An Exploration of Effects of Bullying Victimization From a Complete Mental Health Perspective

Abstract

This study explored the effects of being bullied from a dual-factor lens, specifically examining the relation between victimization and constructs that contribute to social-emotional well-being. Prior to carrying out the main analyses, the factor structure of self-report items related to experiencing bullying and harassment from the California Healthy Kids Survey, which was administered to more than 14,000 high school students, was examined to establish that these items represent an overall factor: students’ experience of victimization. This factor was then used as an independent variable in a series of planned comparisons with a dependent variable represented by constructs addressed by the Social Emotional Health Survey–Secondary: belief-in-self, emotional competence, belief-in-others, and engaged living. With increased frequency of victimization, suicidality increased and belief-in-others decreased. For other constructs, belief-in-self, engaged living, and depression, there were significant differences found between individuals who had experienced frequencies of bullying as low as less than once a month and those who did not experience bullying at all but no further detrimental impacts were seen with even higher frequencies of victimization, indicating that being victimized at all is significantly worse than not being victimized for these variables. Implications and future directions for research are explored.

Resilience in the face of peer victimisation and discrimination: The who, when and why in five patterns of adjustment

“…Fullchange and Furlong (2016) classified participants into three levels of experienced peer victimisation -none, some and frequent -and reported that even if high school students were only occasionally targets of aggressions, they manifested The results here reveal that the most salient associations -per the observed effect size -are related to gender and course type attended in high school. Concerning gender, as previously stated, it is believed that the associations and consequential differences observed within the clusters are due to the gender gap observed within the internalising and externalising behaviours of adolescents (Gentile et al, 2009;Hanish & Guerra, 2002;Rutter et al, 2003).…”

Refining victims’ self‐reports on bullying: Assessing frequency, intensity, power imbalance, and goal‐directedness

“…The frequency of monthly (“two or three times a month”) victimization seems a valid lower cutoff point for classifying children as victims, because this distinguishes victims from non‐victims in levels of higher psychosocial maladjustment (Solberg & Olweus, ). Frequent victimization has been related to lower social support and well‐being (e.g., Fullchange & Furlong, ; Solberg & Olweus, ; Ybarra, Espelage, & Mitchell, ).…”

Association Among Internal Assets, Bullying, and Emotional Distress in Eighth Grade Students

“…All five bullying involvement questions had five response options (eg, never, once or twice, about once a week, several times a week, every day). Consistent with research demonstrating elevated risk among youth reporting bullying involvement once or twice in the past 30 days and the effects of even infrequent bullying victimization on mental health and well‐being, we dichotomized each bullying involvement scale to compare ever being involved in each form of bullying versus never involved in that form in the past 30 days.…”

“…Bullying involvement has been specifically linked to depression, suicidal ideation, 12,[15][16][17] and internalizing and externalizing problems. 18,19 Bullying has detrimental impacts on psychosocial 20 and emotional-well-being, 21 as well as being associated with the deterioration of social-emotional health, 12,22 among myriad other negative health and academic outcomes in adolescence.…”