Association of pupil vandalism, bullying and truancy with teachers' absence due to illness: A multilevel analysis

Abstract

The aim of this study was to examine whether vandalism, bullying, and truancy among pupils at school are associated with absence due to illness among teachers. Data on such problem behaviour of 17,033 pupils in 90 schools were linked to absence records of 2364 teachers. Pupil reported vandalism and bullying at the school-level were associated with teachers' short-term (1- to 3-day) absences. Cumulative exposure to various forms of pupils' problem behaviour was associated with even higher rates of short-term absences among teachers. No association was found between pupils' problem behaviour and teachers' long-term (> 3-day) absences. In conclusion, there seems to be a link between pupils' problem behaviour and teachers' short-term absence due to illness. Further work should determine whether problem behaviour is a cause or a consequence of absences or whether the association is noncausal.

Introduction

Problem behaviour at school includes forms of deviant behaviours that are interrelated, such as bullying, vandalism, and truancy. These behaviours are linked to a number of factors related to pupils' home, friends, school, and health (Luopa et al., 2006, Luopa et al., 2008), and international comparisons show large differences in these behaviours between countries. According to a recent survey, for example, Finland was at the lower end of the continuum with a total of 17% of Finnish 15 year olds reporting being bullied (Currie et al., 2008). In the United States, the corresponding figure was 21%, whereas in countries with the most bullying, such as Greece and some Eastern European countries, over 40% reported being bullied (Currie et al., 2008). Vandalism and truancy are also relatively common worldwide. In Finland, 10% to 17% of pupils had damaged school property at least once during the last year (National Institute for Health and Welfare, 2009) or skipped school more than once during the last 30 days. In the UK, 7% of 15 and 16 year olds had skipped school during the last 30 days (Miller & Plant, 1999). The truancy percent in the Netherlands was 13%, and in the United States it varied from 11% to 16% depending on high school grade (van der Aa, Rebollo-Mesa, Williemsen, Boomsma, & Bartels, 2009).

Findings from several studies suggest that vandalism, bullying, and truancy are a part of a wider cluster of antisocial behaviours, poor performance, and unfavourable circumstances (Miller and Plant, 1999, van der Aa et al., 2009) among youth. A study by Carrasco, Barker, Tremblay, and Vitaro (2006), for example, showed that adolescent boys who were on a persistent, upward vandalism trajectory also scored higher in impulsiveness, risk-taking, and energy and lower in empathy than those who were not. Earlier research has also shown that problem behaviour is more common among children with special educational needs (Kivivuori & Salmi, 2009), in larger schools (Leung & Ferris, 2008), and who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds (Eisenbraun, 2007). The risk for truancy has been found to be higher among pupils with low school satisfaction and difficulties in their studies (Luopa et al., 2006) and in schools with psychosocial work environment problems among the staff (Virtanen et al., 2009).

Along with truancy (Virtanen et al., 2009), other forms of pupils' problem behaviour have been linked with teachers' perceptions of the psychosocial environment at school. For example, verbal insults from pupils have been associated with increased imbalance of efforts and rewards and self-rated ill-health of teachers (Unterbrink et al., 2008). Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine pupils' problem behaviour as a psychosocial risk factor potentially affecting teachers' absence due to illness.

A psychosocial risk factor is defined as a “measurement that potentially relates psychological phenomena to the social environment and to pathophysiological changes” (Hemingway & Marmot, 1999, p. 1460). Psychosocial risk factors operate especially through stress reactions, and in work settings, these factors are a part of the psychosocial work environment. The most widely studied theories of stress caused by psychosocial factors in the psychosocial work environment are the job demand–control–social support model by Karasek, 1979, Karasek and Theorell, 1990 and the effort–reward imbalance model by Siegrist (1996). The psychosocial risk factors in these theoretical models include high job demands (e.g., work overload and time pressure), low job control (e.g., having little decision latitude or control over one's work), low social support from supervisor and colleagues, and imbalance between efforts put to work and rewards received from work. In previous studies, teachers' absences due to illness have been associated with the following features of the psychosocial work environment—perceptions of low flexibility, low autonomy, and low social support at work, restrictive leadership at school, and low commitment to school among personnel (Gaziel, 2004).

Problem behaviour among pupils may deteriorate the psychosocial work environment at school by increasing job demands or feelings of imbalance between efforts and rewards, and thus affecting teachers' well-being (Unterbrink et al., 2008). Moreover, findings from a recent study suggest that pupils' school satisfaction, also an indicator of psychosocial environment at school, may predict teachers' absences, and particularly absences due to mental disorders (Ervasti et al., 2011). Studies conducted in Australia (Bradley, Green, & Leeves, 2007) and Israel (Gaziel, 2004, Rosenblatt et al., 2010) also suggest that, although most absences are ill-health related and involuntary, absenteeism may also represent shirking behaviour (i.e., voluntary absenteeism) among teachers and be affected by school-level absence norms (i.e., more general absence behaviour and an absence culture by personnel at school).

Although research includes examinations of the predictors of teachers' health and absence due to illness, the extent to which problem behaviour among pupils is associated with teachers' absences remains unknown. The association between pupils' problem behaviour and teachers' absence due to illness is plausible as several studies have shown associations between pupil problem behaviour and teacher stress and burnout, a correlate of absence due to illness (Bauer et al., 2007, Borg et al., 1991, Geving, 2007, Hastings and Bham, 2003, Kovess-Masféty et al., 2007, Kyriacou and Sutcliffe, 1978, Moreno-Abril et al., 2007, O'Connor and Clarke, 1990, Unterbrink et al., 2008). However, the vast majority of these studies has relied solely on teachers' self-reports, introducing a potential common method bias arising from response styles and the fact that psychological distress may affect the perceptions of environmental factors, such as the workplace itself. Indeed, common method bias is an important source of both Type I (false positive) and Type II (false negative) errors in studies based on self-reported data (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, & Podsakoff, 2003).

Despite the relatively high prevalence of pupil problem behaviour, we are not aware of any published study on the association of this behaviour with teachers' absence due to illness. In this study, we examined the association between pupil-reported problem behaviour at school and teachers' short- and long-term absences due to illness, as indicated by illness absence records. Making this association explicit has potentially important implications for allocation of school resources and health promotion for both teachers and pupils.