The effects of childhood bullying on adult trust levels

There are multiple negative effects, which can occur after experiencing bullying victimisation. The current study aims to investigate whether experiencing such victimisation throughout compulsory education has an effect on an individual’s trust levels throughout adulthood. A sample of 110 participants were employed, all of whom completed a survey containing the Retrospective Bullying Questionnaire (Schäfer et al., 2004), and four different trust scales. Using four separate multiple regressions, it was found that nine variables significantly predicted variations in trust level scores for all four of the scales, which suggests that being the victim of bullying reduces trust levels in adulthood. Indirect bullying and gender were the two predictor variables, which significantly predicted trust levels when viewed individually. The findings of this study may be applied to both future interventions aimed at reducing bullying and counselling techniques when attempting to increase victims’ trust levels.