The Role of Race and Gender in the Associations Between Bullying and Screen Time Among Adolescents: Big Data Analyses with Moderation Models Using R

Abstract

Researchers have documented that adolescents’ school or electronic bullying victimization took a heavy toll on their mental health, which might give rise to adolescents’ screen time increase like TV watching and video games usage gave the technology growth [11]. However, psychologists have not examined the associations between bullying and screen time with attention to the role of race and gender. The current research examined these associations with the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) dataset collected from 1991 to 2019, which is of considerable data points and statistical power. It was assumed that different coping strategies may be adopted by adolescents in different race and ethnicity groups and gender groups such that, the associations between bully victimization and screen time may be moderated by adolescents’ race and gender in different directions. Statistical models conducted by R language was used to examine the proposed hypotheses. The results showed that, generally, there was a direct association between being bullied and an increase in screen time. Furthermore, males used to have more screen time compared to females after being bullied. As shown by simple slope analyses, Black or African Americans remained high in screen time value after bullying victimization compared to other races. The results of the current study were correlational in nature and should be interpreted with caution.