The societal context of school-based bullying victimization

Periodical
Journal of School Violence
Volume
22
Year
2023
Issue number
1
Relates to study/studies
PISA 2018

The societal context of school-based bullying victimization

An application of institutional anomie theory in a cross-national sample

Abstract

The present study examines cross-national variation in school-based bullying victimization. Specifically, we address whether decommodification, a concept implicated in Institutional Anomie Theory that measures the degree of a society's social welfare protection, is a protective factor against school-based bullying victimization. To test this theory, we retrieve data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) questionnaire and combine this data with other sources capturing cross-national factors hypothesized to impact bullying victimization. The sample consists of 286,871 adolescents (with an average age of 15 years) attending 14,192 schools nested within 55 high-and-middle-income countries. We estimate multilevel regression models with three levels of analysis (student, school, and country), finding that countries with a greater degree of decommodification have lower rates of school-based bullying. Overall, our findings illustrate that the national level of social welfare protection, which had been previously neglected in this research literature, is a robust predictor of bullying victimization.