Elsevier

Journal of School Psychology

Volume 78, February 2020, Pages 115-132
Journal of School Psychology

Disability, poverty, and other risk factors associated with involvement in bullying behaviors

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsp.2020.01.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Using a stigma-based bullying framework, the current study investigated how (a) disability status was related to bullying-related behaviors when controlling for gender, grade level, and free or reduced lunch status; (b) gender, grade level, and free or reduced lunch status moderated the associations of disability status with bullying-related behaviors; and (c) classification in specific disability categories was associated with bullying-related behaviors with a sample of 10,483 students (47.8% female) in elementary, middle, and high school. School records data were collected on grade level, gender, free or reduced lunch price status, disability status, and disability category. Students completed the Bullying Participant Behaviors Questionnaire (BPBQ), rating five types of bully role behaviors (bullying behavior, assistant behavior, victimization, defending behavior, and outsider behavior). Findings indicated that having a disability was associated with increased victimization, assisting, and defending behavior. Furthermore, disability status interacted in meaningful ways with several demographic factors: (a) females with a disability reported more victimization and reported engaging in more outsider behaviors than females without a disability, (b) elementary students with a disability reported more assisting and less defending behaviors than those without a disability, (c) high school students with a disability reported less bullying and assisting behaviors and more defending behaviors than those without a disability, and (d) students with a disability from low socioeconomic backgrounds reported more bullying and outsider behaviors than students not from lower socioeconomic family backgrounds. When comparing students from specific disability categories to those with no disability, students with an emotional disability reported more assisting, victimization, and outsider behaviors; students with other health impairment reported more assisting, victimization, and defending; students with autism reported less defending and outsider behaviors; and students with a learning disability reported more defending behavior. Exploratory analyses of the effects of school-level factors found that school size (enrollment) was positively related to prevalence of assisting and outsider behavior. The percentage of low-income students in a school was positively associated with the extent of victimization and defending behaviors reported, but negatively associated with the extent of outsider behaviors reported.

Section snippets

Bullying and students with disabilities

One of the inherent problems in studying the topic of bullying and disability status is the relatively smaller number of students with low-incidence disabilities. As such, it is difficult to study multiple disability categories with reliable results. Previous research has circumvented this problem by either focusing on one disability profile, such as autism or learning disabilities (Baumeister, Storch, & Geffken, 2008; Cappadocia, Weiss, & Pepler, 2012; Fisher, Lough, Griffin, & Lane, 2017;

Additional risk factors in the bullying dynamic

Students who have disabilities are not defined solely by their disability or IEP status. When research examines only disability status without taking into account other key demographic characteristics, important elements may be missed. For example, socioeconomic inequality can be considered as a potential risk factor for increased involvement in the bullying situation, as students of low SES are at higher risk of victimization (Due et al., 2009; Fu, Land, & Lamb, 2013; Son et al., 2014). In

Current study

Although previous research has considered aspects of various bullying roles (Demaray et al., 2016; Espelage & Holt, 2001; Salmivalli, 1999), as well as bullying behavior in general involving students with a range of disabilities (Kowalski, Morgan, Drake-Lavelle, & Allison, 2016; Rose et al., 2009; Rose, Forber-Pratt, Espelage, & Aragon, 2013), we found little to no research examining how multiple demographic risk factors (e.g., grade level, gender, socioeconomic status, and disability status)

Participants

This study examined data collected from a district-wide evaluation at a suburban school district in Illinois. Data were collected from 10,483 students (47.8% female) in elementary, middle, and high school. Students in grades 4–12 were eligible to participate and approximately 86% of these students completed the study. The remaining 14% of students did not participate due to absence, lack of assent, or parental opt-out through passive consent procedures. Table 1 shows the distribution of

Research Question 1

To address Research Question 1, we carried out a set of generalized multilevel models, where students were clustered within schools and each ordinal BPBQ subscale was predicted by grade level, gender, free or reduced lunch status, and disability status. Table 5 shows the results for these models. As these effects indicate, after controlling for grade level, gender, and free or reduced lunch status, disability status was a statistically significant, positive predictor of assisting behavior (b

Discussion

Research suggests students with disabilities are vulnerable to peer victimization, being bullied at nearly double the rate of students without disabilities (Bear et al., 2015; Blake et al., 2012; Rose, Stormont, et al., 2015). Social stigmas regarding individuals with disabilities may influence the bullying rates among youth with disabilities (Earnshaw et al., 2018). Poverty, another stigmatizing factor, may also interact with disability in relation to bullying behaviors. Prior research has not

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