Abstract
Bullying is an understudied issue of public health importance in low-income countries. In the present study, we aimed to explore social and demographic factors associated with bullying among adolescents in a low-income country urban setting. We divided a sample of 2,154 school-attending adolescents into two groups, those who had been bullied during a 30-day period and those who were not. We considered age, sex, mental health, parent-relationship, hunger and social deprivation and truancy in our comparison of these two groups using logistic regression. Multinomial regression was also used to determine if there was a dose response relationship between bullying frequency and the aforementioned selected variables. We found that school-attending adolescents in Dar es Salaam were more likely to be truant, suffer from mental health problems and have experienced hunger. Adolescents who had parents which were more aware of their free time activities, were less likely to report being bullied. There were also significant differences in bullying frequency and certain variables, most notably with truancy, economic and social deprivation, and signs of depression. School settings in Dar es Salaam offer a potential for intervening in what are potentially harmful effects of bullying behavior among bully victims.
Highlights
Bullying is an important public health problem globally
We investigated the associations of bullying victimization with the following independent variables, which were derived from questions from the Global School-based Student Health Survey (GSHS) survey: (a) Truancy
The Pearson correlation test demonstrated that all variables with the exceptions of gender and number of friendships were statistically significantly correlated with bullying victimization (Table 1)
Summary
Bullying is an important public health problem globally. While it occurs in all countries, considerable variations in prevalence have been observed. Within high-income country (HIC) settings, bullying prevalence ranges from a low of 5/6% (males/females) to 36/32% [1]. In low-income country (LIC) settings which have made population-based data available, differences range from 8/7% to. 63/58% for students who reported being bullied at least once during a one month period [2]. In a recent longitudinal study of U.S high school students, Klomek and colleagues found that bullying frequency was strongly associated with depressive symptomatology and other risk behaviors [8]
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