Psychological correlates of school bullying victimization: academic self-concept, learning motivation and test anxiety

The paper aims at detecting the association between students’ bullying victimization at school and some psychological dimensions, referred to academic self-concept (for both Mathematics and Reading), learning motivation (intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, commitment to study) and test anxiety. A questionnaire including these measures was completed by 3372 students (51.1% boys and 48.9% girls, mostly aged from 11 to 14 years) at grade 6 (n=1082), 7 (n=1113) and 8 (n=1177), coming from 54 middle schools of Southern Italy. T-tests are used for establishing differences in psychological dimensions between groups of students that experienced bullying and those who did not. In order to check the robustness of our findings and evaluate whether bullying victimization could be actually considered a determinant of these psychological measures, linear regression is used to predict each variable, also controlling for gender and grade level. Results confirm most of the research findings on the correlates of bullying victimization: being victim of peer bullying strongly reduces academic self-concept (both in Mathematics and Reading) and commitment to study, whilst tends to increase both extrinsic motivation and test anxiety rates, independently from gender and grade level. No impact, indeed, is revealed on both Math and Reading intrinsic motivation.