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. 2020 Oct 21;20(1):1583.
doi: 10.1186/s12889-020-09677-3.

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

Ruili Li  1 , Qiguo Lian  2 , Qiru Su  3 , Luhai Li  4 , Meixian Xie  4 , Jun Hu  5
Affiliations

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

Ruili Li et al. BMC Public Health. .

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.

Keywords: School bullying; Sex disparities; Trends.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
School bullying victimization trends by sex groups: YRBS 2011–2019
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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