Sibling Bullying, School Bullying, and Children’s Subjective Well-Being Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Indonesia

Abstract

The aims of this study are threefold. The first aim is to examine the prevalence of sibling and school bullying before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia. The second aim is to investigate the subjective well-being (SWB) of children who were bullied or never bullied before and during COVID-19. The third aim is to investigate factors associated with sibling and school bullying before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study uses two separate cross-sectional datasets from the Children’s Worlds survey in Indonesia. Data in Study 1 were collected in October 2017 (N = 12,794; 48.2% boys; 51.8% girls, mean age = 10.56), while data in Study 2 were collected from July to September 2021 (N = 2,222; 46.1% boys; 53.9% girls; mean age = 10.77). Five items were used to measure sibling and school bullying. The five-item version of the Children’s Worlds Subjective Well-Being Scale (CW-SWBS5) was used as the SWB indicator. Three groups of independent variables (family, friends and school climate) were analysed using linear regression to investigate the contribution of each variable to sibling and school bullying. Results show that the prevalence of sibling bullying during the COVID-19 pandemic is higher than before the pandemic, while the frequency of school bullying incidents during COVID-19 is lower than before COVID-19. SWB scores of children during COVID-19 are lower than SWB scores of children before the COVID-19 pandemic, both for bullied or never-bullied children. The fact that children report that parents listen to them and take what they say into account is positively associated with a lower frequency of being bullied at home before and during COVID-19 and being bullied at school only during the pandemic. Although samples are not strictly comparable, the SWB indicators used in both studies showed sensitivity to the changes in children’s lives in previous studies. Therefore, the SWB indicators are supposed to be sensitive to changes associated with children’s new everyday life COVID-19 has implied.