How aggression-related mindsets explain SES-differences in bullying behavior

Abstract

Previous research suggests that lower socioeconomic status (SES) adolescents bully more than their higher-SES peers. This paper tests whether aggression-related mindsets, defined as mindsets that theoretically influence aggressive behavior, explain the relationship between SES and bullying engagement among adolescents. Using a large and diverse dataset of survey responses from secondary students in the U.S. (N = 146,044 students, 30% White, 70% students of color from 5 th-12 th grade), this study applies structural regression modeling with complex survey data analysis. Results suggest that differences in aggressionrelated mindsets, including feelings of academic efficacy, feelings of purpose, global self-esteem, academic-status insecurity, school-related anger, and school-related happiness account for almost half of the relationship between SES and bullying. Students' school-related anger is the strongest direct predictor of bullying (0.88 standard deviation), which suggests that strategies to reduce adolescent bullying are more effective if they teach anger-reducing skills or eliminate the root causes of students' school-related anger.

Understanding Classroom Bullying Climates: the Role of Student Body Composition, Relationships, and Teaching Quality

“…All three items were standardized and aggregated to the classroom level for the analysis. Construct validity of this index has been previously confirmed via the ML-CFA (Dietrich and Zimmermann 2019).…”

“…For example, there is an ongoing research debate on whether higher levels of violence in the American South compared with the American Northwhich concur with regional bullying trends that find more bullying in schools in the American South than schools in the American North (McCann 2018)-are due to cultural differences, or due to poverty and socioeconomic inequality (Lee et al 2007). However, these theories are not mutually exclusive and consistent with the fact that lower SES neighborhoods tend to have higher crime rates (Imran et al 2018) and that lower SES adolescents more strongly self-report aggression-and bullying-related mindsets, such as lower feelings of a sense of purpose and academic status insecurity (Dietrich and Zimmermann 2019).…”

“…Before inserted into the model, the items were aggregated to the classroom level. Internal validity has been previously confirmed via multilevel confirmatory factor analysis (ML-CFA) (Dietrich and Zimmermann 2019). Even though the bullying factor does not measure actual bullying behavior, which is practically impossible to establish on a very large scale, it is a valuable proxy that has been found to be a significant predictor of students' self-perceived victimization rates in schools (Dietrich and Ferguson 2019).…”

“…This link might be partially explained by the fact that many ethnic minority groups-such as Blacks and Latinos in the USA (Shapiro 2017) and many immigrant groups in Europe (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 2017b)-are socioeconomically worse-off than members of their countries' ethnic majority populations. In other words, students from ethnic minority groups may be more involved in bullying because they have-on average-lower SES family backgrounds than their ethnic majority peers, and lower family SES has been found to predict more bullying involvement (Dietrich and Zimmermann 2019;Tippett and Wolke 2014).…”

“…One possible explanation is that higher SES students are raised to be more competitive than lower SES students, which can in turn lead to more stress and aggression (Hamid and Shah 2016;Llorca et al 2017). Both emotions have been linked to more bullying behavior (Dietrich and Zimmermann 2019;Kampoli et al 2017). Another explanation is that there is a power imbalance between higher and lower SES students in peer groups, which provides higher SES students with more opportunities of relational bullying through the peer group.…”