School Relational Cohesion, Gender-inequitable Attitudes, and Bullying Perpetration Across 15 Education Systems: Less Bullying Overall Without a Weaker Attitude-behavior Link

Abstract Gender-inequitable attitudes are consistently associated with bullying perpetration, yet whether supportive schools weaken the link between those attitudes and behavior, or only lower the overall level of perpetration, remains unclear. Data came from the older cohort of the Survey on Social and Emotional Skills 2023. The analytic sample comprised 47,962 mid-adolescents (49.3% girls, 49.5% boys; M age = 15.76 years, SD = 0.29) in 1,263 schools across 15 education systems, five of them national samples and ten cities or sub-national regions. Two-level structural equation models with site indicators were estimated. Endorsement of gender-inequitable attitudes was positively associated with perpetration, and a more female-concentrated household division of labor was indirectly associated with perpetration through those attitudes. Schools higher in relational cohesion reported less bullying on average, but relational cohesion was not associated with a weaker within-school attitude-behavior link. A more hostile school gender climate was associated with both more bullying and a modestly stronger link. An exploratory gender difference in this moderation was not reproduced in split-sample models. Alignment analysis flagged 48% of gender-attitude parameters as noninvariant across systems.