The Impact of School Connectedness and Peer Bullying on Profiles of Child Health and Wellbeing: The Interaction of Risk and Protective Factors

Background and Purpose: Multiple factors in a school setting may have an influence on child health and wellbeing. Risk factors (bullying) are expected to have negative consequences, whereas protective factors (school connectedness) are assumed to bolster positive ones. However, the interplay between risk and protective factors may be more complicated, leading to unexpected outcomes. Given the importance of the school for children, we examined the independent effects of school connectedness and peer bullying on a multidimensional conceptualization of child health and wellbeing. We then explored how the interaction between these two predominated school-related risk and protective factors impact child health and wellbeing.

Methods: Date were from 2,963 children drawn from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing survey, which is an ongoing longitudinal cohort study (Waldfogel et al., 2010). The outcome, child health and wellbeing, was generated using latent profile analysis based on multiple indicators of physical and psychosocial outcomes (Dow-Fleisner et al., 2018). The outcome variable consisted of five profiles: Thriving, Mother-child discrepant (MCD), Thriving physical–At-risk psychosocial (T/AR), At-risk physical–Struggling psychosocial (AR/S), and At-risk (AR). School connectedness was a mean scaled score (0-4) related to the degree of school inclusiveness, closeness, happiness, and safety. Peer bullying was mean scaled score (0-4) related to the frequency a child was picked on, hit, had things taken, or were excluded by peers. Multivariate models included the following covariates: child sex, maternal age, race/ethnicity, maternal education, parents material status, and family poverty-to-income ratio. Initial descriptive and bivariate analyses were conducted, followed by multinomial logistic regression analyses using connectedness, bullying, and an interaction term between the two to predict profile membership.

Results:  Overall, children reported high connectedness (M=3.09, SD=0.96) and low bullying (M=0.59, SD=0.76), with significant differences across profiles. The thriving profile had the highest connectedness (M=3.24, SD=0.90) and lowest bullying (M=0.40, SD=0.58) compared to all other profiles. Conversely, the AR profile showed the highest bullying (M=1.10, SD=1.05), yet not the lowest connectedness. Multinomial regressions revealed connectedness was associated with a decreased risk of poor health and wellbeing, whereas bullying was associated with an increased risk. The addition of an interaction term between connectedness and bullying revealed differential impacts by profile. High levels of bullying and connectedness were associated with an increased risk of being in the MCD (RRR=1.20, p=0.002), T/AR  (RRR=1.25, p=0.018), and the AR  (RRR=1.44, p=0.003) profiles as compared to the thriving profile, adjusting for covariates. The main effect of connectedness and bullying varied significantly across profile.

Conclusion and Implications: Findings revealed important information about the interplay of two school-related risk and protective factors. Independently, connectedness reduced the risk of poor health and wellbeing. However, those with high connectedness were more detrimentally impacted by bullying. This may be because those with greater school connectedness would experience more distress should bullying occur in that environment. Findings have practical implications in the development and implementation of anti-bullying school programming. Programs must simultaneous aim to reduce bullying and improve school connectedness, as focusing only on connectedness may have unintended negative results.