Inclusive school climate and bystander intervention in bullying: Empathic concern among Chinese college students

Bullying and cyberbullying continue to be a fact on digitally crowded Chinese campuses and mobilization of prosocial bystanders is of the urgent concern. It is a cross-sectional and quantitative research on the predictability of Inclusive school climate to predict Bystander intervention in Chinese college students through Empathic concern and the hypothesis that Bystander intervention self-efficacy enhances the climate -intervention relationship. The students at Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Wuhan, and Xi’an undergraduate universities (N = 386) were contacted face-to-face to gather the data. Inclusive school climate, empathic concern (Interpersonal Reactivity Index - Empathic Concern) and bystander intentions and behavior (modeled as second order Bystander intervention construct) and bystander intervention self-efficacy were measured by validated scales. SmartPLS was used to perform the analyses with the consistent PLS and 5,000 bootstrap resamples. There was high reliability and validity (loadings >=.70; CR>=.88; AVE>=.57; HTMT<=.85) in the measurement model. All hypotheses were supported by structural results: inclusive school climate to bystander intervention (β =.18, p <.001); inclusive school climate to empathic concern (β =.41, p <.001); empathic concern to bystander intervention (β =.32, p <.001); and significant indirect effect ( =.13, p <.001; partial mediation); and a positive interaction of inclusive school climate x bystander intervention self-efficacy on bystander intervention ( =.09, p = The insignificance of controls (gender, age, academic year, prior involvement) was observed. The originality of this study is that it focuses on the Chinese higher education and combines inclusivity, empathic concern, and efficacy into one moderate-mediation model, operationalizing bystander intervention as a second-order online-offline result. Findings tighten up climate-empathy-action nexus and provide a mobile model in boosting student defending in the tertiary campuses.