Combining ecological and moral disengagement theories: The impact of individual and school-level perceptions on self-reports of bullying, victimization, and witnessing

Empirical studies in the bullying field have not addressed the merging theories of moral disengagement and ecological systems theory, in order to determine the risk factors associated with bullying involvement. The purpose of this study was to examine how both individual-level variables and school level factors contribute to involvement in bullying, victimization, and bystanding. Participants included 16,879 students from grade 4 - 12 across 114 schools from Southern Ontario. Students completed an online school responsibility survey containing measures of bullying involvement, school safety, adult availability, moral disengagement, and moral engagement. Prevalence rates indicated that the majority of students were witnesses of bullying, with self-reports of bullying and victimization involvement less commonly reported. The majority of variability in bullying, victimization and bystanding was accounted for by individual differences in sex, age, moral disengagement, moral engagement, adult availability, and feeling unsafe at school. Bully perpetrators were likely to score high in moral disengagement and low in moral engagement, whereas victims and bystanders were high in both moral engagement and moral disengagement. Collective perceptions of feeling unsafe at school was the only school-level variable to predict to individual involvement in bullying, victimization, and witnessing. Implications highlight the need for studying the different contexts in which children develop, as well as tailoring bullying intervention to individual schools, rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach.;Keywords: bullying as a group process, adolescence, moral disengagement, HLM, victimization, bystanders, school climate...