Is bullying and suicide a problem for East Asia's schools? Evidence from TIMSS and PISA

ABSTRACT

Herein we examine the dominant image of East Asian schools as marked by a darker side of widespread bullying, leading to high rates of youth suicide. First outlining the substantial literature on bullying in the English language, we turn to show how – paradoxically – the rates of bullying and suicide are no higher, or in nearly all cases, lower than both Anglo-American systems (Australia, England, New Zealand, United States) and high PISA performers (Canada, Finland, Estonia). To explain this, we extend a constructivist approach proposed by sociologists of Japanese youth, suggesting that recurrent ‘moral panics’ such as bullying are determined, at least in part, by underlying differences in self-construal and views of how society functions. This analysis contributes to recent work that has challenged persistent stereotypes of East Asian education, those images blocking deeper engagement with the underlying differences in approach and philosophy these systems represent.

KEYWORDS:

• Student well-being
• Japan
• Korea
• Taiwan
• school violence
• representations of other education systems

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Jeremy Rappleye http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0717-8253

Hikaru Komatsu http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1195-1648

Notes

1 Horio (1991) and Mino (2006) making largely similar arguments.

2 Although TIMSS collected bullying data before 2011, those data were not presented in the main reports.

3 While some internationally comparative datasets were available in the 1990s and 2000s, none of these included data for Japan (Akiba et al., 2002; Due, Holstein, & Soc, 2008; Due et al., 2005). Moreover, and somewhat disappointingly, two large comparative surveys that often feature in global reports (e.g. UNESCO’s, 2018 report), lack data on East Asian countries: the World Health Organization's Global School-Based Student Health Survey (hereafter GSHS; 96 countries, conducted since 2003) and Health Behavior in School-Aged Children Study (hereafter HBSC; 48 countries, conducted since 1983). So we are restricted to TIMSS and PISA.

4 One reviewer pointed out that both TIMSS and PISA are scaled down version of Oleweus's scale. Moreover, it is not clear that these scaled down version have been validated in the case of Japan, Korea, or Taiwan. As such it is possible that the TIMSS and PISA scales have failed to capture forms of bullying that are more salient in these context. One example might be the ‘silent treatment’, where students’ are ostracized or ignored. While we can acknowledge the truncated nature of the TIMSS and PISA scales, we cannot agree that this would be a reason for the lower values for Japan. First and foremost, the Japanese translation of the first PISA item (‘other students left me out of things on purpose’) is translated into Japanese as ‘他の生徒から仲間外れにされた’ (hoka no seito kara nakamahazure ni sureta). This phrase is expansive in scope, signifying any ‘break’ in relations with other students from the student's subjective point of view. In usual usage, this would certainly encompass ‘silent treatment’ as well as almost anything else (even, for example, cold or cutting treatment where the student is formally included). In this sense, the expansive translation covers ground that may result from a truncated scale. A second reason we feel the lower values are accurate is that other research has compared results from different surveys including TIMSS, PISA, GSHS, and HBSC, with Smith, Robinson, and Marchi (2016) and Smith and López-Castro (2017) discovering similarities between results from TIMSS and PISA and those from GSHS and HBSC. This suggests that the concepts of bullying assumed in these surveys have much overlap. That said, it remains unknown whether these similarities hold for East Asian countries, because GSHS and HBSC lack data for East Asian countries. This point needs to be examined in future studies, because the concept of bullying of course differs – as we said at the outset in regards to the term ijime – among countries to some extent (e.g. Kanetsuna & Smith, 2002; Kanetsuna, Smith, & Morita, 2006).

5 We found several papers that presented TIMSS and PISA data of bullying for different countries (e.g. Rutkowski & Rutkowski, 2016). Readers could potentially see from these papers that TIMSS and PISA data do not support negative stereotypes of East Asian education. However, none of these papers stress this point, as these papers are not conceptualized in relation to existing stereotypes found in media and scholarship. Our paper is novel in that it stresses this point, as well as moving beyond empirical description to discuss potential factors that have created and sustained these negative stereotypes.

6 Before 2006, the Ministry had defined ijime as ‘physical and psychological attack on a weaker student in a one-way and continuous manner that causes the victim-student considerable pain’ (authors’ translation). In 2006, the Ministry changed this definition to ‘a situation where the student feels psychological pain due to physical and/or psychological attack’ (MEXT, 2019, authors’ translation). This new definition focuses on the victim's subjective feeling rather than objective situations. The Ministry made this change because it was argued, amidst the panic of the 1990s, that the original definition allowed schools to dismiss ijime cases that did not satisfy the objective situations (National Institute for Education Policy Research, 2013), echoing the argument made by Yoneyama.

7 But this was also in part due to the media reporting of a youth suicide in Hokkaido that was picked up by the Prime Minister as part of a long-standing education reform push (see Toivenen & Imoto, 2012, p. 11).

8 Consider, for example, the highly cited work Bullying Schools: and what we can do about it (Rigby, 2007) that never mentions Japan, Korea, or Taiwan.