Authoritarian Parenting and Physical Bullying: The Mediation Effect of Aggression Attitudes and the Dual Moderation Effects of Low Self-Control and Teacher Support

Physical bullying is considered one of the most harmful forms of school bullying, posing a greater threat to individuals' physical and psychological well-being, educational achievement, and healthy development. However, most existing literature treats school bullying as a whole, neglecting to examine the specific mechanisms to understand physical bullying. The bioecological model, which explores the interaction effects between individual features and ecological systems on individuals' social behaviors, provides an appropriate theoretical framework to explain physical bullying. In the bioecological model, individuals' aggressive attitudes, low self-control, authoritarian family parenting, and teacher apathy have been found to be significant predictors of school bullying. Based on this theoretical framework, the current study built a dual moderated mediation model, providing a systematic understanding of physical bullying and offering evidence-based implications for bullying prevention and intervention programs. Moreover, the study introduced a novel method of moderation analysis, the Polynomial Curved Surface Fitting (PCSF) approach, which can visualize models with dual moderation effects in 3D space. The Revised Bully/Victim Questionnaire, Short Version of Parental Authority Questionnaire, Aggression Attitudes Scale in Authoritative School Climate Survey, Low Self-Control Scale, and Teacher Apathy Scale were used to assess physical bullying, authoritarian parenting, low self-control, and teacher apathy. The cluster sampling method was adopted to recruit 6638 students from a vocational high school in Shandong Province. A total of 5806 individuals (Mage = 15.75 ± 0.81, 34.7% females) finally participated in this research, resulting in a response rate of 87.5%. Mediation analysis was conducted using SEM with 5000 draw BC Bootstrap. The significance of moderation effects was tested using multivariate linear regression. For single-moderation analysis, the Johnson-Neyman analysis was adopted. The PCSF approach was used to analyze the dual moderated mediation effect. The results show that authoritarian parenting can directly predict physical bullying. Mediation analysis suggests that individuals' aggression attitudes significantly mediate the relationship between authoritarian parenting and physical bullying. Moderation analysis reveals that individuals' low self-control significantly moderates the impact of authoritarian parenting on aggression attitudes, with a higher level of low self-control leading to a greater positive effect of authoritarian parenting on aggression attitudes. Additionally, teacher apathy significantly moderates the effects of authoritarian parenting and aggression attitudes on physical bullying, with a higher level of teacher apathy contributing to greater positive effects of authoritarian parenting and aggression attitudes on physical bullying. Moreover, low self-control and teacher apathy significantly moderate the indirect effect of authoritarian parenting on physical bullying, with higher levels of low self-control and teacher apathy leading to greater levels of the mediation effect. The mediation effect increases nonlinearly under the dual moderation effects of low self-control and teacher apathy. The current study not only provides theoretical and practical contributions to understanding physical bullying, but also introduces the PCSF analysis for the models with dual moderation effects. The findings suggest that individual, family, and school domains can interactively predict physical bullying. Family’s authoritarian parenting is the primary predictor, which can directly predict physical bullying even after controlling the mediation effect of individuals’ aggression attitudes. The risk factors of individual characteristics (e.g., low self-control) and school settings (e.g., teacher apathy) can amplify the mediation effect, showing a nonlinear growth tendency. From a practical perspective, reducing individuals' aggression attitudes and authoritarian parenting while improving individuals' self-control skills and teachers' classroom management skills may effectively reduce physical bullying. From a methodological perspective, the introduction of the PCSF approach has overcome the technical limitations of the Johnson-Neyman approach, providing researchers with opportunities to investigate complicated models with dual moderation effects.