Ithaca College

Jen Tennant (Economics) and Wahid Khan (Econ BA '16) just published, "On Bullying, Mental Health, and Weight Perception," in the Spring 2020 volume of Pennsylvania Economic Review.

No previous studies have directly looked at how bullying affects weight perception, which is a gap this article is attempting to fill. We study the effect of being bullied on negative health outcomes in order to more carefully understand and quantify all the costs of bullying. We use propensity score matching techniques to make the samples of the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System more comparable. Bullying is associated with a weight disconnect in which a person perceives themselves as overweight when they are not. Twice as many bullied adolescents suffer from depression than those who were not bullied. Focusing on bullying prevention and intervention may have spillover effects on other adolescent mental health costs.

http://www.econpea.org/pub/PERSpring2020V27N1.pdf