introduction in research of bullying

Preventing Bullying Through Science, Policy, and Practice (2016)

Chapter: 1 introduction, 1 introduction.

Bullying, long tolerated by many as a rite of passage into adulthood, is now recognized as a major and preventable public health problem, one that can have long-lasting consequences ( McDougall and Vaillancourt, 2015 ; Wolke and Lereya, 2015 ). Those consequences—for those who are bullied, for the perpetrators of bullying, and for witnesses who are present during a bullying event—include poor school performance, anxiety, depression, and future delinquent and aggressive behavior. Federal, state, and local governments have responded by adopting laws and implementing programs to prevent bullying and deal with its consequences. However, many of these responses have been undertaken with little attention to what is known about bullying and its effects. Even the definition of bullying varies among both researchers and lawmakers, though it generally includes physical and verbal behavior, behavior leading to social isolation, and behavior that uses digital communications technology (cyberbullying). This report adopts the term “bullying behavior,” which is frequently used in the research field, to cover all of these behaviors.

Bullying behavior is evident as early as preschool, although it peaks during the middle school years ( Currie et al., 2012 ; Vaillancourt et al., 2010 ). It can occur in diverse social settings, including classrooms, school gyms and cafeterias, on school buses, and online. Bullying behavior affects not only the children and youth who are bullied, who bully, and who are both bullied and bully others but also bystanders to bullying incidents. Given the myriad situations in which bullying can occur and the many people who may be involved, identifying effective prevention programs and policies is challenging, and it is unlikely that any one approach will be ap-

propriate in all situations. Commonly used bullying prevention approaches include policies regarding acceptable behavior in schools and behavioral interventions to promote positive cultural norms.

STUDY CHARGE

Recognizing that bullying behavior is a major public health problem that demands the concerted and coordinated time and attention of parents, educators and school administrators, health care providers, policy makers, families, and others concerned with the care of children, a group of federal agencies and private foundations asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to undertake a study of what is known and what needs to be known to further the field of preventing bullying behavior. The Committee on the Biological and Psychosocial Effects of Peer Victimization:

Lessons for Bullying Prevention was created to carry out this task under the Academies’ Board on Children, Youth, and Families and the Committee on Law and Justice. The study received financial support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Highmark Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Semi J. and Ruth W. Begun Foundation, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The full statement of task for the committee is presented in Box 1-1 .

Although the committee acknowledges the importance of this topic as it pertains to all children in the United States and in U.S. territories, this report focuses on the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Also, while the committee acknowledges that bullying behavior occurs in the school

environment for youth in foster care, in juvenile justice facilities, and in other residential treatment facilities, this report does not address bullying behavior in those environments because it is beyond the study charge.

CONTEXT FOR THE STUDY

This section of the report highlights relevant work in the field and, later in the chapter under “The Committee’s Approach,” presents the conceptual framework and corresponding definitions of terms that the committee has adopted.

Historical Context

Bullying behavior was first characterized in the scientific literature as part of the childhood experience more than 100 years ago in “Teasing and Bullying,” published in the Pedagogical Seminary ( Burk, 1897 ). The author described bullying behavior, attempted to delineate causes and cures for the tormenting of others, and called for additional research ( Koo, 2007 ). Nearly a century later, Dan Olweus, a Swedish research professor of psychology in Norway, conducted an intensive study on bullying ( Olweus, 1978 ). The efforts of Olweus brought awareness to the issue and motivated other professionals to conduct their own research, thereby expanding and contributing to knowledge of bullying behavior. Since Olweus’s early work, research on bullying has steadily increased (see Farrington and Ttofi, 2009 ; Hymel and Swearer, 2015 ).

Over the past few decades, venues where bullying behavior occurs have expanded with the advent of the Internet, chat rooms, instant messaging, social media, and other forms of digital electronic communication. These modes of communication have provided a new communal avenue for bullying. While the media reports linking bullying to suicide suggest a causal relationship, the available research suggests that there are often multiple factors that contribute to a youth’s suicide-related ideology and behavior. Several studies, however, have demonstrated an association between bullying involvement and suicide-related ideology and behavior (see, e.g., Holt et al., 2015 ; Kim and Leventhal, 2008 ; Sourander, 2010 ; van Geel et al., 2014 ).

In 2013, the Health Resources and Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services requested that the Institute of Medicine 1 and the National Research Council convene an ad hoc planning committee to plan and conduct a 2-day public workshop to highlight relevant information and knowledge that could inform a multidisciplinary

___________________

1 Prior to 2015, the National Academy of Medicine was known as the Institute of Medicine.

road map on next steps for the field of bullying prevention. Content areas that were explored during the April 2014 workshop included the identification of conceptual models and interventions that have proven effective in decreasing bullying and the antecedents to bullying while increasing protective factors that mitigate the negative health impact of bullying. The discussions highlighted the need for a better understanding of the effectiveness of program interventions in realistic settings; the importance of understanding what works for whom and under what circumstances, as well as the influence of different mediators (i.e., what accounts for associations between variables) and moderators (i.e., what affects the direction or strength of associations between variables) in bullying prevention efforts; and the need for coordination among agencies to prevent and respond to bullying. The workshop summary ( Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, 2014c ) informs this committee’s work.

Federal Efforts to Address Bullying and Related Topics

Currently, there is no comprehensive federal statute that explicitly prohibits bullying among children and adolescents, including cyberbullying. However, in the wake of the growing concerns surrounding the implications of bullying, several federal initiatives do address bullying among children and adolescents, and although some of them do not primarily focus on bullying, they permit some funds to be used for bullying prevention purposes.

The earliest federal initiative was in 1999, when three agencies collaborated to establish the Safe Schools/Healthy Students initiative in response to a series of deadly school shootings in the late 1990s. The program is administered by the U.S. Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Justice to prevent youth violence and promote the healthy development of youth. It is jointly funded by the Department of Education and by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The program has provided grantees with both the opportunity to benefit from collaboration and the tools to sustain it through deliberate planning, more cost-effective service delivery, and a broader funding base ( Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2015 ).

The next major effort was in 2010, when the Department of Education awarded $38.8 million in grants under the Safe and Supportive Schools (S3) Program to 11 states to support statewide measurement of conditions for learning and targeted programmatic interventions to improve conditions for learning, in order to help schools improve safety and reduce substance use. The S3 Program was administered by the Safe and Supportive Schools Group, which also administered the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act State and Local Grants Program, authorized by the

1994 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. 2 It was one of several programs related to developing and maintaining safe, disciplined, and drug-free schools. In addition to the S3 grants program, the group administered a number of interagency agreements with a focus on (but not limited to) bullying, school recovery research, data collection, and drug and violence prevention activities ( U.S. Department of Education, 2015 ).

A collaborative effort among the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, Interior, and Justice; the Federal Trade Commission; and the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders created the Federal Partners in Bullying Prevention (FPBP) Steering Committee. Led by the U.S. Department of Education, the FPBP works to coordinate policy, research, and communications on bullying topics. The FPBP Website provides extensive resources on bullying behavior, including information on what bullying is, its risk factors, its warning signs, and its effects. 3 The FPBP Steering Committee also plans to provide details on how to get help for those who have been bullied. It also was involved in creating the “Be More than a Bystander” Public Service Announcement campaign with the Ad Council to engage students in bullying prevention. To improve school climate and reduce rates of bullying nationwide, FPBP has sponsored four bullying prevention summits attended by education practitioners, policy makers, researchers, and federal officials.

In 2014, the National Institute of Justice—the scientific research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice—launched the Comprehensive School Safety Initiative with a congressional appropriation of $75 million. The funds are to be used for rigorous research to produce practical knowledge that can improve the safety of schools and students, including bullying prevention. The initiative is carried out through partnerships among researchers, educators, and other stakeholders, including law enforcement, behavioral and mental health professionals, courts, and other justice system professionals ( National Institute of Justice, 2015 ).

In 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act was signed by President Obama, reauthorizing the 50-year-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which is committed to providing equal opportunities for all students. Although bullying is neither defined nor prohibited in this act, it is explicitly mentioned in regard to applicability of safe school funding, which it had not been in previous iterations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

The above are examples of federal initiatives aimed at promoting the

2 The Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act was included as Title IV, Part A, of the 1994 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. See http://www.ojjdp.gov/pubs/gun_violence/sect08-i.html [October 2015].

3 For details, see http://www.stopbullying.gov/ [October 2015].

healthy development of youth, improving the safety of schools and students, and reducing rates of bullying behavior. There are several other federal initiatives that address student bullying directly or allow funds to be used for bullying prevention activities.

Definitional Context

The terms “bullying,” “harassment,” and “peer victimization” have been used in the scientific literature to refer to behavior that is aggressive, is carried out repeatedly and over time, and occurs in an interpersonal relationship where a power imbalance exists ( Eisenberg and Aalsma, 2005 ). Although some of these terms have been used interchangeably in the literature, peer victimization is targeted aggressive behavior of one child against another that causes physical, emotional, social, or psychological harm. While conflict and bullying among siblings are important in their own right ( Tanrikulu and Campbell, 2015 ), this area falls outside of the scope of the committee’s charge. Sibling conflict and aggression falls under the broader concept of interpersonal aggression, which includes dating violence, sexual assault, and sibling violence, in addition to bullying as defined for this report. Olweus (1993) noted that bullying, unlike other forms of peer victimization where the children involved are equally matched, involves a power imbalance between the perpetrator and the target, where the target has difficulty defending him or herself and feels helpless against the aggressor. This power imbalance is typically considered a defining feature of bullying, which distinguishes this particular form of aggression from other forms, and is typically repeated in multiple bullying incidents involving the same individuals over time ( Olweus, 1993 ).

Bullying and violence are subcategories of aggressive behavior that overlap ( Olweus, 1996 ). There are situations in which violence is used in the context of bullying. However, not all forms of bullying (e.g., rumor spreading) involve violent behavior. The committee also acknowledges that perspective about intentions can matter and that in many situations, there may be at least two plausible perceptions involved in the bullying behavior.

A number of factors may influence one’s perception of the term “bullying” ( Smith and Monks, 2008 ). Children and adolescents’ understanding of the term “bullying” may be subject to cultural interpretations or translations of the term ( Hopkins et al., 2013 ). Studies have also shown that influences on children’s understanding of bullying include the child’s experiences as he or she matures and whether the child witnesses the bullying behavior of others ( Hellström et al., 2015 ; Monks and Smith, 2006 ; Smith and Monks, 2008 ).

In 2010, the FPBP Steering Committee convened its first summit, which brought together more than 150 nonprofit and corporate leaders,

researchers, practitioners, parents, and youths to identify challenges in bullying prevention. Discussions at the summit revealed inconsistencies in the definition of bullying behavior and the need to create a uniform definition of bullying. Subsequently, a review of the 2011 CDC publication of assessment tools used to measure bullying among youth ( Hamburger et al., 2011 ) revealed inconsistent definitions of bullying and diverse measurement strategies. Those inconsistencies and diverse measurements make it difficult to compare the prevalence of bullying across studies ( Vivolo et al., 2011 ) and complicate the task of distinguishing bullying from other types of aggression between youths. A uniform definition can support the consistent tracking of bullying behavior over time, facilitate the comparison of bullying prevalence rates and associated risk and protective factors across different data collection systems, and enable the collection of comparable information on the performance of bullying intervention and prevention programs across contexts ( Gladden et al., 2014 ). The CDC and U.S. Department of Education collaborated on the creation of the following uniform definition of bullying (quoted in Gladden et al., 2014, p. 7 ):

Bullying is any unwanted aggressive behavior(s) by another youth or group of youths who are not siblings or current dating partners that involves an observed or perceived power imbalance and is repeated multiple times or is highly likely to be repeated. Bullying may inflict harm or distress on the targeted youth including physical, psychological, social, or educational harm.

This report noted that the definition includes school-age individuals ages 5-18 and explicitly excludes sibling violence and violence that occurs in the context of a dating or intimate relationship ( Gladden et al., 2014 ). This definition also highlighted that there are direct and indirect modes of bullying, as well as different types of bullying. Direct bullying involves “aggressive behavior(s) that occur in the presence of the targeted youth”; indirect bullying includes “aggressive behavior(s) that are not directly communicated to the targeted youth” ( Gladden et al., 2014, p. 7 ). The direct forms of violence (e.g., sibling violence, teen dating violence, intimate partner violence) can include aggression that is physical, sexual, or psychological, but the context and uniquely dynamic nature of the relationship between the target and the perpetrator in which these acts occur is different from that of peer bullying. Examples of direct bullying include pushing, hitting, verbal taunting, or direct written communication. A common form of indirect bullying is spreading rumors. Four different types of bullying are commonly identified—physical, verbal, relational, and damage to property. Some observational studies have shown that the different forms of bullying that youths commonly experience may overlap ( Bradshaw et al., 2015 ;

Godleski et al., 2015 ). The four types of bullying are defined as follows ( Gladden et al., 2014 ):

Physical bullying involves the use of physical force (e.g., shoving, hitting, spitting, pushing, and tripping).
Verbal bullying involves oral or written communication that causes harm (e.g., taunting, name calling, offensive notes or hand gestures, verbal threats).
Relational bullying is behavior “designed to harm the reputation and relationships of the targeted youth (e.g., social isolation, rumor spreading, posting derogatory comments or pictures online).”
Damage to property is “theft, alteration, or damaging of the target youth’s property by the perpetrator to cause harm.”

