4P
SES Representation, Bullying, and Victimization Among South Korean Youth
Prior research has found that socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods, characterized as geographic regions that have a large proportion of low-educated families, is associated with poor youth wellbeing (i.e., absolute resource hypothesis). Not only are overall neighborhood characteristics predictive of youth outcomes, but the degree of representation of youth from similar socioeconomic family backgrounds within the neighborhood context may equally be important, as the size of a social group may be a crucial element for determining their position in the social hierarchy (i.e., relative representation hypothesis). In this sense, disadvantage may be a relative concept that changes with the size of representation or composition of the social group, and is not limited to being an absolute term that is measured by structural socioeconomic resources. The proposed study examines the role of representation of the social group within the neighborhood context to explain patterns of bullying in South Korea, a country with rapidly increasing socioeconomic disparities across neighborhoods.
Methods
Analysis was based on wave 1 (2003) of the Korea Youth Panel Study (N=3,449), a nationally representative, longitudinal study of adolescents in their second year of middle school (14-15 year-olds). This individual-level data was matched with neighborhood-level data that was interpolated from the Korean Population Census (years 2000 and 2005). The dependent variables were a dichotomous measure of bullying, as well as the frequency of bullying in the past year. The independent variables were proportion of families in the neighborhood with same parental education (a.k.a., representation), percentage of highly educated families in the neighborhood (a.k.a., resource), and parental education. Control variables were family income, family structure, parental monitoring, friend's engagement in bulling activities, youth’s level of aggression and gender. Logistic regression was used to predict the probability of bullying. Negative binomial regression was used to predict the frequency of bullying among those who have already experienced it.
Results
In accordance with the representation hypothesis, greater educational representation in a young person's neighborhood predicted greater involvement in bullying incidents among those who have already experienced it. Parental education was a significant predictor of the probability of bullying, but not the frequency of bullying. Contrary to the resource hypothesis, neighborhood resource, as measured by the proportion of highly educated families in the neighborhood, was not associated with bullying behavior.
Implications
Although some prior literature has indicated the advantage of living in affluent neighborhoods for adolescents, results of this study did not support the resource hypothesis in understanding youth bullying behavior. Rather, the size of one’s social group played a significant role in predicting youth wellbeing—youth residing in neighborhoods with greater representation of same social status peers were expected to engage in greater frequency of bulling activities against other youth. Findings suggest that to better understand the needs of disadvantaged youth, social workers ought to consider youth relative social position in regards to their social context, in addition to their absolute characteristics.