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. 2017 Jul 11;17(1):160.
doi: 10.1186/s12887-017-0907-8.

The role of family and school-level factors in bullying and cyberbullying: a cross-sectional study

Leonardo Bevilacqua  1   2 , Nichola Shackleton  3 , Daniel Hale  4 , Elizabeth Allen  5 , Lyndal Bond  6 , Deborah Christie  7 , Diana Elbourne  8 , Natasha Fitzgerald-Yau  4 , Adam Fletcher  9 , Rebecca Jones  8 , Alec Miners  10 , Stephen Scott  11 , Meg Wiggins  12 , Chris Bonell  13 , Russell M Viner  4
Affiliations

The role of family and school-level factors in bullying and cyberbullying: a cross-sectional study

Leonardo Bevilacqua et al. BMC Pediatr. .

Abstract

Background: Bullying and cyberbullying are common phenomena in schools. These negative behaviours can have a significant impact on the health and particularly mental health of those involved in such behaviours, both as victims and as bullies. This UK study aims to investigate student-level and school-level characteristics of those who become involved in bullying and cyberbullying behaviours as victims or perpetrators.

Methods: We used data from 6667 Year 7 students from the baseline survey of a cluster randomized trial in 40 English schools to investigate the associations between individual-level and school-level variables with bullying victimization, cyberbullying perpetration, and cyberbullying victimization. We ran multilevel models to examine associations of bullying outcomes with individual-level variables and school-level variables.

Results: In multilevel models, at the school level, school type and school quality measures were associated with bullying risk: students in voluntary-aided schools were less likely to report bullying victimization (0.6 (0.4, 0.9) p = 0.008), and those in community (3.9 (1.5, 10.5) p = 0.007) and foundation (4.0 (1.6, 9.9) p = 0.003) schools were more likely to report being perpetrators of cyberbullying than students in mainstream academies. A school quality rating of "Good" was associated with greater reported bullying victimization (1.3 (1.02, 1.5) p = 0.03) compared to ratings of "Outstanding."

Conclusions: Bullying victimization and cyberbullying prevalence vary across school type and school quality, supporting the hypothesis that organisational/management factors within the school may have an impact on students' behaviour. These findings will inform future longitudinal research investigating which school factors and processes promote or prevent bullying and cyberbullying behaviours.

Trial registration: Trial ID: ISRCTN10751359 Registered: 11/03/2014 (retrospectively registered).

Keywords: Cyberbullying; Gatehouse bullying scale; Multi-level models; School-level variables; Student-level variables.

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Conflict of interest statement

Ethics approval and consent to participate

The study, including means of consent used, has been approved by the Institute of Education Research Ethics Committee (18/11/13 ref. FCL 566) and the University College London Research Ethics Committee (30/1/14, Project ID: 5248/001). All pupils signed a consent form before providing the data (please note that as pupils were under the age of 16, this in essence constitutes providing assent). Parents of all study participants were informed about the study in advance from the schools (via either email or hard copy) through a one-page parent information sheet. This was sent to schools by the research team well in advance and briefly described the study, the data collection procedure, and highlighted that the data would be kept confidential. Parents were not required to provide consent but could contact the research team if they did not want their pupils to take part in the study (passive consent). As agreed with the ethics committee given this was an opt-out consent, we did not assess whether parents had received the information.

Consent for publication

“Not applicable”.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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