In recent years, a new form of aggression or bullying has emerged, labeled “cyberbullying,” in which the aggression occurs through modern technological devices, specifically mobile phones or the Internet ( Slonje and Smith, 2008 ). Cyberbullying may take the form of mean or nasty messages or comments, rumor spreading through posts or creation of groups, and exclusion by groups of peers online.

While the CDC definition identifies bullying that occurs using technology as electronic bullying and views that as a context or location where bullying occurs, one of the major challenges in the field is how to conceptualize and define cyberbullying ( Tokunaga, 2010 ). The extent to which the CDC definition can be applied to cyberbullying is unclear, particularly with respect to several key concepts within the CDC definition. First, whether determination of an interaction as “wanted” or “unwanted” or whether communication was intended to be harmful can be challenging to assess in the absence of important in-person socioemotional cues (e.g., vocal tone, facial expressions). Second, assessing “repetition” is challenging in that a single harmful act on the Internet has the potential to be shared or viewed multiple times ( Sticca and Perren, 2013 ). Third, cyberbullying can involve a less powerful peer using technological tools to bully a peer who is perceived to have more power. In this manner, technology may provide the tools that create a power imbalance, in contrast to traditional bullying, which typically involves an existing power imbalance.

A study that used focus groups with college students to discuss whether the CDC definition applied to cyberbullying found that students were wary of applying the definition due to their perception that cyberbullying often involves less emphasis on aggression, intention, and repetition than other forms of bullying ( Kota et al., 2014 ). Many researchers have responded to this lack of conceptual and definitional clarity by creating their own measures to assess cyberbullying. It is noteworthy that very few of these

definitions and measures include the components of traditional bullying—i.e., repetition, power imbalance, and intent ( Berne et al., 2013 ). A more recent study argues that the term “cyberbullying” should be reserved for incidents that involve key aspects of bullying such as repetition and differential power ( Ybarra et al., 2014 ).

Although the formulation of a uniform definition of bullying appears to be a step in the right direction for the field of bullying prevention, there are some limitations of the CDC definition. For example, some researchers find the focus on school-age youth as well as the repeated nature of bullying to be rather limiting; similarly the exclusion of bullying in the context of sibling relationships or dating relationships may preclude full appreciation of the range of aggressive behaviors that may co-occur with or constitute bullying behavior. As noted above, other researchers have raised concerns about whether cyberbullying should be considered a particular form or mode under the broader heading of bullying as suggested in the CDC definition, or whether a separate defintion is needed. Furthermore, the measurement of bullying prevalence using such a definiton of bullying is rather complex and does not lend itself well to large-scale survey research. The CDC definition was intended to inform public health surveillance efforts, rather than to serve as a definition for policy. However, increased alignment between bullying definitions used by policy makers and researchers would greatly advance the field. Much of the extant research on bullying has not applied a consistent definition or one that aligns with the CDC definition. As a result of these and other challenges to the CDC definition, thus far there has been inconsistent adoption of this particular definition by researchers, practitioners, or policy makers; however, as the definition was created in 2014, less than 2 years is not a sufficient amount of time to assess whether it has been successfully adopted or will be in the future.

THE COMMITTEE’S APPROACH

This report builds on the April 2014 workshop, summarized in Building Capacity to Reduce Bullying: Workshop Summary ( Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, 2014c ). The committee’s work was accomplished over an 18-month period that began in October 2014, after the workshop was held and the formal summary of it had been released. The study committee members represented expertise in communication technology, criminology, developmental and clinical psychology, education, mental health, neurobiological development, pediatrics, public health, school administration, school district policy, and state law and policy. (See Appendix E for biographical sketches of the committee members and staff.) The committee met three times in person and conducted other meetings by teleconferences and electronic communication.

Information Gathering

The committee conducted an extensive review of the literature pertaining to peer victimization and bullying. In some instances, the committee drew upon the broader literature on aggression and violence. The review began with an English-language literature search of online databases, including ERIC, Google Scholar, Lexis Law Reviews Database, Medline, PubMed, Scopus, PsycInfo, and Web of Science, and was expanded as literature and resources from other countries were identified by committee members and project staff as relevant. The committee drew upon the early childhood literature since there is substantial evidence indicating that bullying involvement happens as early as preschool (see Vlachou et al., 2011 ). The committee also drew on the literature on late adolescence and looked at related areas of research such as maltreatment for insights into this emerging field.

The committee used a variety of sources to supplement its review of the literature. The committee held two public information-gathering sessions, one with the study sponsors and the second with experts on the neurobiology of bullying; bullying as a group phenomenon and the role of bystanders; the role of media in bullying prevention; and the intersection of social science, the law, and bullying and peer victimization. See Appendix A for the agendas for these two sessions. To explore different facets of bullying and give perspectives from the field, a subgroup of the committee and study staff also conducted a site visit to a northeastern city, where they convened four stakeholder groups comprised, respectively, of local practitioners, school personnel, private foundation representatives, and young adults. The site visit provided the committee with an opportunity for place-based learning about bullying prevention programs and best practices. Each focus group was transcribed and summarized thematically in accordance with this report’s chapter considerations. Themes related to the chapters are displayed throughout the report in boxes titled “Perspectives from the Field”; these boxes reflect responses synthesized from all four focus groups. See Appendix B for the site visit’s agenda and for summaries of the focus groups.

The committee also benefited from earlier reports by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine through its Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education and the Institute of Medicine, most notably:

Reducing Risks for Mental Disorders: Frontiers for Preventive Intervention Research ( Institute of Medicine, 1994 )
Community Programs to Promote Youth Development ( National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2002 )
Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal School Violence ( National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2003 )
Preventing Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Disorders Among Young People: Progress and Possibilities ( National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2009 )
The Science of Adolescent Risk-Taking: Workshop Report ( Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, 2011 )
Communications and Technology for Violence Prevention: Workshop Summary ( Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, 2012 )
Building Capacity to Reduce Bullying: Workshop Summary ( Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, 2014c )
The Evidence for Violence Prevention across the Lifespan and Around the World: Workshop Summary ( Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, 2014a )
Strategies for Scaling Effective Family-Focused Preventive Interventions to Promote Children’s Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Health: Workshop Summary ( Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, 2014b )
Investing in the Health and Well-Being of Young Adults ( Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, 2015 )

Although these past reports and workshop summaries address various forms of violence and victimization, this report is the first consensus study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on the state of the science on the biological and psychosocial consequences of bullying and the risk and protective factors that either increase or decrease bullying behavior and its consequences.

Terminology

Given the variable use of the terms “bullying” and “peer victimization” in both the research-based and practice-based literature, the committee chose to use the current CDC definition quoted above ( Gladden et al., 2014, p. 7 ). While the committee determined that this was the best definition to use, it acknowledges that this definition is not necessarily the most user-friendly definition for students and has the potential to cause problems for students reporting bullying. Not only does this definition provide detail on the common elements of bullying behavior but it also was developed with input from a panel of researchers and practitioners. The committee also followed the CDC in focusing primarily on individuals between the ages of 5 and 18. The committee recognizes that children’s development occurs on a continuum, and so while it relied primarily on the CDC defini-

tion, its work and this report acknowledge the importance of addressing bullying in both early childhood and emerging adulthood. For purposes of this report, the committee used the terms “early childhood” to refer to ages 1-4, “middle childhood” for ages 5 to 10, “early adolescence” for ages 11-14, “middle adolescence” for ages 15-17, and “late adolescence” for ages 18-21. This terminology and the associated age ranges are consistent with the Bright Futures and American Academy of Pediatrics definition of the stages of development. 4

A given instance of bullying behavior involves at least two unequal roles: one or more individuals who perpetrate the behavior (the perpetrator in this instance) and at least one individual who is bullied (the target in this instance). To avoid labeling and potentially further stigmatizing individuals with the terms “bully” and “victim,” which are sometimes viewed as traits of persons rather than role descriptions in a particular instance of behavior, the committee decided to use “individual who is bullied” to refer to the target of a bullying instance or pattern and “individual who bullies” to refer to the perpetrator of a bullying instance or pattern. Thus, “individual who is bullied and bullies others” can refer to one who is either perpetrating a bullying behavior or a target of bullying behavior, depending on the incident. This terminology is consistent with the approach used by the FPBP (see above). Also, bullying is a dynamic social interaction ( Espelage and Swearer, 2003 ) where individuals can play different roles in bullying interactions based on both individual and contextual factors.

The committee used “cyberbullying” to refer to bullying that takes place using technology or digital electronic means. “Digital electronic forms of contact” comprise a broad category that may include e-mail, blogs, social networking Websites, online games, chat rooms, forums, instant messaging, Skype, text messaging, and mobile phone pictures. The committee uses the term “traditional bullying” to refer to bullying behavior that is not cyberbullying (to aid in comparisons), recognizing that the term has been used at times in slightly different senses in the literature.

Where accurate reporting of study findings requires use of the above terms but with senses different from those specified here, the committee has noted the sense in which the source used the term. Similarly, accurate reporting has at times required use of terms such as “victimization” or “victim” that the committee has chosen to avoid in its own statements.

4 For details on these stages of adolescence, see https://brightfutures.aap.org/Bright%20Futures%20Documents/3-Promoting_Child_Development.pdf [October 2015].

ORGANIZATION OF THE REPORT

This report is organized into seven chapters. After this introductory chapter, Chapter 2 provides a broad overview of the scope of the problem.

Chapter 3 focuses on the conceptual frameworks for the study and the developmental trajectory of the child who is bullied, the child who bullies, and the child who is bullied and also bullies. It explores processes that can explain heterogeneity in bullying outcomes by focusing on contextual processes that moderate the effect of individual characteristics on bullying behavior.

Chapter 4 discusses the cyclical nature of bullying and the consequences of bullying behavior. It summarizes what is known about the psychosocial, physical health, neurobiological, academic-performance, and population-level consequences of bullying.

Chapter 5 provides an overview of the landscape in bullying prevention programming. This chapter describes in detail the context for preventive interventions and the specific actions that various stakeholders can take to achieve a coordinated response to bullying behavior. The chapter uses the Institute of Medicine’s multi-tiered framework ( National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2009 ) to present the different levels of approaches to preventing bullying behavior.

Chapter 6 reviews what is known about federal, state, and local laws and policies and their impact on bullying.

After a critical review of the relevant research and practice-based literatures, Chapter 7 discusses the committee conclusions and recommendations and provides a path forward for bullying prevention.

The report includes a number of appendixes. Appendix A includes meeting agendas of the committee’s public information-gathering meetings. Appendix B includes the agenda and summaries of the site visit. Appendix C includes summaries of bullying prevalence data from the national surveys discussed in Chapter 2 . Appendix D provides a list of selected federal resources on bullying for parents and teachers. Appendix E provides biographical sketches of the committee members and project staff.

Berne, S., Frisén, A., Schultze-Krumbholz, A., Scheithauer, H., Naruskov, K., Luik, P., Katzer, C., Erentaite, R., and Zukauskiene, R. (2013). Cyberbullying assessment instruments: A systematic review. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 18 (2), 320-334.

Bradshaw, C.P., Waasdorp, T.E., and Johnson, S.L. (2015). Overlapping verbal, relational, physical, and electronic forms of bullying in adolescence: Influence of school context. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, 44 (3), 494-508.

Burk, F.L. (1897). Teasing and bullying. The Pedagogical Seminary, 4 (3), 336-371.

Currie, C., Zanotti, C., Morgan, A., Currie, D., de Looze, M., Roberts, C., Samdal, O., Smith, O.R., and Barnekow, V. (2012). Social determinants of health and well-being among young people. Copenhagen, Denmark: World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe.

Eisenberg, M.E., and Aalsma, M.C. (2005). Bullying and peer victimization: Position paper of the Society for Adolescent Medicine. Journal of Adolescent Health, 36 (1), 88-91.

Espelage, D.L., and Swearer, S.M. (2003). Research on school bullying and victimization: What have we learned and where do we go from here? School Psychology Review, 32 (3), 365-383.

Farrington, D., and Ttofi, M. (2009). School-based programs to reduce bullying and victimization: A systematic review. Campbell Systematic Reviews, 5 (6).

Finkelhor, D., Ormrod, R.K., and Turner, H.A. (2007). Poly-victimization: A neglected component in child victimization. Child Abuse & Neglect , 31 (1), 7-26.

Gladden, R.M., Vivolo-Kantor, A.M., Hamburger, M.E., and Lumpkin, C.D. (2014). Bullying Surveillance among Youths: Uniform Definitions for Public Health and Recommended Data Elements, Version 1.0 . Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and U.S. Department of Education.

Godleski, S.A., Kamper, K.E., Ostrov, J.M., Hart, E.J., and Blakely-McClure, S.J. (2015). Peer victimization and peer rejection during early childhood. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, 44 (3), 380-392.

