Understanding peer bullying and broader school aggression from a school psychology perspective: a Social-Ecological...

Peer bullying is increasingly recognized as a contextual issue shaped by the school environment. Although extracurricular activities are often considered protective, their association with school-level aggressive and misconduct behaviors, including peer intimidation-related behaviors, appears to depend on broader institutional factors rather than operating in isolation.

Grounded in a social-ecological framework, this study investigates the relationship between the availability of extracurricular activities and school-level aggressive and misconduct behaviors, specifically examining the mediating role of school-level instructional barriers and the moderating role of learning-related hindrances.

Cross-sectional data from the PISA 2022 database were analyzed. After handling missing data, the final analytic sample comprised 16,555 schools across 75 countries. A moderated mediation model was tested to examine the association between the availability of extracurricular activities and school-level aggressive and misconduct behaviors, with problems hindering the school's instructional capacity as a mediator and phenomena hindering students' learning as a moderator of the direct association.

Greater availability of extracurricular activities was associated with lower levels of school-level aggressive and misconduct behaviors, indirectly through reduced problems that hindered the school's instructional capacity. In addition, the direct association between extracurricular activities and school-level aggressive and misconduct behaviors varied depending on the level of phenomena hindering students' learning. These findings indicate that the relationship between extracurricular activities and aggression- and misconduct-related school problems is shaped not only by institutional barriers but also by the broader school learning context.

The findings suggest that extracurricular activities are not standalone protective factors but operate within a broader school ecology. Their protective potential is partly explained by instructional capacity and depends on the level of learning-related hindrances within the school environment, highlighting the need for comprehensive school-wide strategies addressing broader aggression- and misconduct-related school problems, including peer bullying-related behaviors.