How Gender Moderates the Relationship between Bullying Victimization and Adolescents' Physical Health Status

Background/Purpose: A compelling body of literature has revealed the devastating consequences of bullying – a physical and/or psychological form of violence – for adolescents’ overall wellbeing. This impact remains evident after accounting for an adolescent’s demographic and socio-economic backgrounds and persists years after bullying victimization (Hager & Leadbeater, 2016). Existing research has extensively reported bullying victimization consequences for outcomes concerning mental health (Arseneault, 2017), risk behaviors (Montoro, 2016) and life qualities (Takizawa, 2014) among adolescents. However, limited investigation has focused on association between bullying victimization and its physical health consequences to adolescents. Using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) dataset, this paper examined the relationship between psychosocial variables and self-rated physical health among adolescents who are 14 and 15 years old.

Methods: The FFCSW is an ongoing, longitudinal, birth cohort study of children born to predominantly unmarried parents. This study draws on data from the 15th year follow-up which includes an adolescent’s self-rated health. The analytic sample consists of 3435 adolescents residing with their biological parent(s). Variables included were: 1. Self-rated health, measured by asking “in general, how is your health?” with 1=Poor to 5=Excellent; 2. Bullying, measured by a summed score of reported frequency of how often an adolescent was “picked on or said mean things to”, “hit by others”, “taken things away”, or “purposefully left out?” 3. Demographic and socio-economic variables (race, sex, parents’ education, family income) and 4. Other covariates: physical health (measured by number of diagnosed physical health conditions over the past 12 months), mental health (measured by the Teen Mental Health Scale), and school climate (measured by items from the Measures of Effective Teaching project). Multiple-predictor OLS regression models were estimated for an adolescent’s self-rated health with the aforementioned sets of variables/covariates. Exploratory analysis of demographic variables (race, sex) were tested as potential moderators.

Results: Most adolescents (n=2536, 75.45%) reported no history of bullying and 825 students reported bullying at least once in their lives. Adolescents who were not bullied reported significantly greater self-rated health than those who were bullied at least once in their lifetime (t(3359)=7.796, p<0.001), and the effect size was statistically significant, d=0.31, p<0.01. Bullying was significantly associated with lower score of adolescents’ self-rated health, b=-0.035, p<0.01, after controlling for adolescents’ demographic and socio-economic backgrounds, and their physical and mental health status. An adolescent’s gender (b=-0.204, p<0.001), physical condition (b=-0.099, p<0.01), mental health (b=-0.031, p<0.001) condition and school climate (b=0.022, p<0.001) were significantly associated with his/her self-rated health. Exploratory analysis revealed that gender moderated the relationship between bullying and self-rated health (bully*gender, b=-0.010, p<0.05). Fisher’s r-to-z transformation indicated that the relationship between bullying and self-rated health was significantly stronger among male than female adolescents, z=-2.16, p<0.05.

Implications: Findings provided empirical support for the adverse physical health consequences of bullying victimization, further highlighting the importance of bullying prevention, detection and intervention. The moderating effect of gender implies gender-specific understandings of and interventions for bullying and its consequences.