ABSTRACT
Methods
We analyzed the data from the 2011 to 2019 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) to access the trends in traditional victimization and cybervictimization among U.S. high school students. We identified the temporal trends using multivariate logistic regression analyses, accounting for survey design features of YRBS. Participants included 72,605 high school students.
Results
The overall prevalence of victimization was 19.74% for traditional bullying and 15.38% for cyberbullying, suggesting that cyberbullying is not a low frequent phenomenon. The prevalence of victimization ranged from 20.19 to 19.04% for traditional victimization and 16.23 to 14.77% for cybervictimization, and the declined trends for the two kinds of bullying victimization were both statistically non-significant. The degree of overlap between the two kinds of bullying victimization was about 60%. Besides, female students reported more traditional victimization and cybervictimization than male peers within each survey cycle.
Conclusions
No declined trends in traditional victimization and cybervictimization were observed during 2011 to 2019. Female students are more likely to experience school bullying. To achieve the Healthy People 2020 goal on bullying, more work is needed to explore the underlying reasons behind these unchanging trends. |