earticle

영어

The aims of this study are to investigate the impact of the experience of exposure to domestic violence(witnessed interparental conjugal violence and child abuse) on mental health among college students, and to explore whether social support acts as a moderator between domestic violence and mental health. Through this process, I intended to provide a reference base to suggest substantial interventions for family welfare by helping students to overcome negative domestic violence exposure experiences and adapt as healthy members of society. To achieve this goal, the study established a conceptual framework by considering the mental health of adolescents with domestic-violence exposure experience as a dependent variable, domestic violence exposure experience (witnessed interparental conjugal violence and child abuse) as an independent variable, and social support as a moderator of the relationship between these two variables. The subjects composed 747 college students in 8 colleges in Seoul. The main summary of this study is as follows: First, according to the analysis of domestic-violence exposure experience, all the subjects of this study had substantial experience of violence at home and witnessed interparental conjugal violence. These students scored 3.83 points in social support, higher than the median of 3, implying that these students had a higher awareness of social support. Moreover, their mental health score was 3.50 points, which is higher than the median of 3, indicating a somewhat positive tendency toward mental health. Second, to explore the moderating effects of social support between child violence experience and mental health, gender, age, financial status, academic-performance, child abuse and social support were input in the first step, and then buffering effects were examined by entering an interaction term to the first step in the second step. There was a significant interaction between social support and mental health. Therefore, social support was identified as having moderating effects on the relationship between child violence and mental health. Third, the analysis of moderating effects of social support between witnessed interparental conjugal violence and mental health revealed that social support had a positive influence on mental health in the first step. By contrast, the interaction term of witnessed interparental conjugal violence and social support showed no significance, indicating no moderating effect of social support in the second step. To sum up , social support served as a moderator for mental health among college students with child abuse experience, but had no moderating effect on witnessed interparental conjugal violence experience.