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Schedule:
Friday, January 17, 2025
Jefferson B, Level 4 (Sheraton Grand Seattle)
* noted as presenting author
Background and Purpose: Youth’s bullying involvement in any role (e.g., victim, bully, or bully-victim) is significantly associated with a wide range of negative outcomes. From a developmental perspective, late elementary school years are a critical period for bullying prevention and intervention since students typically start to experience maturational and contextual changes that may contribute to their increased likelihood of bullying involvement. Despite this importance, there is a dearth of empirical studies examining the longitudinal trajectories of bullying involvement among this population and how their experiences may differ by their individual- and school-level characteristics. Employing a social-ecological framework, I aim to explore two research questions (RQs): (1) What are the trajectories of bullying perpetration (BP) and bullying victimization (BV) among students in late elementary school years? (2) Which individual- and school-level factors are significantly associated with these trajectories?
Methods: I used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11. This study recruited a nationally representative sample of kindergartners in the United States and followed them for six years. I primarily used data from the last three waves (Spring 2014 to 2016), when most students attended schools as being in Grades 3 to 5. The final analytic sample included 8877 students from 1792 schools. BV (child-report) and BP (teacher-report) were assessed as the mean score of the responses to four items measuring the frequency of four types of BV or BP during the school year (never to very often; 0 to 4). Information about individual-level factors (gender, race/ethnicity, household poverty, externalizing and internalizing behaviors, disability status) and school-level factors (school size and location, school-level poverty and disorder) was obtained in Spring 2014 or earlier from parents, teachers, school administrators, and/or administrative records. To identify distinct trajectories of bullying involvement (RQ1), latent profile analysis of repeated measures was used. To investigate individual- and school-level predictors (RQ2), Vermunt’s three-step method was used.
Results: Four distinct trajectories of bullying involvement emerged: (1) high stable BV & BP (4% of the sample); (2) moderate BV & increasing BP (10%); (3) moderate BV & decreasing BP (11%); and (4) low stable BV & BP (75%). Compared to the odds of having a low stable BV & BP trajectory, the odds of having other types of trajectories (i.e., trajectories #1, #2, and #3) estimated to be consistently higher for students who are male, black, living in a low-income household, or showing higher levels of externalizing behaviors, holding other factors constant. In addition, the adjusted odds of having a high stable BV & BP trajectory estimated to be higher for disabled students and students attending a school in a low-income neighborhood.
Conclusions and Implications: No trajectory types represented a BP-only group, suggesting that BP may co-occur with BV among late elementary school students. Further research is needed to delve into the joint development of BP and BV in this developmental period. Additionally, more research is needed to investigate the process through which students’ bullying involvement experiences were shaped by the abovementioned individual- and school-level characteristics.
Methods: I used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11. This study recruited a nationally representative sample of kindergartners in the United States and followed them for six years. I primarily used data from the last three waves (Spring 2014 to 2016), when most students attended schools as being in Grades 3 to 5. The final analytic sample included 8877 students from 1792 schools. BV (child-report) and BP (teacher-report) were assessed as the mean score of the responses to four items measuring the frequency of four types of BV or BP during the school year (never to very often; 0 to 4). Information about individual-level factors (gender, race/ethnicity, household poverty, externalizing and internalizing behaviors, disability status) and school-level factors (school size and location, school-level poverty and disorder) was obtained in Spring 2014 or earlier from parents, teachers, school administrators, and/or administrative records. To identify distinct trajectories of bullying involvement (RQ1), latent profile analysis of repeated measures was used. To investigate individual- and school-level predictors (RQ2), Vermunt’s three-step method was used.
Results: Four distinct trajectories of bullying involvement emerged: (1) high stable BV & BP (4% of the sample); (2) moderate BV & increasing BP (10%); (3) moderate BV & decreasing BP (11%); and (4) low stable BV & BP (75%). Compared to the odds of having a low stable BV & BP trajectory, the odds of having other types of trajectories (i.e., trajectories #1, #2, and #3) estimated to be consistently higher for students who are male, black, living in a low-income household, or showing higher levels of externalizing behaviors, holding other factors constant. In addition, the adjusted odds of having a high stable BV & BP trajectory estimated to be higher for disabled students and students attending a school in a low-income neighborhood.
Conclusions and Implications: No trajectory types represented a BP-only group, suggesting that BP may co-occur with BV among late elementary school students. Further research is needed to delve into the joint development of BP and BV in this developmental period. Additionally, more research is needed to investigate the process through which students’ bullying involvement experiences were shaped by the abovementioned individual- and school-level characteristics.