The mediating role of motivation to defend in the relationships between empathy and defending behaviors among Thai secondary school students: a multi-group analysis

Abstract

School bullying has been a spreading and a growing concern of students’ well-being. A student bystander with defending behaviors may be a key player to stop bullying and changing school climate. The present study was to explore the linkages of empathy, motivations to defend with defending behaviors in school bullying incidents among Thai secondary school students. The participants were 1,138 students in Mathayom II and Mathayom III (43.9% boy and 56.1% girl), aged 12 to 15 years (M = 13.83, SD = .66) who had online communication tools and completed the online questionnaire. Mediation analysis and multigroup analysis with structural equation modeling (SEM) were conducted to investigate the relationships among the study variables by using Mplus 8.2. The research findings displayed that empathy had a significant positive association with autonomous motivation and introjected motivation to defend, and a significant negative association with extrinsic motivation to defend. Empathy also had an indirect effect on direct defending and indirect defending via extrinsic motivation and introjected motivation to defend, while the mediating effect of autonomous motivation to defend was insignificant. As Thai students may have less autonomy supportiveness regarding the cultural context, their thoughts and behaviors could be influenced by that environment. The findings also found that there was no significant direct effect of empathy on two subtypes of defending. Furthermore, the moderating effect of gender and students' perception of school anti-bullying policy were found. Additionally, defending self-efficacy was found to be associated with defending behaviors. This study suggests that peer pressure and external incentives can increase the likelihood of defending behaviors to peer witnesses among Thai students. However, future research is needed to place particular attention to autonomous motivation in young adolescents which could ultimately encourage defending behaviors, instead of external contingencies as well as empathic feeling should be focused more, with other factors (e.g., interpersonal factor and contextual factor).