Multiple Faces of Victimization in School: Exploratory Factor Analysis and Latent Class Analysis of Student Reports of Victimization

Background and Purpose: Bullying and school violence victimization and perpetration have major negative impact on students and schools. There are multiple types of student victimization. For social workers and other school professional who design prevention and intervention policies and practices it is important to understand (a) whether there are interrelationships among these diverse behaviors and (b) whether there are distinct groups of students who share similar victimization profiles.    

Methods: Data was the Israeli 2013 National Monitoring of School Violence database. The sample included 474 schools (of the 476 planned), and 24,243 students (85% response rate). The instrument was a modified student self-report School Victimization Scale (SVS) developed by Furlong and associates and used extensively in previous studies. We conducted exploratory factor analysis followed by confirmatory analyses. We further used Latent Class Analyses (LCA) to identify distinct student profile

Results: Exploratory factor analyses and follow up validation identified four content-based domains: Verbal; Indirect-Social; Threat; Physical; Sexual; Cyber.  LCA identified four distinct student profiles, the largest group (91.3%) were students who experienced very little victimization and the smallest group were of students who experienced all these types of victimization (1.3%). Another group (2.7%) sample) was high on indirect-social and cyber.

Conclusions and Implications: The series of victimization types form four content-based factors, Each of these categories seems to address a different set of experiences in school. This is important for school social workers as victimization to each of these types may be related to different student subjective perceptions in school (e.g., safety), and perhaps have different short- and long term consequences. They may also respond differently to interventions. Nonetheless, it is important to point out that the various classes of victimization are strongly associated. This make some of the attempts to address the unique features of each type of victimization less effective.

Two of the profiles represent extreme group- one, consisting of most of the students in school, experience very low levels of victimization (except for some verbal types) and the other, very small group, experiences high levels of victimization, in almost all classes of victimization. A possible implication is the need to employ both a whole school approach to prevent violence among the whole student body in order to keep levels of victimization low, and a more targeted approach to focus on a small group that is victimized by a range of behaviors.

The characteristics of the highly victimized group of students seem to indicate that this is also the group that perpetrates violence and victimizes others. A series of studies show that this 'bully-victim' group may be the most vulnerable among students, showing the worse outcomes.  Students in this group are also is also more prone to be involved with weapons and gangs, as well as expressing more suicidal ideation. This small group may require a targeted approach.