Poster #30 - Racial/Ethnic Group Differences in Children’s Likelihood of Telling Parents versus Teachers about Being Bullied at School

• In Event: Poster Session 13

Abstract

Introduction
At some point in their development, most children will experience the impact of school bullying (Ladd & Kochenderfer-Ladd, 2002). Research suggests an effective way for children to handle bullying is to disclose their bullying experiences to adults (van der Ploeg et al., 2022). Culture can influence how children manage emotionally charged events, including possibly whether they tell an adult about being bullied (Rothbaum & Rusk, 2011). For example, familialism, which centers family in the making of important decisions, could influence whether children disclose to their parent, to their teacher, or to both (Son et al., 2022). Additionally, children who are members of an ethnic/racial minority group might be reluctant to disclose to teachers who represent the cultural majority (Rodríguez-Hidalgo et al., 2019). In this study, we examined racial/ethnic group differences in children’s likelihood of telling a parent versus a teacher about being bullied at school.
Method
Participants were 375 children in grades 3-5 (52% girls, M age=9.33 years, SD=1.07). Demographics were as follows: 46.67% Latinx, 27.2% White/Non-Latinx, 11.73% Pacific Islander/Marshallese, 2.40% Asian American, 2.13% Black, 5.87% multiracial, 1.33% other, and 2.67% unreported. Likelihood of disclosure to parents versus teachers was measured using the What I Would Do scale (Kochenderfer-Ladd & Pelletier, 2008; Cortes & Kochenderfer-Ladd, 2014), which included items related to physical, verbal, and relational victimization. Demographic data was not collected from teachers, but publicly available data indicate that 94.9% of teachers in this school district were White and the majority were women (Arkansas Department of Education, 2017).
Results
Table 1 presents mean scores (and SDs) by racial/ethnic subgroups. Using the full sample, we found students disclosed more often to parents than to teachers (p = .023; p = .008, respectively). Post-hoc (LSD) tests indicated that Latinx students disclosed to teachers significantly more often than non-Latinx White students (p = .014) and Pacific Islander (PI) students (p = .005). PI students were also less likely to disclose to teachers than multiracial students (p = .007). This exact same pattern was found for disclosure to parents. Within-group analyses revealed that Latinx students, as expected were significantly more likely to disclose to parents than to teachers (p = .008). A similar pattern emerged for Asian-American students (p = .050).
Discussion
Our findings support previous research indicating that culture can influence how children manage emotionally charged events, including whether they tell a parent or a teacher about being bullied. Our findings also suggest the possible role of familialism in determining whether Latinx students disclose to their parent or to a teacher.

Authors

• Melissa Brown, University of Arkansas
  Presenting Author

• Julia Kiefer, University of Arkansas

• Jake Steggerda, University of Arkansas

• Forest Moore

• Tim A. Cavell, University of Arkansas