Hamburger, M.E., Basile, K.C., and Vivolo, A.M. (2011). Measuring Bullying Victimization, Perpetration, and Bystander Experiences: A Compendium of Assessment Tools. Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

Hellström, L., Persson, L., and Hagquist, C. (2015). Understanding and defining bullying—Adolescents’ own views. Archives of Public Health, 73 (4), 1-9.

Holt, M.K., Vivolo-Kantor, A.M., Polanin, J.R., Holland, K.M., DeGue, S., Matjasko, J.L., Wolfe, M., and Reid, G. (2015). Bullying and suicidal ideation and behaviors: A meta-analysis. Pediatrics, 135 (2), e496-e509.

Hopkins, L., Taylor, L., Bowen, E., and Wood, C. (2013). A qualitative study investigating adolescents’ understanding of aggression, bullying and violence. Children and Youth Services Review, 35 (4), 685-693.

Hymel, S., and Swearer, S.M. (2015). Four decades of research on school bullying: An introduction. American Psychologist, 70 (4), 293.

Institute of Medicine. (1994). Reducing Risks for Mental Disorders: Frontiers for Preventive Intervention Research. Committee on Prevention of Mental Disorders. P.J. Mrazek and R.J. Haggerty, Editors. Division of Biobehavioral Sciences and Mental Disorders. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. (2011). The Science of Adolescent Risk-taking: Workshop Report . Committee on the Science of Adolescence. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. (2012). Communications and Technology for Violence Prevention: Workshop Summary . Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. (2014a). The Evidence for Violence Prevention across the Lifespan and around the World: Workshop Summary . Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. (2014b). Strategies for Scaling Effective Family-Focused Preventive Interventions to Promote Children’s Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Health: Workshop Summary . Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. (2014c). Building Capacity to Reduce Bullying: Workshop Summary . Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. (2015). Investing in the Health and Well-Being of Young Adults . Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Kim, Y.S., and Leventhal, B. (2008). Bullying and suicide. A review. International Journal of Adolescent Medicine and Health, 20 (2), 133-154.

Koo, H. (2007). A time line of the evolution of school bullying in differing social contexts. Asia Pacific Education Review, 8 (1), 107-116.

Kota, R., Schoohs, S., Benson, M., and Moreno, M.A. (2014). Characterizing cyberbullying among college students: Hacking, dirty laundry, and mocking. Societies, 4 (4), 549-560.

McDougall, P., and Vaillancourt, T. (2015). Long-term adult outcomes of peer victimization in childhood and adolescence: Pathways to adjustment and maladjustment. American Psychologist, 70 (4), 300.

Monks, C.P., and Smith, P.K. (2006). Definitions of bullying: Age differences in understanding of the term and the role of experience. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 24 (4), 801-821.

National Institute of Justice. (2015). Comprehensive School Safety Initiative. 2015. Available: http://nij.gov/topics/crime/school-crime/Pages/school-safety-initiative.aspx#about [October 2015].

National Research Council and Institute of Medicine. (2002). Community Programs to Promote Youth Development . Committee on Community-Level Programs for Youth. J. Eccles and J.A. Gootman, Editors. Board on Children, Youth, and Families, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

National Research Council and Institute of Medicine. (2003). Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal School Violence . Case Studies of School Violence Committee. M.H. Moore, C.V. Petrie, A.A. Barga, and B.L. McLaughlin, Editors. Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

National Research Council and Institute of Medicine. (2009). Preventing Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Disorders among Young People: Progress and Possibilities. Committee on the Prevention of Mental Disorders and Substance Abuse Among Children, Youth, and Young Adults: Research Advances and Promising Interventions. M.E. O’Connell, T. Boat, and K.E. Warner, Editors. Board on Children, Youth, and Families, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Olweus, D. (1978). Aggression in the Schools: Bullies and Whipping Boys. Washington, DC: Hemisphere.

Olweus, D. (1993). Bullying at School. What We Know and Whal We Can Do. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Olweus, D. (1996). Bully/victim problems in school. Prospects, 26 (2), 331-359.

Slonje, R., and Smith, P.K. (2008). Cyberbullying: Another main type of bullying? Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 49 (2), 147-154.

Smith, P. ., and Monks, C. . (2008). Concepts of bullying: Developmental and cultural aspects. International Journal of Adolescent Medicine and Health, 20 (2), 101-112.

Sourander, A. (2010). The association of suicide and bullying in childhood to young adulthood: A review of cross-sectional and longitudinal research findings. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 55 (5), 282.

Sticca, F., and Perren, S. (2013). Is cyberbullying worse than traditional bullying? Examining the differential roles of medium, publicity, and anonymity for the perceived severity of bullying. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 42 (5), 739-750.

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2015). Safe Schools/Healthy Students. 2015. Available: http://www.samhsa.gov/safe-schools-healthy-students/about [November 2015].

Tanrikulu, I., and Campbell, M. (2015). Correlates of traditional bullying and cyberbullying perpetration among Australian students. Children and Youth Services Review , 55 , 138-146.

Tokunaga, R.S. (2010). Following you home from school: A critical review and synthesis of research on cyberbullying victimization. Computers in Human Behavior, 26 (3), 277-287.

U.S. Department of Education. (2015). Safe and Supportive Schools . Available: http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/us-department-education-awards-388-million-safe-and-supportive-school-grants [October 2015].

Vaillancourt, T., Trinh, V., McDougall, P., Duku, E., Cunningham, L., Cunningham, C., Hymel, S., and Short, K. (2010). Optimizing population screening of bullying in school-aged children. Journal of School Violence, 9 (3), 233-250.

van Geel, M., Vedder, P., and Tanilon, J. (2014). Relationship between peer victimization, cyberbullying, and suicide in children and adolescents: A meta-analysis. Journal of the American Medical Association. Pediatrics, 168 (5), 435-442.

Vivolo, A.M., Holt, M.K., and Massetti, G.M. (2011). Individual and contextual factors for bullying and peer victimization: Implications for prevention. Journal of School Violence, 10 (2), 201-212.

Vlachou, M., Andreou, E., Botsoglou, K., and Didaskalou, E. (2011). Bully/victim problems among preschool children: A review of current research evidence. Educational Psychology Review, 23 (3), 329-358.

Wolke, D., and Lereya, S.T. (2015). Long-term effects of bullying. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 100 (9), 879-885.

Ybarra, M.L., Espelage, D.L., and Mitchell, K.J. (2014). Differentiating youth who are bullied from other victims of peer-aggression: The importance of differential power and repetition. Journal of Adolescent Health, 55 (2), 293-300.

This page intentionally left blank.

Bullying has long been tolerated as a rite of passage among children and adolescents. There is an implication that individuals who are bullied must have "asked for" this type of treatment, or deserved it. Sometimes, even the child who is bullied begins to internalize this idea. For many years, there has been a general acceptance and collective shrug when it comes to a child or adolescent with greater social capital or power pushing around a child perceived as subordinate. But bullying is not developmentally appropriate; it should not be considered a normal part of the typical social grouping that occurs throughout a child's life.

Although bullying behavior endures through generations, the milieu is changing. Historically, bulling has occurred at school, the physical setting in which most of childhood is centered and the primary source for peer group formation. In recent years, however, the physical setting is not the only place bullying is occurring. Technology allows for an entirely new type of digital electronic aggression, cyberbullying, which takes place through chat rooms, instant messaging, social media, and other forms of digital electronic communication.

Composition of peer groups, shifting demographics, changing societal norms, and modern technology are contextual factors that must be considered to understand and effectively react to bullying in the United States. Youth are embedded in multiple contexts and each of these contexts interacts with individual characteristics of youth in ways that either exacerbate or attenuate the association between these individual characteristics and bullying perpetration or victimization. Recognizing that bullying behavior is a major public health problem that demands the concerted and coordinated time and attention of parents, educators and school administrators, health care providers, policy makers, families, and others concerned with the care of children, this report evaluates the state of the science on biological and psychosocial consequences of peer victimization and the risk and protective factors that either increase or decrease peer victimization behavior and consequences.

READ FREE ONLINE

Welcome to OpenBook!

You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

Show this book's table of contents , where you can jump to any chapter by name.

...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

Switch between the Original Pages , where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text.

To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter .

Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

View our suggested citation for this chapter.

Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

Get Email Updates

Do you enjoy reading reports from the Academies online for free ? Sign up for email notifications and we'll let you know about new publications in your areas of interest when they're released.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Publications
Account settings
My Bibliography
Collections
Citation manager

Save citation to file

Email citation, add to collections.

Create a new collection
Add to an existing collection

Add to My Bibliography

Your saved search, create a file for external citation management software, your rss feed.

Search in PubMed
Search in NLM Catalog
Add to Search

Four decades of research on school bullying: An introduction

Affiliations.

1 Faculty of Education, Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology and Special Education.
2 Faculty of Education, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
PMID: 25961310
DOI: 10.1037/a0038928

This article provides an introductory overview of findings from the past 40 years of research on bullying among school-aged children and youth. Research on definitional and assessment issues in studying bullying and victimization is reviewed, and data on prevalence rates, stability, and forms of bullying behavior are summarized, setting the stage for the 5 articles that comprise this American Psychologist special issue on bullying and victimization. These articles address bullying, victimization, psychological sequela and consequences, ethical, legal, and theoretical issues facing educators, researchers, and practitioners, and effective prevention and intervention efforts. The goal of this special issue is to provide psychologists with a comprehensive review that documents our current understanding of the complexity of bullying among school-aged youth and directions for future research and intervention efforts.

PubMed Disclaimer

Publication types

Search in MeSH

Related information

Cited in Books

LinkOut - more resources

Full text sources.

American Psychological Association
Ovid Technologies, Inc.
MedlinePlus Health Information

Miscellaneous

NCI CPTAC Assay Portal
Citation Manager

NCBI Literature Resources

MeSH PMC Bookshelf Disclaimer

The PubMed wordmark and PubMed logo are registered trademarks of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Unauthorized use of these marks is strictly prohibited.

Bullying: What We Know Based On 40 Years of Research

APA journal examines science aimed at understanding causes, prevention

WASHINGTON — A special issue of American Psychologist ® provides a comprehensive review of over 40 years of research on bullying among school age youth, documenting the current understanding of the complexity of the issue and suggesting directions for future research.

“The lore of bullies has long permeated literature and popular culture. Yet bullying as a distinct form of interpersonal aggression was not systematically studied until the 1970s. Attention to the topic has since grown exponentially,” said Shelley Hymel, PhD, professor of human development, learning and culture at the University of British Columbia, a scholarly lead on the special issue along with Susan M. Swearer, PhD, professor of school psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “Inspired by the 2011 U.S. White House Conference on Bullying Prevention, this collection of articles documents current understanding of school bullying.”

The special issue consists of an introductory overview (PDF, 90KB) by Hymel and Swearer, co-directors of the Bullying Research Network, and five articles on various research areas of bullying including the long-term effects of bullying into adulthood, reasons children bully others, the effects of anti-bullying laws and ways of translating research into anti-bullying practice.

Articles in the issue:

Long-Term Adult Outcomes of Peer Victimization in Childhood and Adolescence: Pathways to Adjustment and Maladjustment (PDF, 122KB) by Patricia McDougall, PhD, University of Saskatchewan, and Tracy Vaillancourt, PhD, University of Ottawa.

The experience of being bullied is painful and difficult. Its negative impact — on academic functioning, physical and mental health, social relationships and self-perceptions — can endure across the school years. But not every victimized child develops into a maladjusted adult. In this article, the authors provide an overview of the negative outcomes experienced by victims through childhood and adolescence and sometimes into adulthood. They then analyze findings from prospective studies to identify factors that lead to different outcomes in different people, including in their biology, timing, support systems and self-perception.

Patricia McDougall can be contacted by email or by phone at (306) 966-6203.

A Relational Framework for Understanding Bullying: Developmental Antecedents and Outcomes (PDF, 151KB) by Philip Rodkin, PhD, and Dorothy Espelage, PhD, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Laura Hanish, PhD, Arizona State University.

How do you distinguish bullying from aggression in general? In this review, the authors describe bullying from a relationship perspective. In order for bullying to be distinguished from other forms of aggression, a relationship must exist between the bully and the victim, there must be an imbalance of power between the two and it must take place over a period of time. “Bullying is perpetrated within a relationship, albeit a coercive, unequal, asymmetric relationship characterized by aggression,” wrote the authors. Within that perspective, the image of bullies as socially incompetent youth who rely on physical coercion to resolve conflicts is nothing more than a stereotype. While this type of “bully-victim” does exist and is primarily male, the authors describe another type of bully who is more socially integrated and has surprisingly high levels of popularity among his or her peers. As for the gender of victims, bullying is just as likely to occur between boys and girls as it is to occur in same-gender groups.

Dorothy Espelage can be contacted by email or by phone at (217) 333-9139.

Translating Research to Practice in Bullying Prevention (PDF, 157KB) by Catherine Bradshaw, PhD, University of Virginia.

This paper reviews the research and related science to develop a set of recommendations for effective bullying prevention programs. From mixed findings on existing programs, the author identifies core elements of promising prevention approaches (e.g., close playground supervision, family involvement, and consistent classroom management strategies) and recommends a three-tiered public health approach that can attend to students at all risk levels. However, the author notes, prevention efforts must be sustained and integrated to effect change.

