Abstract
Past research has shown concurrent associations between adolescent's body mass index (BMI) and classroom bullying victimization experiences. The goal of this three‐wave longitudinal study is to examine a transactional model of associations between BMI and bullying victimization among adolescents in India. We investigate concurrent unidirectional and bidirectional relations between BMI and victimization. In a sample of 1238 students from nine schools (Grades 7–9; M‐ageT1 = 13.15, SD = 1.16) in Indore, India, we used self‐ and peer‐reports to measure bullying victimization in the classroom, and objective measurement of students' height and weight to collect data on adolescents' BMI, across three waves in one school year. Structural equational modeling was used to test transactional relations between BMI and bullying victimization. For self‐reported victimization, there was no concurrent or over time association between BMI and victimization for boys or girls in the present study. For peer‐reported victimization, we observed concurrent associations between BMI and victimization for boys and girls and a prospective relation where higher BMI corresponded to less victimization over time for boys. The study yielded mainly concurrent relations between BMI and victimization among adolescents in India. Results from western countries may not generalize to India.
Highlights
Worldwide there has been an increase in the prevalence of obesity among school‐going children (Li et al, 2020; WHO, 2018)
The present study focuses on cultural replication and cross‐ validation of research in the field of body mass index (BMI) and victimization to determine the extent of generalizability of previous global findings in India (Thakkar et al, 2020)
We found no significant associations between BMI and self‐reported victimization for either gender, whereas peer‐reported victimization presented a different picture
Summary
Worldwide there has been an increase in the prevalence of obesity among school‐going children (Li et al, 2020; WHO, 2018). Being obese or overweight among youth are associated with a plethora of adverse physical, psychosocial, and psychological consequences (Li et al, 2020; Sheinbein et al, 2019), one of them being increased risk of being bullied (Van Geel et al, 2014; Waasdorp et al, 2018). These results were mostly based on cross‐sectional designs that do not allow for analysis of directionality of relations, and the few longitudinal studies that have examined the direction of links have reported inconsistent results The purpose of the present study is to examine directions in the relation between BMI and victimization, by using a transactional model with data from a three‐wave longitudinal study in an urban area in India
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