and learning, linköping university, linköping, sweden; b occupational and environmental medicine center, Department of health, medicine and caring sciences, linköping university, linköping, sweden ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to investigate the risks of being bullied at work based on country of birth, and compared to natives. We used a representative sample of the Swedish workforce collected in the autumn of 2017 (n = 1856). The results showed a more than doubled risk of being bullied for

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... the foreign-born. Coming from a culturally dissimilar country, the risk of becoming a victim of bullying was almost fourfold. The increased risk was only for person-related bullying, indicating a risk of being excluded from the social work environment. From a social identity perspective, foreign-born is a salient out-group easy to single out and with a predatory bullying origin they easily become the scapegoat of the group or just an easy target of frustration. There was a greater risk associated with self-labelling as bullied than with the behavioural experience method. Self-labelling could possibly be construed as a mix of exposure to bullying behaviours, and being discriminated against, making it a less suitable method when studying bullying for minorities. The study shows the importance of working with these issues. It severely affects both individuals and the organization in which the negative treatment is occurring. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noDerivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.