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