Bullying is a phenomenon of international interest that motivates continuous research worldwide. Three elements have been considered essential for the definition of school bullying: “the intention to harm the victim, the repetitive nature of bullying, and the imbalance in power between the victim and the perpetrator(s)” (Solberg & Olweus, 2003, p. 246). There is a large body of evidence on the negative consequences of bullying involvement (see e.g., Graham, 2016; Zych, Ortega-Ruiz & Del Rey, 2015), from lower school engagement and performance to a variety of negative mental health outcomes. The negative consequences of bullying have been found in students with different types of involvement in this phenomenon, with a distinction between victim, bully and bully-victim status being important (Haynie et al., 2001; Solbert, Olweus & Endresen, 2007). 

School engagement and school climate theoretical models consider relationships with teachers as a central factor for positive development in the schools (e.g. Skinner & Pitzer, 2013; Wang & Degol, 2016). Indeed, when positive student-teacher relationships are established, students’ aggressive behaviour tends to decrease and school engagement increases (McGrath & Van Bergen, 2015; Roorda, Koomen, Spilt & Oort, 2011).

Bullying tends to peak at the beginning of adolescence, a developmental stage during which supportive student-teacher relationships usually decrease. This decline in the perceived quality of relationships with teachers is not coupled with a decrease in their importance for students’ outcomes. There is robust evidence that affective student-teacher relationships continue influencing student engagement, achievement and wellbeing during adolescence (García-Moya, 2020). Maintaining close and positive relationships with some teachers is important to prevent bullying too, since positive relationships with teachers have been associated with reduced bullying victimization also in adolescent students (e.g. DiStasio, Savage & Burgos, 2016). In addition, positive student-teacher relationships have been hypothesized to buffer the negative effects of bullying experiences. Unfortunately, recent research has also found that students involved in bullying (especially those in bully or bully-victim status) have lower-quality relationships with their teachers (Huang, Lewis, Cohen, Prewett & Herman, 2018).

Despite the general decrease in the quality of student-teacher relationships during adolescence, research suggests that most adolescent students have one or a few teachers they develop a meaningful relationship with, what we refer here as student-teacher connectedness. More specifically, student-teacher connectedness can be defined as “a student’s perception that teachers notice and respect them as an individual, are sympathetic and can see things from the student’s perspective, and act as supportive figures responsive to the student’s needs“ (García-Moya, Brooks & Moreno, 2020, p.17). This definition encompasses three main dimensions of student-teacher connectedness: respectful and individualized personal interaction, empathy and perspective taking, and support.

The present study explores the links between different types of bullying involvement and student-teacher connectedness. Specifically, the aim of this poster was to examine potential differences in students’ global reports of connectedness with teachers and its three dimensions (respectful and individualized personal interaction, empathy and perspective taking, and support) depending on bullying involvement (i.e. not involved, victim, bully and bully-victim).

Participants come from the representative sample of adolescent students who took part in the 17/18 edition of the WHO-collaborative survey Health Behaviour in School-aged Children in Spain. Sample in the present study consisted of 15,672 adolescent students aged 11 to 16 years (51.2% girls) who had answered a specific package of questions on connectedness with teachers developed as part of the Teacher Connectedness Project. For the assessment of student-teacher connectedness, we used a new scale developed as part of the aforementioned Teacher Connectedness Project, which consists of 12 items (e.g., I have at least one teacher that is willing to listen to my problems) answered in a 4-point likert-type scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The scale allows for calculating a global score of student-teacher connectedness as well as separate scores for its three dimensions: respectful and individualized personal interaction, empathy and perspective taking, and support. Higher scores represent higher levels of connectedness or the dimension under study. The scale showed high reliability in the study sample: Cronbach’s alpha was .95 for the total scale, and .82, .89 and .94 for its three dimensions, respectively. Bullying involvement was assessed by means of two of the items (the ones for global reports of bullying victimization and perpetration) from the Revised Bully/Victim Questionnaire (Olweus, 1996). In line with the ‘repetitive nature’ criterion in the definition of bullying, we used the cut-off point proposed by Solberg and Olweus (2003), according to which a frequency of two or three times a month or higher is used for the identification of bullying. Based on the students’ responses to the items on bullying victimization and perpetration, the following four types of bullying involvement were distinguished: not involved (n= 14,798), victim (n= 482), bully (n = 291) and bully-victim (n = 101). ANOVA with a significance level of 5% was used for the analysis of mean differences in student-teacher connectedness and its three dimensions among the four bullying involvement groups. Because Levene’s test revealed that the homoscedasticity assumption was not satisfied, the Welch-test is reported. Where Welch-test showed significant differences associated to bullying involvement, we performed Games Howell post-hoc analyses to identify mean pairs for which significant differences existed. In addition, given that significance tests have been found to be sensitive to sample size, Cohen’s d was used as an effect size test to assess the magnitude of the mean differences between groups.

There was a significant association between bullying involvement and student-teacher connectedness. Specifically, students involved in bullying (either as victim, bully or bully-victim) reported lower levels of connectedness with their teachers than not involved students. Among those involved in bullying, bully-victims consistently reported the lowest levels of student-teacher connectedness, resulting in noticeable differences when compared to victims in total levels of connectedness, as well as in the respectful and individualized personal interaction and support dimensions. Mean differences in respectful and individualized personal interaction also reached a noticeable effect size in the comparison between bully-victims and bullies. Overall, our findings indicate that there are differences in student-teacher connectedness associated with bullying involvement, which is consistent with previous research. However, unlike some of the previous studies, we found that any kind of bullying involvement (as victim, bully or bully-victim) was associated with lower levels of connectedness. Our finding that the bully-victim group consistently reported the lowest level of connectedness adds to the body of literature that points to bully-victims as the less prevalent status among bullying involvement while describing comparatively more negative consequences for these students (Graham, 2016; Haynie et al., 2001). This finding requires additional attention, since some studies suggest that bully-victims who lack affective relationships with teachers may be at a heightened risk of depression (Huang et al., 2018). This study has important strengths such as its large and representative sample and the use of good-quality measures for the assessment of both student-teacher connectedness and bullying involvement. However, its cross-sectional design does not allow for a definitive conclusion on the direction of the associations we found (i.e. low connectedness may make students more vulnerable to bullying involvement or bullying involvement may negatively affect connectedness with teachers), so longitudinal studies in this area would be beneficial.

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