Catherine Bradshaw can be contacted by email or by phone at (434) 924-8121.

Law and Policy on the Concept of Bullying at School (PDF, 126KB) by Dewey Cornell, PhD, University of Virginia, and Susan Limber, PhD, Clemson University.

Since the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, all states but one have passed anti-bullying laws, and multiple court decisions have made schools more accountable for peer victimization. Unfortunately, current legal and policy approaches, which are strongly rooted in laws regarding harassment and discrimination, do not provide adequate protection for all bullied students. In this article, the authors provide a review of the legal framework underpinning many anti-bullying laws and make recommendations on best practices for legislation and school policies to effectively address the problem of bullying.

Dewey Cornell can be contacted by email or by phone at (434) 924-0793.

Understanding the Psychology of Bullying: Moving Toward a Social-Ecological Diathesis-Stress Model by Susan Swearer, PhD, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Shelley Hymel, PhD, University of British Columbia.

Children’s involvement in bullying varies across roles and over time. A student may be victimized by classmates but bully a sibling at home. Bullying is a complex form of interpersonal aggression that can be both a one-on-one process and a group phenomenon. It negatively affects not only the victim, but the bully and witnesses as well. In this paper, the authors suggest an integrated model for examining bullying and victimization that recognizes the complex and dynamic nature of bullying across multiple settings over time.

Susan Swearer can be contacted by email or by phone at (402) 472-1741. Shelley Hymel can be contacted by email or by phone at (604) 822-6022.

Copies of articles are also available from APA Public Affairs , (202) 336-5700.

The American Psychological Association, in Washington, D.C., is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States. APA's membership includes more than 122,500 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 54 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance the creation, communication and application of psychological knowledge to benefit society and improve people's lives.

Jim Sliwa (202) 336-5707

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Publications
Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

Advanced Search
Journal List
Springer Nature - PMC COVID-19 Collection

Tackling Bullying from the Inside Out: Shifting Paradigms in Bullying Research and Interventions

James o’higgins norman.

UNESCO Chair on Tackling Bullying in Schools and Cyberspace, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

Introduction

The decision to have a university Chair dedicated to tackling bullying and cyberbullying was achieved through a partnership between the Government of Ireland, Dublin City University and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Research by UNESCO shows that one-third of children globally experience bullying in schools (UNESCO 2019 ), so one of the reasons the Chair was established was to ensure that all of the important work being done around the globe to tackle bullying and cyberbullying is amalgamated in one place to create a critical mass of researchers so that we can work internationally to address these problems. In the past, bullying was a very local issue, but today it is understood as an issue that crosses boundaries between nations, time and space and that occurs online as well as offline.

UNESCO awards the status of a Chair to select universities around the world when they assess the university to have reached a high enough standard in research and teaching in a specific area that relates to the goals of the UN. In our case at DCU, it is sustainable development goal number four to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’ ( United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 ). DCU’s Annual Impact Review 2018 /2019 outlines how the university is providing quality education for all through a range of research and teaching initiatives including the work at the National Anti-Bullying Research and Resource Centre (DCU Impact Review 2018 ).

The aim of a UNESCO Chair is to promote international inter-university cooperation and networking, to enhance institutional capacities through knowledge sharing and collaborative work, in key priority areas related to UNESCO’s fields of competence, and to serve as think-tanks and bridge-builders between academia, civil society, local communities, research and policy-making to inform policy decisions, establishing new teaching initiatives, generating innovation through research and contributing to the enrichment of existing university programmes while promoting cultural diversity.

The specific work of DCU’s UNESCO Chair will be to lead a major systematic review of the international evidence in relation to the effects of bullying on how migrant children experience equality and wellbeing in schools, to explore the possibility for whole-school anti-bullying interventions and to support local-level delivery through partner institutions in different countries. The aim is also to consolidate materials and resources for delivery in terms of high-quality training courses. These aims will be achieved through a number of funded projects currently being delivered by the UNESCO Chair which is located at the National Anti-Bullying Research and Resource Centre in DCU. Chief among these projects is TRIBES , a project focused on migrant experiences of school bullying across the European continent. The project is funded by COST and involves 120 partners in over 40 countries, all of whom are working together to understand the increased vulnerability experienced by migrants and to prevent and intervene where bullying is concerned.

In this lecture, I will revisit our understanding of childhood and how our assumptions have influenced our approach to undertaking research and initiatives to tackle bullying in schools and cyberspace. I will explore how the dominant discourse in the field of bullying studies has for almost 50 years been based on traditional assumptions about childhood and has also perpetuated a particular type of research that tends to ignore the realities of childhood as experienced by children today. I will set out a newer view of childhood that has already established itself in other fields, and I will explain how we can apply this new sociology of childhood to our work on tackling bullying in schools and cyberspace.

Defining and Contextualising Bullying

While certain individuals are more likely to bully ( psychological dimension ), the structures in which they exist ( sociological dimension ) can also contribute towards an environment ( educational dimension ) where bullying is more acceptable. Furthermore, social media and other online spaces ( technological dimension ) are now extending the nature and scope of bullying beyond the built environment into cyberspace. Bullying has been defined for some time now as:

occurring when an individual is repeatedly exposed to intentional negative actions by another person(s), creating an imbalance in power between the perpetrator and victim. (Olweus 2007 )

This definition comes from the work of Dan Olweus who is generally recognised as a seminal figure in anti-bullying studies. The definition is not perfect and I will contest it somewhat later on, but for now, we can say that there are four things that characterise bullying behaviour and these are:

Intentionality
Repetitiveness
Power imbalance
Negative effects

We could spend some time exploring what each of these means, for example, to what extent can a once off event be said to be bullying? Where is the repetition in that? Some would say that as it is just a one-off event, then it is aggression and conflictual but not bullying. On the other hand, it can be argued that the threat of its being repeated in itself means that effect of repetition is present, and so an apparent once off event can be considered to be bullying.

The first case of bullying ever to be named as such involved a young soldier in the British Army who was reported in The Times newspaper in 1862 to have taken his own life because he had been subject to ‘systematic bullying’ and had been the object of constant ‘vexations and attack’. Interestingly the tone of the newspaper article was non-condemnatory with regard to those who had carried out these vexations concluding that bullying was a part of human nature frequently found in a ‘school or a camp, or a barracks, or a ship’s crew’ as cited in Koo ( 2007 ).

Similarly, cyberbullying is defined as:

wilful and repeated harm inflicted through computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices. (Hinduja and Patchin 2015 :11)

The key differences here between bullying and cyberbullying relate to the fact that victims often cannot tell who is bullying them online, and this increases the power imbalance between the bully and the victim, and as such, this anonymity can cause much trauma to the victim. Another key difference is that the potential audience is much larger when the bullying takes place online, and this increases the scope of humiliation for the victim. Finally, the fact that the internet is everywhere in our lives is key, it is virtually impossible in many countries to avoid the internet. As such cyberbullying can be extremely pervasive —in other words, there is no getting away from it. The extensive lockdown as a result of COVID-19 means that young people have more time and opportunity to engage in cyberbullying.

So how big of a problem is bullying for our young people. Research from UNESCO in 2018 that relied on individual country reports found that one-third of children and young people are victimised in school. Clearly, if we consider the mental health effects and diseases that can result from being bullied, then bullying can be understood in some ways as a problem of pandemic proportions. If one-third of children globally were starving or contracted a disease, we would immediately close our airports and send in the army to tackle the problem—but yet we often accept that bullying is a fact of life and there is little that can be done about it. The number of victims, however, is not consistent across all countries. UNESCO’s report looked at the individual countries where data is available to see what the more local situations are like.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is 42380_2020_76_Figa_HTML.jpg

(UNESCO 2019 )

We see that the Middle Eastern countries have a very high prevalence rate of bullying, followed by the US and then Europe and Caribbean countries. It is interesting to drill down into some of those figures and look at Ireland as an example from Europe. In our own meta-analysis of all bullying and cyberbullying studies in Ireland, we found that 26% of primary school children and 12% of post-primary school children had been bullied offline, with 14% of primary and 10% of post-primary being bullied online (Foody et al. 2017 ).

Furthermore, in a more recent study, we found that 57% of 15–18-year-olds were asked to share a sexual image, 24% shared a sexual image and 13% had a sexual image shared without their consent (O’Higgins Norman et al. 2019 ). Reaction to the increased participation in sexting, that is, sending sexual content online, among young people naturally raises concern about young people and their safety online and how best to support them. Colleagues in the USA at the Cyberbullying Research Centre are now beginning to suggest that we should educate young people how to sext safely (Patchin and Hinduja 2020 ). This view is based on data that shows that a large number of students in our schools are sending sexts and so it is argued that it would be be better and more responsible to teach them how to do it safely, and in doing so, minimise the risks to their safety and privacy. This is somewhat controversial. In Ireland many schools take a traditionalist approach to sexual matters where children are concerned and sex education in schools has been found to be poor, focused narrowly on biology and avoiding sensitive topics (Keating et al. 2018 ).

If we return to the Behind the Numbers ( 2019 ) report from UNESCO, we find that similar to the Middle East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa unclear have very high reported prevalence rates of bullying, while South America and Central America report the lowest rates. As a sociologist, I have to ask what are the societal and cultural factors that lead to such high prevalence rates in some countries and lower rates in other countries. If we look to the work of Emile Durkheim on suicide and society, we can see that he was able to link suicide rates in different countries to societal norms (Pickering et al. 2000 ), and there is a similar task to be undertaken for those interested in why prevalence rates vary from one country to another.

If we turn our attention to Asia, we find that the rate of bullying reported there is higher than in Europe but not as high as in the Middle East and African countries. Looking specifically at Japan and relying on data from the Government, we find that the number of cases that were reported in 2018 increased by 28%, with 478 of these cases being investigated and found to be serious. Again this marks an increase from previous years. Of these 55 cases were deemed to be life threatening (Government of Japan 2018 ). In order to understand the situation with school bullying in Japan, I turn to the work of Japanese colleagues who help us to get behind the numbers for Japan (MEXT 2018 ).

In Japan conformity is traditionally valued over individual identity, and this can cause problems for people who do not easily fit in or who identify with a minority outlook. An old Japanese saying, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down , is suggested as one way of explaining, at least partially, how children who seem to be different might be treated in schools in Japan (Naito and Gielen 2005 ) Of course, this is not a problem unique to Japan. There are aspects of this in homogeneous Western societies and certainly in Ireland where until recently we had a very homogeneous society. The Western philosopher René Girard advances the notion of ‘scapegoats’ and how people who are perceived to be different to the norm can be pushed out or excluded from society (Girard 1989 ). Another societal and cultural explanation for why students in schools in Japan may not report bullying to parents or teachers is that culturally it is not acceptable to burden others with one’s own problems. Finally, it is reported that bullying in Japan can be more extreme physically and as such cause school boys and girls to consider suicide as a means of escape from physical pain (Naito and Gielen 2005 ).

Clearly, the cost of bullying to the individual in terms of mental health and life opportunities can be significant, resulting in low self-esteem, depression, social isolation and even suicidal ideation. Furthermore, the cost can be economic too. Recent research in Sweden found that, if it is not tackled, the cost to the State of 1 year of bullying in schools can be up to two billion euro over the following 30 years (Nilsson Lundmark et al. 2016 ).

The current geopolitical context is more challenging than ever before to promote inclusion and address discrimination as a form of bullying in schools and cyberspace. In 2017, bullying rates among middle school students in the USA were 18% higher in localities where voters had favoured Donald Trump than in those that had supported Hillary Clinton (Huang and Cornell 2019 ). Similarly, student reports of peers being teased or put down because of their race or ethnicity were 9% higher in localities favouring the Republican candidate. Research by UNESCO found that appearance and race were the top reasons for bullying in school (2019). Children and young people are rarely bullied because they are perceived to be the same as everyone else. They are often bullied because they stand out in their environment for being different from their peers and the normative life that dominates in a society. In fact, there is now a body of research that shows that racism harms children’s health even from before they are born (Trent et al. 2019 ). This points to the need for schools to promote inclusion and diversity. Research shows that where young people are provided with an opportunity to reflect on difference as a positive aspect of life, levels of bullying and other forms of discrimination decrease (O'Higgins Norman 2008 ).

Bullying Research

Over the last 50 years, there have been many major studies into school bullying. These have been mostly quantitative in nature with little attention paid to the experience or understanding of bullying and cyberbullying by children and young people (Smith and Berkkun 2020 ). If we look at the first studies of note by Dan Olweus in Norway in the 1970s, these resulted in his now famous Olweus Bullying Questionnaire (Olweus 2007 ). These early studies by Olweus were so ground-breaking and significant that most of the international studies that followed just repeated the same type of empirical data collection and analysis. While this was useful, the nature of bullying was not addressed in a deep enough way. Certainly, the recent data from UNESCO shows that school bullying is still a major global problem globally affecting children in schools in most countries (2019).

In order to move our efforts to tackle bullying in school and cyberspace forward we need to return to three basic questions and try to answer them.

What assumptions have we been making about childhood?

