Do social support and eating family meals together play a role in promoting resilience to bullying and cyberbullying in Scottish school children?

Richard J Shaw,Joanna C Inchley,Judith Brown,Daniel J Smith,Gillian S Smith,Dorothy B Currie

doi:10.1016/j.ssmph.2019.100485

Abstract

This study investigates if cyberbullying is associated with wellbeing independently of traditional bullying and if social support and eating family meals together promotes resilience by buffering adolescents against the consequences of both types of bullying. Data for 5286 eleven, thirteen and fifteen year olds participating in the cross-sectional 2018 Scottish Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study were analysed. Adolescent self-report measures were used to assess traditional bullying, cyberbullying, classmate and teacher support and frequency of family meals together. Psychological wellbeing was assessed with the 5-item World Health Organization Wellbeing index. Analyses were conducted separately by gender with multilevel models, adjusting for sociodemographic factors. Resilience to bullying and cyberbullying was operationalised using statistical interactions. For both genders, cyberbullying and traditional bullying measures were associated with reduced wellbeing and all social support indicators were associated with increased wellbeing. In models containing both bullying measures, frequent traditional bullying victimisation was associated with a 7.2 (95% CI: 3.4–10.1) reduction in wellbeing score for boys and a 7.2 (95% CI: 4.5–10.0) reduction for girls, while cyberbullying was associated with 10.5 (95% CI: 5.8–15.1) reduction in wellbeing score for boys and 11.1 (95% CI: 6.7–15.5) reduction for girls. For both genders adjusting for classmate support explained away the relationships between traditional bullying and wellbeing, but cyberbullying was associated negatively with wellbeing independent of social support. Only one of 12 interaction tests provided any evidence of resilience. Cyberbullying was associated with a 7.8 (95% CI: 0.2–15.4) reduction in wellbeing score for girls who ate with their family every day, and 17.3 (95% CI: 10.5–24.1) reduction for girls who ate with their families less than weekly. In conclusion, cyberbullying is a strong, albeit rare, threat to adolescent wellbeing. Social support is important for wellbeing, but its ability to buffer adolescents against the consequences of bullying may be limited.

Highlights

There are increasing concerns about the effect that cyberbullying has on the mental wellbeing and long term development of adolescents (Arseneault, 2018)
Rather than focusing on the role of protective and risk factors in relation to adolescents’ experiences of traditional bullying and cyberbullying, for which there is already an extensive literature (Kowalski et al, 2014; Zych et al, 2015), we focus on identifying factors which may promote wellbeing and provide addi tional protective effects in the presence of traditional bullying and cyberbullying, with resilience operationalised using interaction effects (Masten & Cicchetti, 2016; Roosa, 2000)
We investigate the de gree to which eating family meals together and support from teachers or classmates is associated with adolescent wellbeing and whether these indicators of social support might buffer the impact of both forms of bullying on wellbeing

Summary

Introduction

There are increasing concerns about the effect that cyberbullying has on the mental wellbeing and long term development of adolescents (Arseneault, 2018). Un derstanding the degree to which cyberbullying influences wellbeing independently from traditional bullying, and whether social support and eating family meals together promote resilience to both forms of bullying, are important considerations for developing anti-bullying strategies in schools and at government level. The medium of the internet changes the nature of these interactions between victim and perpetrator(s) (Kowalski, Giumetti, Schroeder, & Lattanner, 2014; Smith et al, 2008). The use of online technology changes power re lations: perpetrators can potentially be anonymous, and a single incident of cyberbullying can be disseminated rapidly and persist online, changing the nature of repetition (Gaffney & Farrington, 2018). The impact of cyberbullying could potentially be greater than that of traditional bullying (Hamm et al, 2015)

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