Income Inequality and School Bullying: Multilevel Study of Adolescents in 37 Countries.
Income Inequality and School Bullying: Multilevel Study of Adolescents in 37 Countries.
A multilevel study in 37 countries investigated
whether there is an association between income inequality and school bullying.
The study resulted in clear but regrettable results: there is a significant
positive correlation between the inequality rates and rates of school
bullying. However males and females were studied separately because bullying
manifests differently in both sexes (physical vs. verbal), the results are
comparable: high income inequality corresponded with more frequent bullying.
Countries like Turkey and Russia with high inequality
rates have four to five times higher bullying rates than Scandinavian countries
such as Sweden and Denmark where income inequality is less significant. In
countries with greater income inequality, children already experience at young
age the status competition of their parents in the society. Children often
reflect this impression to their daily environment and start bullying in order
to claim their status position at school. Adolescents characterized as bullies
are at greater risk of antisocial problems: most of adolescent bullies end up
in crime before age 24.
In addition, the study shows that bullying situations affect
the social and emotional development of the children involved. These findings
suggest that adolescents in areas of wide income inequality should be a focus
of antibullying campaigns.
Frank J. Elgar, Ph.D.,
Wendy Craig, Ph.D., William Boyce, Antony Morgan, M.Sc., and Rachel
Vella-Zarb, B.A. Journal of Adolescent
Health 45 (2009) 351359
Wider income gaps, wider waistbands? An ecological study of obesity and income inequality.
Wider income gaps, wider waistbands? An ecological study of obesity and income inequality.
Obesity seems to be(come) a major
problem forour society. Throughout the
developed countries, the obesity rate has increased significantly or has even
doubled in just a few years. Where once the rich were fat and the poor were
thin, in developed countries these patterns are now reversed, even though this
may be a bit counterintuitive.
Previous studies have already
examined the level of inequality which resulted in a high level of inequality
in the USA in comparison with very low inequality rates in Japan and the
Scandinavian countries. Also the obesity rate was examined with comparable
results: a low rate in Japan compared to a high rate in the USA.
Purpose of this study was to investigate the association between income inequality and the
obesity rate. Therefore, 21 eligible developed countries were compared to each
other. The data on income inequality came from the United Nations, obesity rate
data came from the International Obesity TaskForce, an international
association for the study of obesity.
The results were almost as expected:
indeed, there is found a positive correlation between income inequality and
obesity. However, this is only a slight correlation. In my point of view the
question can be raised whether the obesity rate would decrease significantly if
unequal societies evolve to more egalitarian societies.
Kate E Pickett, Shona Kelly, Eric Brunner, Tim Lobstein & Richard G
Wilkinson, 2005. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 59, 670-674.
Inequality as a cause of environmental degradation.
Inequality as a cause of environmental degradation.
The paper consists of two large parts. On the one hand environmental degradation is represented as a function of the balance of power between the winners and the losers and on the other hand inequality is seen as the main reason of causing the degradation.
The first part mainly describes the different ways that the winners use to impose the costs on the losers and by winners they mean the people who derive benefits from the negative activity on the environment and by losers they mean the people who bear the costs. One thing really seemed important to me and that was the fact that the activity is socially justified as long as the positive consequences for the winners compensated the costs of the losers.
In the second part they illustrate the relationship between inequality and environmental degradation on the basis of a well explained graph. The wealthy people will tend more to pollute the air in an environment where a lot of poor people live because the poors ability and willingness to pay is too low to avoid it. This will result into a bigger difference between rich and poor and leads to a vicious circle.
James K. Boyce, 1994, inequality as a cause of environmental degradation, ecological economics,66,169-178
The author wants to investigate the influence of structural and cultural processesas well as the influence of gender differences on the committing of crimes.
The first part of the text shows us that something called socioeconomic status (SES) has an influence on violent delinquency. It concludes that boys from lower SES families have a higher chance to get involved in crime. The reason for this is because boys are less supervised by their parents and the parents of lower SES families are more likely to use coercive measures such as commands, restrictions, threats and physical punishment to solve problems.
Another important factor is the interactions that the youthhas with others who are engaged in violent delinquency. Its obvious that there exists a positive correlation between being connected with people who have a history of violence and the opportunity to get into crime.
The second part of the text deals with the gender differences.
Girls who have learned the traditional definitions(= the idea of woman in the middle ages) of gender will be less violent than the girls who havent. By contrast the boys who accept these definitions may be more likely to use physical force and aggression.
We could conclude that the ability to commit a crime or to be violent differs from person to person.
HEIMER, K. and COSTER, S. D. ,1999, the gendering of violent delinquency, Criminology, 37, 277318
