Trends and sex disparities in school bullying victimization among U.S. youth, 2011–2019

Abstract

Background The prevalence of being bullied traditionally among U.S. high school students is expected to reduce to 17.9%, according to Healthy People 2020 Initiatives. We examined trends in traditional victimization and cybervictimization with the latest large-scale time-series data in the United States. Methods We analyzed the data from the 2011–2019 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) to access the trends in traditional victimization and cybervictimization among U.S. high school students. We identified the temporal trends using multivariate logistic regression analyses, accounting for survey design features of YRBS. Participants included 72,605 high school students. Results The overall prevalence of victimization was 19.74% for traditional bullying and 15.38% for cyberbullying, suggesting that cyberbullying is not a low frequent phenomenon. The prevalence of victimization ranged from 20.19 to 19.04% for traditional victimization and 16.23 to 14.77% for cybervictimization, and the declined trends for the two kinds of bullying victimization were both statistically non-significant. The degree of overlap between the two kinds of bullying victimization was about 60%. Besides, female students reported more traditional victimization and cybervictimization than male peers within each survey cycle. Conclusions No declined trends in traditional victimization and cybervictimization were observed during 2011–2019. Female students are more likely to experience school bullying. To achieve the Healthy People 2020 goal on bullying, more work is needed to explore the underlying reasons behind these unchanging trends.

Temporal Trends in Suicidal Ideation and Attempts Among US Adolescents by Sex and Race/Ethnicity, 1991-2019

“… 21 , 22 , 53 , 56 Increasing suicidal ideation among female youths after 2007 calls for the need for suicide interventions addressing female-specific risks, particularly given their greater vulnerability to school bullying, cyberbullying, and peer victimization than male adolescents. 11 , 57 , 58 , 59 Our results lend support to previous studies 35 , 60 suggesting the need to consider both individual stress-diathesis risks and societal-contextual factors at large.…”

“…Adolescents in recent decades are experiencing rapid change in technology with behavioral consequences (eg, disrupted sleep, increased obesity) and evolving cultural norms associated with mental health discourse (eg, more suicide-related lyrics in popular rap music) . Increasing suicidal ideation among female youths after 2007 calls for the need for suicide interventions addressing female-specific risks, particularly given their greater vulnerability to school bullying, cyberbullying, and peer victimization than male adolescents . Our results lend support to previous studies suggesting the need to consider both individual stress-diathesis risks and societal-contextual factors at large.…”

A Trend Analysis of Adherence to the Muscle Strengthening Exercise Guidelines in US Adolescents

“…Survey year was used as a continuous variable to assess the linear trend, and quadratic terms of survey year were included to examine the quadratic trend. Only linear time variable was included in the logistic regression models to examine the linear trends, both linear and quadratic time variables were included when examining the quadratic trends [ 20 , 21 ]. Separate logistic regression models were also performed to explore associations between sociodemographic variables (sex, grade, race/ethnicity) and MSE guideline adherence, which generated a year-specific association.…”

A sociology of bullying: Placing youth aggression in social context

“…This line of thinking may suggest that by engaging explicitly with the interdisciplinary research on bullying, sociologists may add to what some might consider a moral panic about bullying (Barron & Lacombe, 2005). Some scholars and scholarship suggests that bullying may not even be on the rise, and that national rates of bullying have remained steady over the past decade (Li et al., 2020). We may instead just be seeing an inflation of the use of the term bullying to include behaviors that do not really fit the traditional definition of the word, but simply refer to disagreement or incivility (Pascoe, 2013) or, conversely, more serious forms of aggression like group‐based violence (Collins, 2011).…”