Abstract: Bullying victimization has been shown to negatively impact academic achievement. However, under certain circumstances, levels of academic achievement might also be a cause of bullying victimization. Previous research has shown that at least in Western countries, high school engagement is connoted by students as un-masculine. Therefore, high school engagement and achievement in school violate boys’, but not girls’, peer-group norm. This might put high-achieving boys at higher risk of bullying victimization as compared to high-achieving girls. The present study investigated boys’ and girls’ risk of bullying victimization, depending on different achievement levels. To this end, representative data of N = 3928 German fourth grade students were analyzed. Results showed that boys among the top-performers and also boys among the worst performers had a markedly higher risk of being bullied than girls showing the same achievement, whereas there were no such risk differences between genders in the average achievement groups. The relation between academic achievement and bullying victimization, features with regard to gender, and directions for future research are discussed.
Keywords: Bullying Peer victimization Academic achievement Gender differences Gender roles Elementary school
4 Discussion
Showing high engagement for school as a boy is against the peer-group norm
whereas doing so as a girl is not. Violating the peer-group norm, in turn, is
sanctioned by the classmates. As school engagement is an important determinant of
academic achievement, we investigated whether boys showing exceptionally high
academic achievement would be at higher risk of bullying victimization than girls
with exceptionally high academic achievement. We drew on representative data of
fourth graders from the combined TIMSS and PIRLS 2011 assessments conducted
in Germany.
4.1 General relation between academic achievement and bullying victimization
In accordance with previous research on the relation between academic achievement
and bullying victimization (e.g., Nakamoto and Schwartz 2010), we found that there
was a negative relation between both variables in general. The higher the level of
academic achievement, the lower was self-reported bullying victimization. Bullying
victimization was lowest in the profle with students exhibiting the highest achievement
level, which is in line with previous studies showing that high-performing or
gifted students in general are somewhat less often bullied than average students
(Estell et al. 2009; Peters and Bain 2011). This pattern is also in accordance with
studies investigating the social integration of gifted students (which, on average,
show markedly higher achievement than students with average ability; e.g., Rost
and Hanses 1997; Wirthwein et al. 2019). For example, gifted students in elementary
school age as well as in adolescence were found to be well-integrated into their
classes: They seemed to be even somewhat more popular among their classmates
and somewhat less rejected than students with average ability (e.g., Czeschlik and
Rost 1995; Rost 2009).
Whereas this is an encouraging result for high-performing and gifted students as
a whole, it is a worrying finding for low-performing students. It became apparent
that the frequency of victimization was alarming for students in the profles with
low achievement: A quarter of the Profle 1 students reported being bullied weekly,
and another 45% of these students reported being bullied once or twice a month.
Altogether, this makes well over two-thirds of these students being victimized to a
non-trivial extent. Of course, due to the cross-sectional nature of our data, we cannot draw any conclusions about the causal direction of this relation. Drawing on
previous research, it can be regarded as certain that bullying victimization impedes
academic achievement, probably through many diferent pathways (e.g., Buhs et al.
2006; Juvonen et al. 2000, 2011; Ladd et al. 1997, 2017; Schwartz et al. 2005).
However, there might additionally be an efect in the other direction. Very poor
achievement might also predispose students to being victimized by classmates. This
would accord with Olweus’ (1978) assumption that not only students with extremely
high, but also students with extremely low achievement might be at higher risk of
being bullied. This would also be in line with efects found in vocational contexts,
according to which not only high, but also low performers are victimized more
often than average performers (Jensen et al. 2014). Also the study by Ladd et al.
(2017) (see Sect. 1) might point in this direction, because most of the diferent profles of victimization trajectories in this study had difered in academic achievement
from the outset. If this causal direction should indeed prove true anti-bullying programs should pay greater attention to low performance as a risk factor for bullying
victimization.
4.2 Bullying victimization by academic achievement and gender
Although there was a clear negative relation between bullying victimization and academic achievement when considering the entire sample regardless of gender, taking
gender into consideration provided more nuanced results. Consistent with our main
hypothesis, we found that in the profle of students with extremely high achievement, boys had a markedly higher risk of being bullied than girls: Boys’ risk of
being bullied weekly was more than twice as large as girls’; and boys’ risk of being
bullied once or twice a month was increased by over 40% as compared with girls’.
Importantly, this was not the case in the profles in the middle of the achievement
spectrum, showing that this finding was specifc to the group of extreme high (and
low, see below) achievers. Although we cannot draw causal conclusions from this
finding either, it is at least consistent with the hypothesis that highly engaged and
therefore high-achieving boys (but not girls) violate the peer-group norm by showing high academic achievement and are therefore more prone to victimization than
girls engaging in, and excelling at, school. Importantly, as the students excelling
in one domain (e.g., reading) and the students excelling in the other domains (e.g.,
mathematics) were the same individuals, this finding did not difer across domains
stereotypically denoted as “male” or “female”.
