Abstract
We examine whether students’ victimization (nonvictims, non-bias-based, and bias-based victims) relates to reports on sadness and hopelessness (SH) and suicidal ideation (SI) and how school size, ethnic and socioeconomic status composite, and school climate relate to these outcomes through multilevel analyses of the California Healthy Kids Survey (2017–2019; N = 2,569 schools; N = 1,025,876 students). Bias-based or non-bias-based victims experienced greater SH and SI compared to nonvictimized students. School climate negatively associated with both outcomes, yet positive school climate exacerbated SH and SI of victimized students, particularly those subjected to bias-based violence. The findings confirm the healthy context paradox, indicating that adverse effects may occur for violence victims in schools with more positive climates. Implications for interventions and future research are discussed.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Educational Researcher |
| DOIs | |
| State | Accepted/In press - 2025 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2025 The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Lficense (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Keywords
- adolescence
- bias-based victimization
- cross-level interactions
- multilevel modeling
- sadness and hopelessness
- school climate
- school victimization
- suicidal ideation
- the healthy context paradox