How best to undertake research on childhood?

What do we do about it now?

In terms of the assumptions we have been making about children in our research, we can trace these assumptions in the West back to the seventeenth century and the very influential writings of John Locke (1632–1704). Locke argued that all knowledge comes from experience and perception of the world around us. According to him, humans are born as a tabula rasa , a blank slate, and as such, they have no built in content or internal processes, just an open space waiting for the world to fill it in. As such he emphasises nurture over nature and saw children as lacking any ability to make sense of the world around them (Winkler 1996 ). These ideas were taken up by others such as Jean-Jacque Rousseau (1721–1778) who argued that children were born innocent and pure but with the capacity to be formed by experience (Rousseau 1991 ). But even before this, from a theological perspective, John Calvin (1509–1564) understood children to be born with the ‘seed of sin’ in them and therefor needing to be guided and stewarded away from evil towards good (Reeves 2018 ). All of this led to a situation where children were understood to be incomplete and uninteresting. Children should be seen and not heard is an often quoted Victorian phrase, and, in many ways, it sums up the reasons why social scientists have often neglected to enquire from children themselves as to what they know, understand and experience. Returning to Japan, we find that the influence of Shintoism resulted in similar assumptions about childhood. Traditional beliefs about childhood in Japan assumed that a child was a gift from the gods, and as such the child was understood in society to be born pure in nature. In fact, a child was traditionally believed to exist in the realm of the gods until the age of 7 years (Nigosian 1994 ). This view is not unlike Western Christian beliefs where it was also believed that the age of reason was 7 years and that this age marked was the point when a child would know right from wrong (Shapiro and Perry 1976 ). The implications of these traditional beliefs for society and child rearing were significant. It was believed that adults needed to protect children from evil influences so that the children could develop their own innate good nature. In this context, mothers, mainly, were responsible for raising their children to become respectable adults. They were also responsible for raising the first boy to excel as the successor in patriarchal family systems.

Because of these assumptions about childhood both in the West and in the East, researchers have tended to focus on questions regarding the socialisation of children, i.e. to what extent have children acquired the requisite knowledge and skills to become competent members of society. The socialisation perspective defines children as ‘incomplete’ or ‘in process’ rather than as full members of society. We have only had an interest in measuring and observing children from the outside in terms of their future capacity as adults. Until recently, generally speaking, children’s voices have not been recognised as important either in research or in education and wider society. Children, as is said in German, lacked Mündigkeit which means maturity or, more literally, the capacity of speaking for themselves. It is the case that others tend to speak for them, and these tend to be mothers and/or female teachers who will often carry and transfer an unconscious bias developed in their socialisation into normative cultures. In research on school children, teachers (mostly female) assess children’s personalities, abilities and promise. These unconscious biases have been found to influence how teachers relate to and represent the children in their classrooms, particularly in terms of gender and social class (Renehan 2006 ; Skelton et al. 2009 ; Schmude and Jackisch 2019 ), reinforcing normative lifestyles with little attention to the voice of children.

I mentioned earlier the seminal works conducted by Dan Olweus and how his early work has influenced so much of the research on bullying that has followed over the past 40 years. It could be said that a singular model of research has been applied to most subsequent studies on bullying. Use of Olweus’ definition and related self-report questionnaire on bullying has been extensive in international research. This approach, however, has been critiqued on the basis that it does not account for nuances in different cultural meanings and terminology associated with the concept of bullying. For example, Smith et al. ( 2002 ) point to the fact that in Japan, the term ‘ ijime ’ is used as a bullying equivalent, but the term implies less of a focus on physical violence and greater emphasis on social manipulation. So given just these different cultural meanings and terminology, it is difficult to apply a single research instrument in every context with every child as if they were all the same. Furthermore, the criticism by Lee ( 2004 ) of the approach recommended by Olweus ( 1993 ) argues that such an approach could possibly be regarded as value-laden and reflects the power of the researcher to define bullying, and this leads to the exclusion of related behaviours. Olweus’ Bullying Questionnaire and other frequently used research instruments such as the Moods and Feelings Questionnaire often carry gendered assumptions about what is considered good behaviour for males and females. This can set up boys and girls to be considered only in terms of narrow binary conceptions of gender, ignoring sexuality and other individual and social traits. Essentially in this type of research, children are subjects rather than collaborators in that research is done on them rather than with them. This has implications for those who are being asked to create policies and procedures that include definitions of bullying. Maybe some of our policies and programmes in the West have not been as successful as they could have been because they are based on data from studies where the local culture and experience of the child were not considered as much as it should have been. This was a lesson learned in Japan where initial efforts to tackle bullying were purely adaptations of programmes from the West. In recent years, however, greater attention has been given to the specific experience and culture of school children in Japan resulting in some new successful child-centred initiatives (Toda 2019 ). The core challenge here for policymakers and schools is how to develop a workable definition that sufficiently covers various types of aggressive behaviour and shapes effective school-based programmes to tackle bullying and cyberbullying.

Recent Influence of the New Sociology of Childhood

A new sociology of childhood approach rejects a transmission model of development and education (Durkheim 1975 ) where children are understood to merely internalise the values and normative behaviours of society. More recent research and theories show that children are not just passive recipients but active agents in their socialisation process. It is now argued that children are both constructed by structure and also active agents, acting in and upon structure. They do not simply internalise the world, but strive to make sense of the world and to participate in it. By active participation in social interactions, children and teenagers incorporate and co-construct many social constructions of various aspects of their social life. It is argued then that we need to investigate how they make sense of social situations in order better to understand their actions and interaction patterns.

According to the new sociology of childhood, children are social actors in their world. We talk about the idea of interpretive reproduction as the means by which children make sense of their world and their experiences. The term interpretive captures innovative and creative aspect of children’s participation in society. Children produce and participate in their own unique peer cultures by creatively appropriating information from the adult world to address their own peer concerns. The term reproductive captures the idea that children do not simply internalise society and culture but also actively contribute to cultural production and change. For example, children are known to play with gender rather than simply accepting adult definitions, they establish within their own peer group cultures and systems that make sense to them (Corsaro 2012 ).

Both the socialisation and the developmental psychology perspectives have tended to prompt scholars to write about children as if all children were the same regardless of social location or context. The ‘new’ sociological perspective stresses ‘a plurality of childhoods’ not only within the same society but also across the settings in which children conduct their everyday lives. Using a social constructionist view, scholars focus on how particular cultural representations of children affect children’s relationships, rights and responsibilities. Scholars in the ‘new’ sociology advocate recognising that children in different social locations have different childhoods and that their experience of childhood changes from one context to another. Children are not all the same in every situation and context.

Scholars argue that no matter how benign parents, teachers and other adults may be, relationships between adults and children are characterised by differential power resources. Hence, based on the situation, dependence in relationships with adults may capture the experience of children better than socialisation, which characterises children as deficient relative to adults rather than disadvantaged or oppressed by them. The crucial distinction that makes children children is that they are not adults ; as individuals and as a social group, they lack adulthood. This lack can be defined variously as deficiency, disadvantage and/or oppression. The components may vary according to individual and societal standpoint, but intergenerational relationships between children and adults are established in such a way that children are always inferior to adults and find it harder to have their rights vindicated (Mayall 1994 ; Quennerstedt and Quennerstedt 2014 ).

This view of childhood as oppression is countered in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child ( 1989 ). The four foundational principals of the Convention are key to understanding how to undertake research with children and to plan initiatives to improve their lives such as in an anti-bullying programmes. The four general principles (United Nations 1989 ) are:

That all the rights guaranteed by the Convention must be available to all children without discrimination of any kind (Article 2)
That the best interests of the child must be a primary consideration in all actions concerning children (Article 3)
That every child has the right to life, survival and development (Article 6)
That the child’s views must be considered and taken into account in all matters affecting him or her (Article 12)

So, if we start our anti-bullying research and initiatives to tackle bullying with a new sociology of childhood perspective as represented in the UN Convention, we find ourselves starting our work with children with their rights. We now begin to plan our research and anti-bullying programmes differently.

Involving children and young people as respondents, co-researchers and commissioner of research.
Avoid privileging adults and instead interact directly with children.
Think carefully about suitable ways to gather data from children.
Use qualitative, participatory and ethnographic approaches as they seem most appropriate.
Making children visible through the way statistics are collected and reported.

In some studies, we have asked the children to explain to us why bullying happens, and the answers they give us are very interesting and important from the point of view of planning anti-bullying programmes.

They tell us that being perceived by their peers as different, odd or deviant in some way can lead to being bullied at school. This ties in with the image mentioned previously of the ‘nail that stands out’ and the need for conformity. According to stigma and labelling theories, when a social group labels a person as deviant, then he or she is understood to have violated important taken for granted social norms of the peer culture. Once the label is applied, the person can be justifiably victimised. Stigma theory (Goffman 1963 ) and labelling theory (Phelan and Link 1999 ) explain that it is almost impossible for individuals to improve their situation once they have had a stigmatised label assigned to them (Thornberg 2015 ). This highlights the importance of diversity education programmes to prevent these exclusionary situations occurring in schools (O'Higgins Norman 2008 ; Thornberg 2010 ).

Children also tell us that those who bully often do it because they want to increase their social positioning (Thornberg 2019 ), that is, to be more powerful than other children in the classroom and that bullying others serves to enable this. Schools are hierarchical in nature with children at the bottom of the pyramid. They often want to appear cool and are driven to obtain a higher social position in the school than other students, seeking to enhance, maintain or show off their power, status and popularity. Being seen to be cool and to have lots of friends can be a way to improve social position in school.

Finally, in our studies, we find children also explain that bullies have psychosocial problems and as such their acting out represents some deeper emotional problem. It is interesting that children can show such understanding and appreciation for mental health and emotional problems. This points us to the need to develop classroom programmes that allow children to grow and express their emotions while at the same time providing counselling and support for children at a school and community level (Thornberg 2019 ).

In terms of interventions to tackle bullying and cyberbullying, international research has reported that if a school is to tackle these issues with any success, a whole school and community approach is often recommended (Smith 2014 ). This is described in different ways by different authors (Smith 2014 ), but the characteristics that are constant can be described as follows (O’Higgins Norman & Sullivan 2017 ):

Leadership and change management
Policy development
Curriculum planning
School ethos
Student voice and bystanders
Student support services
Partnership with parents and local communities

What has been missing from many of these whole school approaches is a recognition of the importance of the voice and agency of the child. Anti-bullying initiatives will be more successful if they are commissioned, designed and evaluated with children. I realise that this is challenging for us as researchers and educators who have honed our skills and expertise over many years. However, if our work is to really make a difference, we need to extend the scope of our expertise to include partnership with children and young people who are ultimately the experts in what is like to be a child today (Kellett 2010 ). While other fields of study have made considerable progress in adopting this approach (Lundy et al. 2019 , I think many of us who work in the field of bullying studies have come to it later than in other fields. This is due to a number of factors not least an over reliance on quantitative research methods and the related dominance of particular branches of sociology and psychology in driving research and initiatives in our field.

Furthermore, now that we are coming around to the realisation that research and responses to bullying and cyberbullying must include at least an acknowledgment of the importance of the voice and agency of children, O’Brien and Dadswell ( 2020 ) warn that it is not enough to merely acknowledge that children and young people have a right to be heard and to actively participate in research and initiatives to tackle bullying and cyberbullying, but they must be provided with opportunities that are not ‘one off’ or ‘add on’ activities; instead they should be embedded within the system to accommodate their participation as partners in research and responses to tackle bullying and cyberbullying. This is a point taken up by Lundy ( 2018 ) although she acknowledges that a tokenistic approach to collective child participation might be a useful and necessary step on a journey towards more meaningful engagement with children. Either way some researchers in the field of bullying are now beginning to lead research and to develop initiatives that attempt to include a greater acknowledgement of the voice and agency of the child (Thornberg 2010 ; O’Brien 2019 ; White et al. 2019 ).

Not only will this approach be more effective, but it will also respect the rights of the child and go towards fulfilling our obligations and objectives under Article 12(1) of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). However, as I have already suggested, such an approach to research and the development of related initiatives to tackle bullying in schools and online brings with it many challenges to the established order within the field of bullying studies. One such challenge is in the area of research ethics. Traditionally, adults have decided what is best for children, including what protects them from harm. Ethical standards are of course necessary to ensure that children and young people are not taken advantage of during the research process and that the researcher does not put his/her needs ahead of the needs of the child. However, when it comes to working ethically with children as respondents, co-researchers and commissioner of research, we must be careful not to allow traditional views of childhood to get in the way of allowing children their right to express themselves and to be heard by society on how they are affected by bullying and cyberbullying. Children and young people have a right to be heard and to be involved in anything that affects them; as such our assumptions and ethical frameworks must change to ensure that these rights are fulfilled. I suggest that university ethics committees need to involve children and young people in producing standards for ethical research and in evaluating research proposals that involve children and young people as respondents, co-researchers and/or commissioner of research.