Of course, one might argue that it might not be achievement (or engagement)
itself, which increases high-achieving boys’ risk of victimization. Instead, highachieving boys could show other, specifc behaviors or attitudes that increase their
risk. This would be consistent with the finding that gifted boys, but not so much
gifted girls, are seen by their teachers as being more maladjusted (Preckel et al.
2015), and maladjustment might easily make them victims of bullying (Eriksen
et al. 2014; Reijntjes et al. 2010, 2011; Schwartz et al. 1993). However, studies have
shown that those stereotypes do not match reality: Gifted students, whether they
may be boys or girls, do not show worse adjustment in any regard (e.g., Bergold
et al. 2015; Francis et al. 2016; Rost 2009). Therefore, this alternative explanation
appears unlikely.
Our finding has important practical implications: As a result of being bullied
because of their high engagement and achievement, boys might reduce their school
engagement and their academic achievement after having experienced victimization
in order to get themselves out of the fring line. Renold (2001) has also documented
further strategies of high-achieving boys to maintain masculinity, for example
becoming bullies themselves, disrupting the lessons, or devaluing girls’ achievements.
All these avoidance strategies come at a price too high for both the individual
student(s) and society in the long run. To avoid these undesirable consequences,
several interventions could be implemented. One problem surely is that victimized
students—and especially boys—often do not seek help from others, for example
from their teacher or from their parents (e.g., Hunter et al. 2004). The psychological
costs for help-seeking are often perceived as too high, comprising the fear of
(further) disapproval by the classmates (which is especially present in boys), feelings
of own weakness, and feelings of a lack of autonomy (not being able to solve
the problem on one’s own) (Boulton et al. 2017). One possibility to help victimized
students (especially boys) would be to encourage them to confde in their teachers or
their parents. This can be helpful, yet the efect heavily relies on the adult’s reaction
and on the specifc situation (Bauman et al. 2016). Especially for high-achieving
students, telling the teacher about victimization could sometimes be problematic
because some high-achieving students might already be perceived by their
classmates as the “teacher’s pet” (Babad 1995; Tal and Babad 1990; Trusz 2017). Telling
the teacher about bullying and disclosing the perpetrator(s) might then possibly
even worsen the situation. Therefore, intervention strategies could additionally start
at other points. One option would be to change the peer-group norm for boys. Interventions
could aim at a masculinization of academic achievement and engagement
in school. For example, the learning strategy of memorizing new material is more
often used by girls than by boys (e.g., Artelt et al. 2010; Heyder and Kessels 2016).
However, Heyder and Kessels (2016) showed that labeling memorizing with a
stereotypically masculine designation (“training consequently” vs. “memorizing diligently”)
increased boys’ choice of the memorizing strategy (whereas there was no
efect on girls’ choices). This could be a promising approach to make school
engagement seem more acceptable to boys and, thereby, to destigmatize boys who show
high levels of school engagement, which could in turn decrease their victimization.
Likewise, high academic achievement might be made more acceptable to boys by
labeling it as a result of competition, which is perceived as a stereotypically male
domain (e.g., Niederle and Vesterlund 2011). However, it would be important here
to defne competition in an intra-individual sense rather than in an inter-individual
sense, since competition between classmates would likely trigger average students’
upward comparisons, making negative reactions to the high-achieving students possibly
even more likely (Di Stasio et al. 2016; Festinger 1954). Rather, instruction
should stimulate intra-individual comparisons, inspiring boys to compete
with themselves to achieve better and better, with high(er) academic
achievement as a kind of trophy finally gained.
Another interesting finding, which we had however not predicted, was that not
only high-, but also low-achieving boys showed a greater risk of bullying
victimization than their female counterparts. Whereas the risk diference
was well-explainable for the high-achieving
students (violation of peer-group norm by showing high
engagement and achievement), it appears harder to explain it for the low-achieving
students, because displaying poor achievement (and engagement) is not inconsistent
with the male gender role. Maybe boys’ academic achievement sufers more from
victimization than girls’. Another explanation would be that especially
low-achieving boys rather than low-achieving girls and average- or high-performing boys react
more aggressively to victimization (aggression and cognitive ability are negatively
related; e.g., Duran-Bonavila et al. 2017), which might in turn evoke negative reactions
from the classmates, reinforce the perpetrator(s), and thus increase
victimization further (Salmivalli et al. 1996;
Sokol et al. 2015). However, as we cannot test
this hypothesis on the basis of our data, this could be a subject of future studies.
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