Ethnic-cultural bullying among adolescents in multicultural environments: A study in Latin America

Abstract

Ethnic-cultural bullying among schoolchildren is a harmful, discriminatory practice, which is particularly difficult to combat educationally both because it involves a sociocultural dimension closely linked to social identity, and because few validated, reliable instruments have been developed to evaluate and study it. The aims of this research were to validate a scale for measuring ethnic-cultural bullying, fine-tune its specificity, and examine its prevalence in a multicultural school population from Ecuador. A sample of 17,309 students, representative of the adolescent student population in Higher Basic General Education and Baccalaureate, completed the EBIPQ-ECD. The validation showed a two-dimensional structure featuring ethnic-cultural victimization and ethnic-cultural aggression, and had optimal psychometric properties. There were also evident differences in the prevalence of ethnic-cultural bullying in adolescents depending on the ethnic-cultural group, with Afro-descendants and indigenous people more often involved, and whites and mestizos less so, which is consistent with the theory of social dominance. Finally, we discuss the results in relation to the complexity of the construct itself, as well as the suitability and educational potential of evaluating ethnic-cultural bullying in populations which show considerable ethnic-cultural diversity, such as Ecuador and other countries in the Latin-American geopolitical sphere.