In this lecture, I have explored traditional assumptions about childhood and the impact of these assumptions on research about childhood and specifically about bullying. I have argued that over almost 50 years, these assumptions led to a dominant discourse in bullying research and related initiatives that was characterised by a particular view of childhood. This view of childhood tended to focus on questions about the extent to which children had acquired the requisite knowledge and skills to become competent adult members of society. This socialisation perspective assumes that children are ‘incomplete’ adults rather than full members of society in their own right. Consequently, researchers have only had an interest in measuring and observing children in terms of their future capacity as adults. Until relatively recently, generally speaking, children’s voices have not been recognised as important either in research or in education and wider society. However, when we consider the perspective of children’s rights and apply a new sociology of childhood approach, our work with children moves beyond traditional assumptions and begins to be underpinned by a view of childhood that recognises that children have agency, are diverse and develop meaningful relationships, ultimately creating their own view of the world around them. Consequently, this changes our approach to research and the development of responses to bullying in school and online. It is clear that our work with children has to fundamentally change to recognise the experience of childhood as something that is valid and contains within it a set of rights that are fundamental to their general wellbeing and specifically to the future success of tackling bullying in schools and cyberspace.

Corsaro W. Interpretive reproduction in children’s play. Journal of Play. 2012; 4 (4):488–504. [ Google Scholar ]
Dublin city University, Annual Impact Review (2018/19). Making a Difference . Retrieved from: https://www.dcu.ie/sites/default/files/dcu_making_a_difference_lowres_2.pdf . Accessed 12 Aug 2020.
Durkheim, E. (1975). Educación y sociología. Barcelona: Península.
Foody M, Samara M, O’Higgins Norman J. Bullying and cyberbullying studies in the school-aged population on the island of Ireland: A meta-analysis. British Journal of Educational Psychology. 2017; 87 :535–557. doi: 10.1111/bjep.12163. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Girard R. The scapegoat. New York: Johns Hopkins University Press; 1989. [ Google Scholar ]
Goffman E. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall; 1963. [ Google Scholar ]
Government of Japan, (2018). Survey of problematic behavior and school non-attendance and other issues among pupils. Ministry of Education, Cultre, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) . https://www.mext.go.jp/content/1410392.pdf . Accessed 12 Aug 2020.
Hinduja S, Patchin JW. Bullying beyond the schoolyard: Preventing and responding to Cyberbullying. 2. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications; 2015. [ Google Scholar ]
Huang F, Cornell D. School teasing and bullying after the presidential election. Educational Researcher. 2019; 48 (2):69–83. doi: 10.3102/0013189X18820291. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Keating, S., Morgan, M., & Collins, B. (2018). Relationships and sexuality education (RSE) in primary and post-primary Irish schools , Research Paper. Dublin. National Council for Curriculum and Assessment.
Kellett M. Small shoes, big steps! Empowering children as active researchers. American Journal of Community Psychology. 2010; 46 (1–2):195–203. doi: 10.1007/s10464-010-9324-y. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Koo H. A time line of the evolution of school bullying in differing social contexts 2007. Asia Pacific Education Review. 2007; 8 (1):107–116. doi: 10.1007/BF03025837. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Lee C. Preventing bullying in schools. London: Sage Publications; 2004. [ Google Scholar ]
Lundy L. In defence of tokenism? Implementing children’s right to participate in collective decision-making. Childhood. 2018; 25 (3):340–354. doi: 10.1177/0907568218777292. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Lundy, L., Parkes, A., & Tobin, J. (2019). Article 12: The right to respect for the views of the child. In J. Tobin (Ed.), The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child: A Commentary (p. 397). Oxford University Press.
Mayall B. Children’s childhoods, observed and experienced. Hove: Psychology Press Ltd.; 1994. [ Google Scholar ]
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports and Technology (MEXT), (2018). School bullying annual report . Government of Japan.
Naito T, Gielen UP. Bullying & Ijime in Japanese schools. In: Denmark FL, Krauss HH, Wesner RW, Midlarsky E, Gielen UP, editors. Violence in schools. Cham, Switzerland: Springer; 2005. [ Google Scholar ]
Nigosian SA. World faiths. London: Palgrave Macmillan; 1994. [ Google Scholar ]
Nilsson Lundmark, E., Nilsson, I., & Wadeskog, A. (2016). The costs of bullying. A socio-economic analysis (Stockholm. FRIENDS).
O’Brien N. Understanding alternative bullying perspectives through research engagement with young people. Frontiers in Psychology. 2019; 10 :1984. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01984. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
O’Brien, N., & Dadswell, A. (2020). Reflections on a participatory research project exploring bullying and school self-exclusion: Power dynamics, practicalities and partnership working. Pastoral Care in Education , 1–22. 10.1080/02643944.2020.1788126.
O’Higgins Norman J, Sullivan K. Reducing school bullying: A whole school approach. In: Cowie H, Meyers CA, editors. Bullying in schools: Intervention and prevention. Oxfordshire: Routledge; 2017. [ Google Scholar ]
O’Higgins Norman, J., Foody, M., & Milosevic, T. (2019). Submission to the joint oireachtas committee on justice and equality on harmful communications. Retrieved from: Harmful Communications https://bit.ly/2Ci3wTd . Accessed 12 Aug 2020.
O'Higgins Norman J. Homophobic bullying in Irish secondary education. Palo Alto: Academica Press; 2008. [ Google Scholar ]
Olweus D. Bullying at school: What we know and what we can do. Malden: Blackwell Publishing; 1993. [ Google Scholar ]
Olweus, D. (2007). Olweus bullying prevention program. Center City, MN. Hazeldene.
Patchin JW, Hinduja S. It is time to teach safe sexting. Journal of Adolescent Health. 2020; 66 (2):140–143. doi: 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2019.10.010. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Phelan JC, Link BG. The labelling theory of mental disorder (1): The role of contingencies in the application of psychiatric labels. In: Horowitz A, Scheid-Cook T, editors. The sociology of mental health and illness. New York: Cambridge University Press; 1999. [ Google Scholar ]
Pickering WSF, Walford G, British Centre for Durkheimian Studies . Durkheim's suicide: A century of research and debate. Hove: Psychology Press Ltd.; 2000. [ Google Scholar ]
Quennerstedt A, Quennerstedt M. Researching children’s rights in education: Sociology of childhood encountering educational theory. British Journal of Sociology of Education. 2014; 35 (1):115–132. doi: 10.1080/01425692.2013.783962. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Reeves M. 'A prospect of flowers', concepts of childhood and female youth in seventeenth-century British culture. In: Cohen ES, Reeves M, editors. The Youth of Early Modern Women. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press; 2018. p. 40. [ Google Scholar ]
Renehan C. Different planets?: Gender attitudes and classroom practice in post-primary teaching. Dublin: Liffey Press; 2006. [ Google Scholar ]
Rousseau J. Emile, or on education. London: Penguin Classics; 1991. [ Google Scholar ]
Schmude J, Jackisch S. Feminization of teaching: Female teachers at primary and lower secondary schools in Baden-Württemberg, Germany: From its beginnings to the present. In: Jahnke H, Kramer C, Meusburger P, editors. Geographies of schooling. Springer: US; 2019. [ Google Scholar ]
Shapiro T, Perry R. Latency revisited, the age 7, plus or minus 1. The Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood. 1976; 31 (1):79–105. doi: 10.1080/00797308.1976.11822310. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Skelton C, Carrington B, Francis B, Hutchings M, Read B, Hall I. Gender 'matters' in the primary classroom: Pupils' and teachers' perspectives. British Educational Research Journal. 2009; 35 (2):187–204. doi: 10.1080/01411920802041905. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Smith PK. Understanding school bullying: Its nature and prevention strategies. London: Sage; 2014. [ Google Scholar ]
Smith PK, Berkkun F. How prevalent is contextual information in research on school bullying? Scandinavian Journal of Psychology. 2020; 61 :17–21. doi: 10.1111/sjop.12537. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Smith PK, Cowie H, Olafsson RF, Liefooghe APD. Definitions of bullying: A comparison of terms used, and age and gender differences, in a fourteen–country international comparison. Child Development. 2002; 73 (4):1119–1133. doi: 10.1111/1467-8624.00461. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Thornberg R. School children’s social representations on bullying. Psychology in the Schools. 2010; 47 (4):311–327. doi: 10.1002/pits.20472. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Thornberg R. School bullying as a collective action: Stigma processes and identity struggling. Children and Society. 2015; 29 (4):310–320. doi: 10.1111/chso.12058. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Thornberg R. How do secondary school students explain bullying? Educational Research. 2019; 61 (2):142–160. doi: 10.1080/00131881.2019.1600376. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Toda Y. Ijime prevention programs in Japan. In: Smith PK, editor. Making an impact on school bullying: Interventions and recommendations. New York: Routledge; 2019. pp. 132–153. [ Google Scholar ]
Trent, M., Dooley, D. G., Dougé, J., & Grubb, L. (2019). The impact of racism on child and adolescent health. SECTION ON ADOLESCENT HEALTH, COUNCIL ON COMMUNITY PEDIATRICS and COMMITTEE ON ADOLESCENCE. Pediatrics, August 2019, 144 (2). [ PubMed ]
UNESCO, (2019). Behind the numbers: Ending school violence and bullying . Retrieved from: https://en.unesco.org/news/school-violence-and-bullying-major-global-issue-new-unesco-publication-finds . Accessed 12 Aug 2020.
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Document, (2015) . Sustainable Development Goals . Retrieved from: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/ . Accessed 12 Aug 2020.
United Nations, (1989). United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child , 1989. Retrieved from: https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/a1481d-united-nations-convention-on-the-rights-of-the-child/ . Accessed 12 Aug 2020.
White I, Foody M, O’Higgins Norman J. Storytelling as a liminal space: Using a narrative based participatory approach to tackle cyberbullying among adolescents. In: Vandebosch H, Green L, editors. Narratives in Research and Interventions on Cyberbullying among Young People. Springer, Cham: Cham; 2019. [ Google Scholar ]
Winkler, Kenneth P. (Ed.) (1996). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. (Hacket Classics) Hackett Publishing Company.

Research article
Open access
Published: 14 December 2021

Bullying at school and mental health problems among adolescents: a repeated cross-sectional study

Håkan Källmén 1 &
Mats Hallgren ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0599-2403 2

Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health volume 15 , Article number: 74 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

111k Accesses

18 Citations

37 Altmetric

Metrics details

To examine recent trends in bullying and mental health problems among adolescents and the association between them.

A questionnaire measuring mental health problems, bullying at school, socio-economic status, and the school environment was distributed to all secondary school students aged 15 (school-year 9) and 18 (school-year 11) in Stockholm during 2014, 2018, and 2020 (n = 32,722). Associations between bullying and mental health problems were assessed using logistic regression analyses adjusting for relevant demographic, socio-economic, and school-related factors.

The prevalence of bullying remained stable and was highest among girls in year 9; range = 4.9% to 16.9%. Mental health problems increased; range = + 1.2% (year 9 boys) to + 4.6% (year 11 girls) and were consistently higher among girls (17.2% in year 11, 2020). In adjusted models, having been bullied was detrimentally associated with mental health (OR = 2.57 [2.24–2.96]). Reports of mental health problems were four times higher among boys who had been bullied compared to those not bullied. The corresponding figure for girls was 2.4 times higher.

Conclusions

Exposure to bullying at school was associated with higher odds of mental health problems. Boys appear to be more vulnerable to the deleterious effects of bullying than girls.

Introduction

Bullying involves repeated hurtful actions between peers where an imbalance of power exists [ 1 ]. Arseneault et al. [ 2 ] conducted a review of the mental health consequences of bullying for children and adolescents and found that bullying is associated with severe symptoms of mental health problems, including self-harm and suicidality. Bullying was shown to have detrimental effects that persist into late adolescence and contribute independently to mental health problems. Updated reviews have presented evidence indicating that bullying is causative of mental illness in many adolescents [ 3 , 4 ].

There are indications that mental health problems are increasing among adolescents in some Nordic countries. Hagquist et al. [ 5 ] examined trends in mental health among Scandinavian adolescents (n = 116, 531) aged 11–15 years between 1993 and 2014. Mental health problems were operationalized as difficulty concentrating, sleep disorders, headache, stomach pain, feeling tense, sad and/or dizzy. The study revealed increasing rates of adolescent mental health problems in all four counties (Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark), with Sweden experiencing the sharpest increase among older adolescents, particularly girls. Worsening adolescent mental health has also been reported in the United Kingdom. A study of 28,100 school-aged adolescents in England found that two out of five young people scored above thresholds for emotional problems, conduct problems or hyperactivity [ 6 ]. Female gender, deprivation, high needs status (educational/social), ethnic background, and older age were all associated with higher odds of experiencing mental health difficulties.

Bullying is shown to increase the risk of poor mental health and may partly explain these detrimental changes. Le et al. [ 7 ] reported an inverse association between bullying and mental health among 11–16-year-olds in Vietnam. They also found that poor mental health can make some children and adolescents more vulnerable to bullying at school. Bayer et al. [ 8 ] examined links between bullying at school and mental health among 8–9-year-old children in Australia. Those who experienced bullying more than once a week had poorer mental health than children who experienced bullying less frequently. Friendships moderated this association, such that children with more friends experienced fewer mental health problems (protective effect). Hysing et al. [ 9 ] investigated the association between experiences of bullying (as a victim or perpetrator) and mental health, sleep disorders, and school performance among 16–19 year olds from Norway (n = 10,200). Participants were categorized as victims, bullies, or bully-victims (that is, victims who also bullied others). All three categories were associated with worse mental health, school performance, and sleeping difficulties. Those who had been bullied also reported more emotional problems, while those who bullied others reported more conduct disorders [ 9 ].

