School Bullying Among US Adolescents: Physical, Verbal, Relational and Cyber

By Jing Wang, R. Iannotti, T. Nansel. Journal of Adolescent Health, 2009

2,050 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Purpose Four forms of school bullying behaviors among US adolescents and their association with socio-demographic characteristics, parental support and friends were examined. Methods Data were obtained from the Health Behavior in School-Aged Children (HBSC) 2005 Survey, a nationally-representative sample of grades 6 to 10 (N = 7182). The Olweus Bully/Victim Questionnaire was used to measure physical, verbal and relational forms of bullying. Two items were added using the same format to measure cyber bullying. For each form, four categories were created: bully, victim, bully-victim, and not involved. Multinomial logistic regressions were applied, with socio-demographic variables, parental support and number of friends as predictors. Results Prevalence rates of having bullied others or having been bullied at school for at least once in the last 2 months were 20.8% physically, 53.6% verbally, 51.4% socially or 13.6% electronically. Boys were more involved in physical or verbal bullying, while girls were more involved in relational bullying. Boys were more likely to be cyber bullies, while girls were more likely to be cyber victims. African-American adolescents were involved in more bullying (physical, verbal or cyber) but less victimization (verbal or relational). Higher parental support was associated with less involvement across all forms and classifications of bullying. Having more friends was associated with more bullying and less victimization for physical, verbal and relational forms, but was not associated with cyber bullying. Conclusions Parental support may protect adolescents from all four forms of bullying. Friends associate differentially with traditional and cyber bullying. Results indicate that cyber bullying has a distinct nature from traditional bullying.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Education, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4f15aed0a6e06d2d90208eb79c543ddbdfb1cad7

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Citations in the corpus

Bullying in the digital age: a critical review and meta-analysis of cyberbullying research among youth. (2014, background): “Similar findings were reported by Wang et al. (2009), who found an inverse relationship between levels of parental support and involvement in cyberbullying as a perpetrator.”
Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement and Their Associations With Indirect Bullying, Direct Bullying, and Pro-Aggressive Bystander Behavior (2020, background): “…boys engage more frequently in direct bullying, whereas girls tend to engage more frequently in indirect bullying (e.g., Crick & Grotpeter, 1995; J. Wang et al., 2009; see also Card, Stucky, Sawalani, & Little, 2008 for a meta-analysis), although it should be noted that the findings for indirect…”
Adolescent loneliness and social anxiety as predictors of bullying victimisation (2016, background): “These prevalence rates are consistent with reported rates in the uS (Wang et al., 2009) and Canada (Craig et al., 2009).”
A Meta-Analysis of School-Based Bullying Prevention Programs' Effects on Bystander Intervention Behavior (2012, background): “Reports from Europe to North America have indicated that anywhere from 1% to 50% of students had been bullied or victimized within the last 2 months (Wang et al., 2009).”
Preventing School Bullying: Should Schools Prioritize an Authoritative School Discipline Approach Over Security Measures? (2016, background): “We also found that males reported statistically significant higher rates of physical bullying victimization and lower rates of relational victimization, as compared to females, which is similar to previous work (Varjas et al., 2009; Wang et al., 2009).”