Legislative Lessons: An Analysis of State Anti-Bullying Interventions and their Effects on Student Outcomes

Abstract

Bullying is a type of unwanted aggressive behavior that involves various forms of physical, verbal, cyber, and social abuse. The Department of Education (ED) estimates that approximately 20% of children ages 12-18 report being bullied each year nationwide, and 70.6% of students state that they have personally witnessed bullying occur in their schools. Substantial existing research demonstrates that individuals that encounter bullying in any role are at an increased risk of poor health, lower income, and poor social relationship outcomes in the short- and long-terms. In response to these public health concerns, the majority of states in the U.S. have enacted legislation that requires school districts to adopt anti-bullying policies. However, these anti-bullying laws (ABLs) often differ substantially in specificity, construction, and scope at the state level. While the existing literature has demonstrated that school bullying represents a pressing social problem and facilitated some preliminary analyses of existing anti-bullying laws, little research has been conducted to examine the effects of legislative interventions on student-reported bullying and cyberbullying rates in U.S. schools. This thesis addresses this gap in the existing literature by conducting a national analysis of the relationship between the strength of existing legislation and the prevalence of bullying among students at the state level. It employs a quantitative research approach involving factor analyses, OLS regressions, and random effects models to examine the impact of anti-bullying legislation on two student-reported metrics of school safety (bullying and cyberbullying) collected by the CDC through its biannual administration of the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS). This thesis specifically addresses the following two research questions: (1) How does anti-bullying legislation vary in enactment and strength across different states?; (2) How does variation in law strength impact the prevalence of reported bullying and cyberbullying across the United States? This thesis ultimately finds that substantial variation exists in regard to the timing of law enactment and law strength across the United States. It also finds that the number of ED-identified policy components a state includes in its legislation impacts the occurrence of bullying and cyberbullying in schools; states with stronger legislation typically experience larger reductions in reported peer aggression behaviors over time. Its findings additionally suggest that the Purpose, Enumerated Groups, Prohibited Behavior, Reporting, and Written Records policy components could be the legislative elements that most impact the incidence of peer aggression. This thesis ultimately asserts that bullying is an ongoing social issue and concludes by offering four key policy recommendations to policymakers at the state, district, and school levels. Failing to enact these changes would represent a lost opportunity to improve the health and wellbeing of students that encounter peer aggression and could exacerbate other social problems in the long-term.