As most adolescents spend a considerable amount of time at school, the school environment has been a major focus of mental health research [ 10 , 11 ]. In a recent review, Saminathen et al. [ 12 ] concluded that school is a potential protective factor against mental health problems, as it provides a socially supportive context and prepares students for higher education and employment. However, it may also be the primary setting for protracted bullying and stress [ 13 ]. Another factor associated with adolescent mental health is parental socio-economic status (SES) [ 14 ]. A systematic review indicated that lower parental SES is associated with poorer adolescent mental health [ 15 ]. However, no previous studies have examined whether SES modifies or attenuates the association between bullying and mental health. Similarly, it remains unclear whether school related factors, such as school grades and the school environment, influence the relationship between bullying and mental health. This information could help to identify those adolescents most at risk of harm from bullying.

To address these issues, we investigated the prevalence of bullying at school and mental health problems among Swedish adolescents aged 15–18 years between 2014 and 2020 using a population-based school survey. We also examined associations between bullying at school and mental health problems adjusting for relevant demographic, socioeconomic, and school-related factors. We hypothesized that: (1) bullying and adolescent mental health problems have increased over time; (2) There is an association between bullying victimization and mental health, so that mental health problems are more prevalent among those who have been victims of bullying; and (3) that school-related factors would attenuate the association between bullying and mental health.

Participants

The Stockholm school survey is completed every other year by students in lower secondary school (year 9—compulsory) and upper secondary school (year 11). The survey is mandatory for public schools, but voluntary for private schools. The purpose of the survey is to help inform decision making by local authorities that will ultimately improve students’ wellbeing. The questions relate to life circumstances, including SES, schoolwork, bullying, drug use, health, and crime. Non-completers are those who were absent from school when the survey was completed (< 5%). Response rates vary from year to year but are typically around 75%. For the current study data were available for 2014, 2018 and 2020. In 2014; 5235 boys and 5761 girls responded, in 2018; 5017 boys and 5211 girls responded, and in 2020; 5633 boys and 5865 girls responded (total n = 32,722). Data for the exposure variable, bullied at school, were missing for 4159 students, leaving 28,563 participants in the crude model. The fully adjusted model (described below) included 15,985 participants. The mean age in grade 9 was 15.3 years (SD = 0.51) and in grade 11, 17.3 years (SD = 0.61). As the data are completely anonymous, the study was exempt from ethical approval according to an earlier decision from the Ethical Review Board in Stockholm (2010-241 31-5). Details of the survey are available via a website [ 16 ], and are described in a previous paper [ 17 ].

Students completed the questionnaire during a school lesson, placed it in a sealed envelope and handed it to their teacher. Student were permitted the entire lesson (about 40 min) to complete the questionnaire and were informed that participation was voluntary (and that they were free to cancel their participation at any time without consequences). Students were also informed that the Origo Group was responsible for collection of the data on behalf of the City of Stockholm.

Study outcome

Mental health problems were assessed by using a modified version of the Psychosomatic Problem Scale [ 18 ] shown to be appropriate for children and adolescents and invariant across gender and years. The scale was later modified [ 19 ]. In the modified version, items about difficulty concentrating and feeling giddy were deleted and an item about ‘life being great to live’ was added. Seven different symptoms or problems, such as headaches, depression, feeling fear, stomach problems, difficulty sleeping, believing it’s great to live (coded negatively as seldom or rarely) and poor appetite were used. Students who responded (on a 5-point scale) that any of these problems typically occurs ‘at least once a week’ were considered as having indicators of a mental health problem. Cronbach alpha was 0.69 across the whole sample. Adding these problem areas, a total index was created from 0 to 7 mental health symptoms. Those who scored between 0 and 4 points on the total symptoms index were considered to have a low indication of mental health problems (coded as 0); those who scored between 5 and 7 symptoms were considered as likely having mental health problems (coded as 1).

Primary exposure

Experiences of bullying were measured by the following two questions: Have you felt bullied or harassed during the past school year? Have you been involved in bullying or harassing other students during this school year? Alternatives for the first question were: yes or no with several options describing how the bullying had taken place (if yes). Alternatives indicating emotional bullying were feelings of being mocked, ridiculed, socially excluded, or teased. Alternatives indicating physical bullying were being beaten, kicked, forced to do something against their will, robbed, or locked away somewhere. The response alternatives for the second question gave an estimation of how often the respondent had participated in bullying others (from once to several times a week). Combining the answers to these two questions, five different categories of bullying were identified: (1) never been bullied and never bully others; (2) victims of emotional (verbal) bullying who have never bullied others; (3) victims of physical bullying who have never bullied others; (4) victims of bullying who have also bullied others; and (5) perpetrators of bullying, but not victims. As the number of positive cases in the last three categories was low (range = 3–15 cases) bully categories 2–4 were combined into one primary exposure variable: ‘bullied at school’.

Assessment year was operationalized as the year when data was collected: 2014, 2018, and 2020. Age was operationalized as school grade 9 (15–16 years) or 11 (17–18 years). Gender was self-reported (boy or girl). The school situation To assess experiences of the school situation, students responded to 18 statements about well-being in school, participation in important school matters, perceptions of their teachers, and teaching quality. Responses were given on a four-point Likert scale ranging from ‘do not agree at all’ to ‘fully agree’. To reduce the 18-items down to their essential factors, we performed a principal axis factor analysis. Results showed that the 18 statements formed five factors which, according to the Kaiser criterion (eigen values > 1) explained 56% of the covariance in the student’s experience of the school situation. The five factors identified were: (1) Participation in school; (2) Interesting and meaningful work; (3) Feeling well at school; (4) Structured school lessons; and (5) Praise for achievements. For each factor, an index was created that was dichotomised (poor versus good circumstance) using the median-split and dummy coded with ‘good circumstance’ as reference. A description of the items included in each factor is available as Additional file 1 . Socio-economic status (SES) was assessed with three questions about the education level of the student’s mother and father (dichotomized as university degree versus not), and the amount of spending money the student typically received for entertainment each month (> SEK 1000 [approximately $120] versus less). Higher parental education and more spending money were used as reference categories. School grades in Swedish, English, and mathematics were measured separately on a 7-point scale and dichotomized as high (grades A, B, and C) versus low (grades D, E, and F). High school grades were used as the reference category.

Statistical analyses

The prevalence of mental health problems and bullying at school are presented using descriptive statistics, stratified by survey year (2014, 2018, 2020), gender, and school year (9 versus 11). As noted, we reduced the 18-item questionnaire assessing school function down to five essential factors by conducting a principal axis factor analysis (see Additional file 1 ). We then calculated the association between bullying at school (defined above) and mental health problems using multivariable logistic regression. Results are presented as odds ratios (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (Cis). To assess the contribution of SES and school-related factors to this association, three models are presented: Crude, Model 1 adjusted for demographic factors: age, gender, and assessment year; Model 2 adjusted for Model 1 plus SES (parental education and student spending money), and Model 3 adjusted for Model 2 plus school-related factors (school grades and the five factors identified in the principal factor analysis). These covariates were entered into the regression models in three blocks, where the final model represents the fully adjusted analyses. In all models, the category ‘not bullied at school’ was used as the reference. Pseudo R-square was calculated to estimate what proportion of the variance in mental health problems was explained by each model. Unlike the R-square statistic derived from linear regression, the Pseudo R-square statistic derived from logistic regression gives an indicator of the explained variance, as opposed to an exact estimate, and is considered informative in identifying the relative contribution of each model to the outcome [ 20 ]. All analyses were performed using SPSS v. 26.0.

Prevalence of bullying at school and mental health problems

Estimates of the prevalence of bullying at school and mental health problems across the 12 strata of data (3 years × 2 school grades × 2 genders) are shown in Table 1 . The prevalence of bullying at school increased minimally (< 1%) between 2014 and 2020, except among girls in grade 11 (2.5% increase). Mental health problems increased between 2014 and 2020 (range = 1.2% [boys in year 11] to 4.6% [girls in year 11]); were three to four times more prevalent among girls (range = 11.6% to 17.2%) compared to boys (range = 2.6% to 4.9%); and were more prevalent among older adolescents compared to younger adolescents (range = 1% to 3.1% higher). Pooling all data, reports of mental health problems were four times more prevalent among boys who had been victims of bullying compared to those who reported no experiences with bullying. The corresponding figure for girls was two and a half times as prevalent.

Associations between bullying at school and mental health problems

Table 2 shows the association between bullying at school and mental health problems after adjustment for relevant covariates. Demographic factors, including female gender (OR = 3.87; CI 3.48–4.29), older age (OR = 1.38, CI 1.26–1.50), and more recent assessment year (OR = 1.18, CI 1.13–1.25) were associated with higher odds of mental health problems. In Model 2, none of the included SES variables (parental education and student spending money) were associated with mental health problems. In Model 3 (fully adjusted), the following school-related factors were associated with higher odds of mental health problems: lower grades in Swedish (OR = 1.42, CI 1.22–1.67); uninteresting or meaningless schoolwork (OR = 2.44, CI 2.13–2.78); feeling unwell at school (OR = 1.64, CI 1.34–1.85); unstructured school lessons (OR = 1.31, CI = 1.16–1.47); and no praise for achievements (OR = 1.19, CI 1.06–1.34). After adjustment for all covariates, being bullied at school remained associated with higher odds of mental health problems (OR = 2.57; CI 2.24–2.96). Demographic and school-related factors explained 12% and 6% of the variance in mental health problems, respectively (Pseudo R-Square). The inclusion of socioeconomic factors did not alter the variance explained.

Our findings indicate that mental health problems increased among Swedish adolescents between 2014 and 2020, while the prevalence of bullying at school remained stable (< 1% increase), except among girls in year 11, where the prevalence increased by 2.5%. As previously reported [ 5 , 6 ], mental health problems were more common among girls and older adolescents. These findings align with previous studies showing that adolescents who are bullied at school are more likely to experience mental health problems compared to those who are not bullied [ 3 , 4 , 9 ]. This detrimental relationship was observed after adjustment for school-related factors shown to be associated with adolescent mental health [ 10 ].

A novel finding was that boys who had been bullied at school reported a four-times higher prevalence of mental health problems compared to non-bullied boys. The corresponding figure for girls was 2.5 times higher for those who were bullied compared to non-bullied girls, which could indicate that boys are more vulnerable to the deleterious effects of bullying than girls. Alternatively, it may indicate that boys are (on average) bullied more frequently or more intensely than girls, leading to worse mental health. Social support could also play a role; adolescent girls often have stronger social networks than boys and could be more inclined to voice concerns about bullying to significant others, who in turn may offer supports which are protective [ 21 ]. Related studies partly confirm this speculative explanation. An Estonian study involving 2048 children and adolescents aged 10–16 years found that, compared to girls, boys who had been bullied were more likely to report severe distress, measured by poor mental health and feelings of hopelessness [ 22 ].

Other studies suggest that heritable traits, such as the tendency to internalize problems and having low self-esteem are associated with being a bully-victim [ 23 ]. Genetics are understood to explain a large proportion of bullying-related behaviors among adolescents. A study from the Netherlands involving 8215 primary school children found that genetics explained approximately 65% of the risk of being a bully-victim [ 24 ]. This proportion was similar for boys and girls. Higher than average body mass index (BMI) is another recognized risk factor [ 25 ]. A recent Australian trial involving 13 schools and 1087 students (mean age = 13 years) targeted adolescents with high-risk personality traits (hopelessness, anxiety sensitivity, impulsivity, sensation seeking) to reduce bullying at school; both as victims and perpetrators [ 26 ]. There was no significant intervention effect for bullying victimization or perpetration in the total sample. In a secondary analysis, compared to the control schools, intervention school students showed greater reductions in victimization, suicidal ideation, and emotional symptoms. These findings potentially support targeting high-risk personality traits in bullying prevention [ 26 ].

The relative stability of bullying at school between 2014 and 2020 suggests that other factors may better explain the increase in mental health problems seen here. Many factors could be contributing to these changes, including the increasingly competitive labour market, higher demands for education, and the rapid expansion of social media [ 19 , 27 , 28 ]. A recent Swedish study involving 29,199 students aged between 11 and 16 years found that the effects of school stress on psychosomatic symptoms have become stronger over time (1993–2017) and have increased more among girls than among boys [ 10 ]. Research is needed examining possible gender differences in perceived school stress and how these differences moderate associations between bullying and mental health.

Strengths and limitations

Strengths of the current study include the large participant sample from diverse schools; public and private, theoretical and practical orientations. The survey included items measuring diverse aspects of the school environment; factors previously linked to adolescent mental health but rarely included as covariates in studies of bullying and mental health. Some limitations are also acknowledged. These data are cross-sectional which means that the direction of the associations cannot be determined. Moreover, all the variables measured were self-reported. Previous studies indicate that students tend to under-report bullying and mental health problems [ 29 ]; thus, our results may underestimate the prevalence of these behaviors.

