The Social Safety Ecology: A multi-contextual approach to bullying, social safety, gender, and health in adolescence

Abstract

Social safety, including connection, protection, and inclusion, is a fundamental human need that may protect us from social threat (Slavich, 2020). One such social threat is bullying. In adolescence, social belonging becomes increasingly important, as youth become more attuned to social cues, which may render social safety even more relevant for health and well-being during this developmental stage. Despite the importance of social safety for health and well-being, current literature has yet to establish a measure that accounts for the multiple contexts in which a youth may perceive social safety (e.g., interpersonal, school, community, societal, etc.), and how these levels may moderate the relationship between bullying victimization and health, concurrently, and over time. The current dissertation is composed of three studies using data from the Health Behavior in School-Aged Children (HBSC) study, which assessed youth in grades 6-10 (n = 26,571 for Studies 1 and 2; n = 118,764 for Study 3). In Study 1, I developed and validated a multi-contextual measure of perceived social safety called the Social Safety Ecology Scale. Our results supported a four-factor solution that identified subscales assessing friend, family, school, and community safety. In Study 2, I used the Social Safety Ecology Scale to examine how perceived social safety at different levels of the social ecology may moderate the relationship between bullying victimization and both psychosomatic symptoms and well-being, and examined this effect between grades (grades 6-8 and grades 9-10) and genders (cisgender boys, cisgender girls, and gender diverse youth). Unexpectedly, the results showed that rather than buffering youth against negative health outcomes, school safety exacerbated this relationship, such that youth who reported higher school safety showed a steeper relationship between bullying victimization and psychosomatic symptoms. Finally, Study 3 expanded its scope to include six different waves of data from the HBSC survey, from 2002 to 2022. The results showed that the relationship between general bullying victimization and school safety increased in magnitude over cohorts, suggesting that the link between these experiences has become stronger over time. The current dissertation suggests that social safety is a multidimensional construct that evolves across relationships and contexts.