Impact of Bullying in Childhood on Adult Health, Wealth, Crime and Social Outcomes

By Dieter Wolke, William E. Copeland, A. Angold, E. Costello. Psychology Science, 2013

662 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Bullying is a serious problem for schools, parents, and public-policymakers alike. Bullying creates risks of health and social problems in childhood, but it is unclear if such risks extend into adulthood. A large cohort of children was assessed for bullying involvement in childhood and then followed up in young adulthood in an assessment of health, risky or illegal behavior, wealth, and social relationships. Victims of childhood bullying, including those that bullied others (bully-victims), were at increased risk of poor health, wealth, and social-relationship outcomes in adulthood even after we controlled for family hardship and childhood psychiatric disorders. In contrast, pure bullies were not at increased risk of poor outcomes in adulthood once other family and childhood risk factors were taken into account. Being bullied is not a harmless rite of passage but throws a long shadow over affected people’s lives. Interventions in childhood are likely to reduce long-term health and social costs.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Safety Research, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/09663fa9699b7f882f4d30f21b77ddc44003412a

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Citations in the corpus

Adult health outcomes of childhood bullying victimization: evidence from a five-decade longitudinal British birth cohort. (2014, positive): “Findings from the Great Smoky Mountains Study demonstrated that childhood bullying victimization was associated with variations in health, wealth, and social relationships at age 25 (34).”
Latent Class Analysis: A Guide to Best Practice (2020, background): “The assumption underlying LCA is that membership in unobserved classes can cause or explain patterns of scores across survey questions, assessment indicators, or scales (B. O. Muthén & Muthén, 2000; Wolke et al., 2013).”
Comparing children's experiences of schools-based bullying across countries (2017, background): “Wolke et al. (2013) found that, in a longitudinal study in the US, adults who had been bullied as children had increased likelihood of poor health, economic and relationships outcomes, controlling for a range of other factors.”
So you want to study bullying? Recommendations to enhance the validity, transparency, and compatibility of bullying research (2017, background): “individuals who are both bullies and victims? Research shows that unlike the adaptive benefits associated with “pure” bullies (who represent about 80-90% of bullies), bully-victims (10-20% of bullies) are more likely to report lower popularity, lower social competence, and greater physical and menta”
Long-term effects of bullying (2013, background): “57 The ﬁ ndings from prospective child, adolescent and adult outcome studies are summarised in ﬁ gure 1.”
The Economic Value of Social and Emotional Learning (2015, positive): “Although there was no overall program impact, when results are limited to strong implementation of Responsive Classroom, there was an effect size gain by 5 grade of 0.26 in math and 0.3 in reading (Rimm-Kaufman, 2014, Table 5). These fidelity-determined results are applied here under the justificati”