samples. Sports participation, the quality of social relationships with parents, peers, and parents, and school victimization are all based on students’ self-reported data.

Analysis plan: Structural equation modeling (SEM) was performed in AMOS 26.0 to assess the relationships among sports participation, social relationship quality, and school victimization. Then, a multiple-group comparison SEM analysis was applied to test the potential sex differences in the associations between sports participation, social relationship quality, and school victimization.

Results: The results showed that participation in sports activity is not directly associated with school victimization. However, sports participation could indirectly influence school victimization through its effect on social relationship quality. Peer relationship quality exerts a stronger mediating effect on the link between sports participation and school victimization compared to parent-child and teacher-student relationship quality. The proposed model applies to both boys and girls, as the interrelationships between sports participation, social relationship quality, and school victimization were largely consistent across sex groups.

Implications: These findings support the propositions of previous theories and perspectives, which suggest that participation in sports can reduce school victimization through the enhancement of social relationship quality. They also support the assumptions of the heuristic model of school violence, which posits that school victimization is predominantly shaped by within-school factors, such as peer relationship quality. Furthermore, the results extend the applicability of the sports-bullying perpetration theoretical framework to the context of school victimization.

These findings underscore the importance of fostering students’ social relationship quality in reducing school victimization. School social workers and educators may consider implementing social-emotional learning programs that equip students with essential interpersonal skills, thereby enhancing their ability to build and maintain positive social relationships and reducing their vulnerability to victimization. Moreover, intervention programs aimed at reducing school victimization could benefit from encouraging students’ active engagement in sports activities. Schools could implement structured recreational activities such as playground games, dance, and other cooperative exercises before the start of the school day. Finally, the interrelationships between the study variables were consistent for boys and girls, suggesting that potential interventions and policies on enhancing social relationship quality and reducing school victimization could be equally effective for both sexes.