article · BMC Psychology
Peer mistreatment and bullying among healthcare students can impair wellbeing and professional development. An institutional study in the United Arab Emirates surveyed 307 undergraduates studying medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, and nursing to investigate links between Big Five personality traits and self-reported bullying perpetration behaviours. Using standard assessment instruments, the survey recorded an overall mean perpetration behaviour score of 1.56 on a four-point scale. Fully adjusted regression models revealed that lower agreeableness was significantly associated with higher self-reported perpetration behaviours, an effect that remained consistent across sensitivity checks. Other personality domains, including openness, extraversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism, did not yield conclusive associations, partly due to low measurement reliability. Because the findings are cross-sectional and rely on self-reported metrics with measurement limitations, they cannot support causal conclusions or individual trait screening, but they highlight areas for broader institutional prevention research.
Bullying among healthcare students damages psychological safety and learning environments. Identifying behavioural correlates helps universities recognise factors that influence institutional climate. However, the reliance on self-reporting and imperfect measurement scales demonstrates that institutions should focus on comprehensive anti-bullying environments rather than using personality screening to judge or label individual students.
The abstract does not indicate an application pathway, explicitly advising against commercial or operational uses such as personality screening, trait-based interventions, or student labelling.
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Bullying and peer mistreatment in health-professions education may undermine psychological safety, wellbeing, and professional learning. This study examined the association between agreeableness and self-reported bullying-related perpetration behaviors among health-professions undergraduates in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Other Big Five domains and age-band modification of the openness association were secondary or exploratory. This single-institution cross-sectional survey used a non-probability sample of 307 undergraduates from medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, and nursing. The outcome was the mean of the six perpetration-oriented items of the Bullying Prevalence Questionnaire (range 1–4), interpreted as behavior frequency rather than a bullying diagnosis or prevalence estimate. Personality was assessed with the English 44-item Big Five Inventory (BFI-44). Age band, year, and college were modeled categorically. Welch’s analysis of variance was used when variances were unequal. Hierarchical linear regression used HC3 heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors; bootstrap, Huber M-estimation, and fractional-logit analyses assessed robustness. The mean bullying-related behavior score was 1.56 (SD 0.66); 109 participants (35.5%) scored 1.00. Age-band means differed, Welch F(2, 96.35) = 7.75, p <.001. In the fully adjusted model, lower agreeableness was associated with higher behavior scores (standardized β=−0.455, HC3 95% CI − 0.583 to − 0.326, p <.001) and remained consistent in sensitivity analyses. However, the agreeableness estimate was derived from a scale with only modest internal consistency (α = 0.642; ω = 0.632) and reverse-keying anomalies. The categorical age band × openness block was not statistically significant (ΔR²=0.015, F-change(2, 290) = 3.02, p =.0502). BFI reliability was weak for extraversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism; therefore, corresponding null findings are uncertain. Lower agreeableness was the most consistent measured personality correlate among the assessed domains, but the estimate rests on a psychometrically imperfect scale. The cross-sectional design, self-report, omitted sociocultural covariates, and BFI measurement limitations preclude causal, mechanistic, or diagnostic interpretation. The findings should inform general institution-level prevention research—not personality screening, student labeling, or trait-based intervention—and require replication with locally validated measures.
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DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05519-w
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