With back-to-school season upon us and 19% of high school students reporting being bullied on school property, the personal-finance website WalletHub today released its report on 2018’s States with the Biggest Bullying Problems.
To identify the states where bullying is most pervasive, WalletHub’s analysts compared 47 states and the District of Columbia across 20 key metrics, ranging from “bullying-incident rate” to “truancy costs for schools” to “share of high school students bullied online.”
Bullying Prevalence & Prevention in Florida (1=Biggest, 24=Avg.):
- 46th – % of High School Students Bullied on School Property
- 45th – % of High School Students Bullied Online
- 15th – % of High School Students Involved in Physical Fight at School
- 36th – % of High School Students Who Attempted Suicide
- 38th – Student-to-Counselor Ratio
In order to identify the states with the biggest bullying problems, WalletHub compared the 47 states and the District of Columbia across three key dimensions: 1) Bullying Prevalence, 2) Bullying Impact & Treatment and 3) Anti-Bullying Laws.
We evaluated these categories using 20 relevant metrics, which are listed below with their corresponding weights. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with 100 representing the highest prevalence of bullying.
We then determined each state’s weighted average across all metrics to calculate its overall score and used the resulting scores to rank-order our sample.
Please note that Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington were excluded from our analysis due to data limitations.
