Exploring the Links Between School Mobility, School Bonding, and Bullying: An Exploratory Mediation Model

Introduction

Although a robust literature documents that school mobility (frequency with which students change schools within a school year) is associated with negative outcomes such as psychological distress, poor social adjustment, decreased academic performance, and school dropout (Hartman, 2002; Rumberger & Larson, 1998), few studies have explored antecedents of school mobility. The practice of “open schools,” that allows students to select which school they attend, provides parents and students the option of addressing school related problems by transferring schools. For instance, Kerbow (1996) found that issues related to safety and dissatisfaction were responsible for 40% of the most recent move. Although no studies have linked bullying directly to increases in mobility, because mobility negatively affects peer relations and school engagement (South et al., 2007), it seems likely that students who frequently change schools may be more vulnerable to bullying, and bullying may increase school mobility. This study explores the relationship between bullying and school mobility and whether this relationship is mediated by school bonding.

Methods

A path model tested the mediated path from bullying to school mobility via school bonding among an urban sample of 1,740 7^thgrade students. Past 12-month mobility was modeled as an ordinal count variable with a negative binomial distribution while controlling for the nested structure of the data. Incident Rate Ratios (IRRs) were used to interpret the findings. MacKinnon’s asymmetric distribution of products test (MacKinnon, 2008) was used to test the mediation effects.

Results

Model-1 regressed mobility on bullying to assess direct effects. Increases in bullying were positively associated with mobility (IRR=1.32, p=.005 ).  Model-2 added school bonding as a predictor of mobility. School bonding was significantly associated with both bullying (IRR=.10, p<.001) and mobility (IRR=.94, p=.003). Bullying remained significantly associated with mobility (IRR=1.38, p=.04) and school bonding significantly, but only partially mediated the relationship between bullying and mobility (IRR=1.14, p<.05).

Conclusion

After controlling for school bonding, bullying was related to school mobility with a unit increase in bullying resulting in a 38% increase in moving one additional time during the past year. School bonding was also strongly associated with less bullying. Although the causal relationship cannot be determined from this study (i.e., some students may change schools as a result of bullying, or school mobility may increase youth vulnerability to bullying), it is the first study to link bullying to school mobility and is an important step to understanding how school mobility and bullying may affect student well-being.