Social disorganization, collective efficacy, bullying perpetration, and victimization: An empirical test

ABSTRACTThe current study offers a test of social disorganization theory to assess the effects of neighborhood-level factors on bullying perpetration and victimization. The study offers a quasi-replication the Sampson and Groves (1989) model and integrates proxy measures consistent with prior research to test the theoretical framework on bullying outcomes. Data from the National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) 2019 were used to analyze a sample of adolescent youth between the ages 12 and 17 (n = 8,584). Multinomial logistic regression analyses were conducted to assess the effects of indicators consistent with social disorganization and collective efficacy on varying levels of bullying perpetration and bullying victimization. Results suggest that indicators of social disorganization (i.e., low-SES, neighborhood decay) increases the odds of bullying perpetration/victimization. Additionally, collective efficacy reduces the odds of both bullying perpetration and bullying victimization. Ecological factors beyond the context of school environments appear to be influential to bullying outcomes.KEYWORDS: Bullying perpetrationBullying victimizationSocial disorganization theoryCollective efficacy Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Data availability statementThe NSCH data used within this study is available upon request from the Data Resource Center for Child and Adolescent Health at: https://www.childhealthdata.org/help/dataset.