An investigation of the predictive effects of bullying behaviors and the psychosocial environment of schools on behaviors of middle school students

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among a school's psychosocial environment and the prevalence and types of bullying behaviors that either lead to or resulted from that environment. More specifically, this study examined how the frequency of aggressive behaviors (e.g., bullying) experienced by students (as perpetrators and victims) contributed to their interpretation of their schools' psychosocial environment and how those environments effected the existence of ongoing aggressive and avoidance behaviors. The data for this study was archival, having originally been collected for a study of school culture, climate and violence from the Philadelphia School District during the school year of 1993-1994. The current study used structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis to develop a theoretical model of predictive relationships among (a) students' perceptions of bullying behaviors and safety at school, (b) the schools' psychosocial environment as measured by the students and (c) the students' reactionary behavior to both (a) and (b) in order to understand the consequences of bullying in schools. The sample of 5,153 student surveys was randomly split into two groups in order to examine and test a model for Group 1 and then to be able to test a cross-validation analysis with the data from Group 2. This cross-validation helped to determine if the proposed model accurately predicted the proposed relationships across different samples.