The Societal Context of School-Based Bullying Victimization: An Application of Institutional Anomie Theory in a Cross-National Sample

ABSTRACT

The present study examines cross-national variation in school-based bullying victimization. Specifically, we address whether decommodification, a concept implicated in Institutional Anomie Theory that measures the degree of a society’s social welfare protection, is a protective factor against school-based bullying victimization. To test this theory, we retrieve data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) questionnaire and combine this data with other sources capturing cross-national factors hypothesized to impact bullying victimization. The sample consists of 286,871 adolescents (with an average age of 15 years) attending 14,192 schools nested within 55 high-and-middle-income countries. We estimate multilevel regression models with three levels of analysis (student, school, and country), finding that countries with a greater degree of decommodification have lower rates of school-based bullying. Overall, our findings illustrate that the national level of social welfare protection, which had been previously neglected in this research literature, is a robust predictor of bullying victimization.

KEYWORDS:

• Bullying
• anomie
• decommodification
• adolescents
• PISA
• homicide rates

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15388220.2022.2126850

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Tuttle

James Tuttle is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Montana. His research focuses primarily on macro-criminological theory, cross-national variation in homicide rates, and crime trends.

Gregorio Gimenez

Gregorio Gimenez is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Zaragoza. His research interests include education, the economics of development, quantitative methodology, the consequences of violence, and bullying.

Beatriz Barrado

Beatriz Barrado is an Assistant Lecturer of Applied Economics at the University of León. Her main areas of research include education, economic development, and the impact of crime.