Bullying victimization, language proficiency, and school belonging among Syrian refugee early adolescents in Canada: A cross‐lagged and random‐intercept cross‐lagged panel study

Abstract

Refugee children's school adjustment is often associated with host country language proficiency, peer victimization, and school belonging, but longitudinal associations among these constructs may reflect both stable child differences and time‐varying school‐experience processes. This three‐wave longitudinal study examined English language proficiency, bullying victimization, and school belonging in 68 Syrian refugee children in Canada. We estimated a cross‐lagged panel model (CLPM) and a random intercept cross‐lagged panel model (RI‐CLPM), both with family‐clustered robust inference and controlling for child's age and gender, to distinguish stable child effects from time‐varying school‐experience processes. The former addresses correlation (e.g., children show trait stability in the three constructs and their associations over time) while the latter addresses whether time‐varying school experiences precede later change (e.g., bullying is followed by lower host country language proficiency). In the CLPM, significant cross‐lag paths showed that higher Wave 1 bullying victimization predicted lower Wave 2 English language proficiency, higher Wave 1 English language proficiency predicted higher Wave 2 school belonging, higher Wave 1 school belonging predicted higher Wave 2 bullying victimization and higher Wave 2 school belonging predicted higher Wave 3 English language proficiency. In the RI‐CLPM with the stable child effect removed, only two significant cross‐lags were seen: higher Wave 1 bullying victimization predicted lower Wave 2 English language proficiency (expected), and higher Wave 1 school belonging predicted higher Wave 2 bullying victimization (unexpected). The difference in the findings from the two models suggests that observed longitudinal associations between English language proficiency, bullying victimization, and school belonging are primarily stable between‐child differences, whereas early bullying was associated with lower later English language proficiency.