Although the level of overall teasing and bullying has decreased across the country since 2005, there has been an unusual uptick in the number of teasing and bullying incidents related to race and sexual orientation since the 2016 presidential election, with some students making comments linked to President Donald Trump.
That’s the findings from a new study published in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.
The correlational study was led by Dr. Francis Huang, an associate professor of statistics, measurement and evaluation in education at the University of Missouri, and Dr. Dewey Cornell, a professor of education at the University of Virginia.
Huang and Cornell have conducted studies of bullying and school climate in the state of Virginia for over a decade and began noticing an increase in the news reports of bullying incidents since the 2016 election.
Many of the news reports regarding student bullying that occurred after the election were anecdotal, and some reports, such as the one done by the Southern Poverty Law Center, was only teacher reported, Huang said.
“So while interesting, it limits our ability to look really at the bigger picture,” Huang added, saying that he and Cornell decided to “dive deeper” into the issue.
For the study, Huang and Cornell evaluated a statewide sample of over 155,000 seventh- and eighth-grade students throughout Virginia’s 132 school districts. They used school climate survey data from the spring of 2013, 2015 and 2017. The results were then compared to voting districts that largely favored Trump’s candidacy.