In conclusion, consistent with our stated hypotheses, we observed an increase in self-reported mental health problems among Swedish adolescents, and a detrimental association between bullying at school and mental health problems. Although bullying at school does not appear to be the primary explanation for these changes, bullying was detrimentally associated with mental health after adjustment for relevant demographic, socio-economic, and school-related factors, confirming our third hypothesis. The finding that boys are potentially more vulnerable than girls to the deleterious effects of bullying should be replicated in future studies, and the mechanisms investigated. Future studies should examine the longitudinal association between bullying and mental health, including which factors mediate/moderate this relationship. Epigenetic studies are also required to better understand the complex interaction between environmental and biological risk factors for adolescent mental health [ 24 ].

Availability of data and materials

Data requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis; please email the corresponding author.

Code availability

Not applicable.

Olweus D. School bullying: development and some important challenges. Ann Rev Clin Psychol. 2013;9(9):751–80. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-050212-185516 .

Article Google Scholar

Arseneault L, Bowes L, Shakoor S. Bullying victimization in youths and mental health problems: “Much ado about nothing”? Psychol Med. 2010;40(5):717–29. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291709991383 .

Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar

Arseneault L. The long-term impact of bullying victimization on mental health. World Psychiatry. 2017;16(1):27–8. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20399 .

Article PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Moore SE, Norman RE, Suetani S, Thomas HJ, Sly PD, Scott JG. Consequences of bullying victimization in childhood and adolescence: a systematic review and meta-analysis. World J Psychiatry. 2017;7(1):60–76. https://doi.org/10.5498/wjp.v7.i1.60 .

Hagquist C, Due P, Torsheim T, Valimaa R. Cross-country comparisons of trends in adolescent psychosomatic symptoms—a Rasch analysis of HBSC data from four Nordic countries. Health Qual Life Outcomes. 2019;17(1):27. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12955-019-1097-x .

Deighton J, Lereya ST, Casey P, Patalay P, Humphrey N, Wolpert M. Prevalence of mental health problems in schools: poverty and other risk factors among 28 000 adolescents in England. Br J Psychiatry. 2019;215(3):565–7. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2019.19 .

Article PubMed Central Google Scholar

Le HTH, Tran N, Campbell MA, Gatton ML, Nguyen HT, Dunne MP. Mental health problems both precede and follow bullying among adolescents and the effects differ by gender: a cross-lagged panel analysis of school-based longitudinal data in Vietnam. Int J Ment Health Syst. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13033-019-0291-x .

Bayer JK, Mundy L, Stokes I, Hearps S, Allen N, Patton G. Bullying, mental health and friendship in Australian primary school children. Child Adolesc Ment Health. 2018;23(4):334–40. https://doi.org/10.1111/camh.12261 .

Article PubMed Google Scholar

Hysing M, Askeland KG, La Greca AM, Solberg ME, Breivik K, Sivertsen B. Bullying involvement in adolescence: implications for sleep, mental health, and academic outcomes. J Interpers Violence. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260519853409 .

Hogberg B, Strandh M, Hagquist C. Gender and secular trends in adolescent mental health over 24 years—the role of school-related stress. Soc Sci Med. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.112890 .

Kidger J, Araya R, Donovan J, Gunnell D. The effect of the school environment on the emotional health of adolescents: a systematic review. Pediatrics. 2012;129(5):925–49. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2011-2248 .

Saminathen MG, Låftman SB, Modin B. En fungerande skola för alla: skolmiljön som skyddsfaktor för ungas psykiska välbefinnande. [A functioning school for all: the school environment as a protective factor for young people’s mental well-being]. Socialmedicinsk tidskrift [Soc Med]. 2020;97(5–6):804–16.

Google Scholar

Bibou-Nakou I, Tsiantis J, Assimopoulos H, Chatzilambou P, Giannakopoulou D. School factors related to bullying: a qualitative study of early adolescent students. Soc Psychol Educ. 2012;15(2):125–45. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-012-9179-1 .

Vukojevic M, Zovko A, Talic I, Tanovic M, Resic B, Vrdoljak I, Splavski B. Parental socioeconomic status as a predictor of physical and mental health outcomes in children—literature review. Acta Clin Croat. 2017;56(4):742–8. https://doi.org/10.20471/acc.2017.56.04.23 .

Reiss F. Socioeconomic inequalities and mental health problems in children and adolescents: a systematic review. Soc Sci Med. 2013;90:24–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.04.026 .

Stockholm City. Stockholmsenkät (The Stockholm Student Survey). 2021. https://start.stockholm/aktuellt/nyheter/2020/09/presstraff-stockholmsenkaten-2020/ . Accessed 19 Nov 2021.

Zeebari Z, Lundin A, Dickman PW, Hallgren M. Are changes in alcohol consumption among swedish youth really occurring “in concert”? A new perspective using quantile regression. Alc Alcohol. 2017;52(4):487–95. https://doi.org/10.1093/alcalc/agx020 .

Hagquist C. Psychometric properties of the PsychoSomatic Problems Scale: a Rasch analysis on adolescent data. Social Indicat Res. 2008;86(3):511–23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-007-9186-3 .

Hagquist C. Ungas psykiska hälsa i Sverige–komplexa trender och stora kunskapsluckor [Young people’s mental health in Sweden—complex trends and large knowledge gaps]. Socialmedicinsk tidskrift [Soc Med]. 2013;90(5):671–83.

Wu W, West SG. Detecting misspecification in mean structures for growth curve models: performance of pseudo R(2)s and concordance correlation coefficients. Struct Equ Model. 2013;20(3):455–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705511.2013.797829 .

Holt MK, Espelage DL. Perceived social support among bullies, victims, and bully-victims. J Youth Adolscence. 2007;36(8):984–94. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-006-9153-3 .

Mark L, Varnik A, Sisask M. Who suffers most from being involved in bullying-bully, victim, or bully-victim? J Sch Health. 2019;89(2):136–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/josh.12720 .

Tsaousis I. The relationship of self-esteem to bullying perpetration and peer victimization among schoolchildren and adolescents: a meta-analytic review. Aggress Violent Behav. 2016;31:186–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2016.09.005 .

Veldkamp SAM, Boomsma DI, de Zeeuw EL, van Beijsterveldt CEM, Bartels M, Dolan CV, van Bergen E. Genetic and environmental influences on different forms of bullying perpetration, bullying victimization, and their co-occurrence. Behav Genet. 2019;49(5):432–43. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-019-09968-5 .

Janssen I, Craig WM, Boyce WF, Pickett W. Associations between overweight and obesity with bullying behaviors in school-aged children. Pediatrics. 2004;113(5):1187–94. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.113.5.1187 .

Kelly EV, Newton NC, Stapinski LA, Conrod PJ, Barrett EL, Champion KE, Teesson M. A novel approach to tackling bullying in schools: personality-targeted intervention for adolescent victims and bullies in Australia. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2020;59(4):508. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2019.04.010 .

Gunnell D, Kidger J, Elvidge H. Adolescent mental health in crisis. BMJ. 2018. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k2608 .

O’Reilly M, Dogra N, Whiteman N, Hughes J, Eruyar S, Reilly P. Is social media bad for mental health and wellbeing? Exploring the perspectives of adolescents. Clin Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2018;23:601–13.

Unnever JD, Cornell DG. Middle school victims of bullying: who reports being bullied? Aggr Behav. 2004;30(5):373–88. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.20030 .

Download references

Acknowledgements

Authors are grateful to the Department for Social Affairs, Stockholm, for permission to use data from the Stockholm School Survey.

Open access funding provided by Karolinska Institute. None to declare.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Stockholm Prevents Alcohol and Drug Problems (STAD), Center for Addiction Research and Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Solna, Sweden

Håkan Källmén

Epidemiology of Psychiatric Conditions, Substance Use and Social Environment (EPiCSS), Department of Global Public Health, Karolinska Institutet, Level 6, Solnavägen 1e, Solna, Sweden

Mats Hallgren

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

HK conceived the study and analyzed the data (with input from MH). HK and MH interpreted the data and jointly wrote the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mats Hallgren .

Ethics declarations

Ethics approval and consent to participate.

As the data are completely anonymous, the study was exempt from ethical approval according to an earlier decision from the Ethical Review Board in Stockholm (2010-241 31-5).

Consent for publication

Competing interests.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary Information

Additional file 1..

Principal factor analysis description.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Källmén, H., Hallgren, M. Bullying at school and mental health problems among adolescents: a repeated cross-sectional study. Child Adolesc Psychiatry Ment Health 15 , 74 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13034-021-00425-y

Download citation

Received : 05 October 2021

Accepted : 23 November 2021

Published : 14 December 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s13034-021-00425-y

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Mental health
Adolescents
School-related factors
Gender differences

Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health

ISSN: 1753-2000

Submission enquiries: [email protected]

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Understanding alternative bullying perspectives through research engagement with young people.

$\r\nNiamh O&#x;Brien*$

School of Education and Social Care, Faculty of Health, Education, Medicine and Social Care, Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, United Kingdom

Bullying research has traditionally been dominated by largescale cohort studies focusing on the personality traits of bullies and victims. These studies focus on bullying prevalence, risk and protective factors, and negative outcomes. A limitation of this approach is that it does not explain why bullying happens. Qualitative research can help shed light on these factors. This paper discusses the findings from four mainly qualitative research projects including a systematic review and three empirical studies involving young people to various degrees within the research process as respondents, co-researchers and commissioners of research. Much quantitative research suggests that young people are a homogenous group and through the use of surveys and other large scale methods, generalizations can be drawn about how bullying is understood and how it can be dealt with. Findings from the studies presented in this paper, add to our understanding that young people appear particularly concerned about the role of wider contextual and relational factors in deciding if bullying has happened. These studies underscore the relational aspects of definitions of bullying and, how the dynamics of young people’s friendships can shift what is understood as bullying or not. Moreover, to appreciate the relational and social contexts underpinning bullying behaviors, adults and young people need to work together on bullying agendas and engage with multiple definitions, effects and forms of support. Qualitative methodologies, in particular participatory research opens up the complexities of young lives and enables these insights to come to the fore. Through this approach, effective supports can be designed based on what young people want and need rather than those interpreted as supportive through adult understanding.

Introduction

Research on school bullying has developed rapidly since the 1970s. Originating in social and psychological research in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, this body of research largely focusses on individualized personality traits of perpetrators and victims ( Olweus, 1995 ). Global interest in this phenomenon subsequently spread and bullying research began in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States ( Griffin and Gross, 2004 ). Usually quantitative in nature, many studies examine bullying prevalence, risk and protective factors, and negative outcomes ( Patton et al., 2017 ). Whilst quantitative research collates key demographic information to show variations in bullying behaviors and tendencies, this dominant bullying literature fails to explain why bullying happens. Nor does it attempt to understand the wider social contexts in which bullying occurs. Qualitative research on the other hand, in particular participatory research, can help shed light on these factors by highlighting the complexities of the contextual and relational aspects of bullying and the particular challenges associated with addressing it. Patton et al. (2017) in their systematic review of qualitative methods used in bullying research, found that the use of such methods can enhance academic and practitioner understanding of bullying.

In this paper, I draw on four bullying studies; one systematic review of both quantitative and qualitative research ( O’Brien, 2009 ) and three empirical qualitative studies ( O’Brien and Moules, 2010 ; O’Brien, 2016 , 2017 ) (see Table 1 below). I discuss how participatory research methodologies, to varying degrees, were used to facilitate bullying knowledge production among teams of young people and adults. Young people in these presented studies were consequently involved in the research process along a continuum of involvement ( Bragg and Fielding, 2005 ). To the far left of the continuum, young people involved in research are referred to as “active respondents” and their data informs teacher practice. To the middle of the continuum sit “students as co-researchers” who work with teachers to explore an issue which has been identified by that teacher. Finally to the right, sit “students as researchers” who conduct their own research with support from teachers. Moving from left to right of the continuum shows a shift in power dynamics between young people and adults where a partnership develops. Young people are therefore recognized as equal to adults in terms of what they can bring to the project from their own unique perspective, that of being a young person now.

Table 1. The studies.

In this paper, I advocate for the active involvement of young people in the research process in order to enhance bullying knowledge. Traditional quantitative studies have a tendency to homogenize young people by suggesting similarity in thinking about what constitutes bullying. However, qualitative studies have demonstrated that regardless of variables, young people understand bullying in different ways so there is a need for further research that starts from these perspectives and focusses on issues that young people deem important. Consequently, participatory research allows for the stories of the collective to emerge without losing the stories of the individual, a task not enabled through quantitative approaches.

What Is Bullying?

Researching school bullying has been problematic and is partly related to the difficulty in defining it ( Espelage, 2018 ). Broadly speaking, bullying is recognized as aggressive, repeated, intentional behavior involving an imbalance of power aimed toward an individual or group of individuals who cannot easily defend themselves ( Vaillancourt et al., 2008 ). In more recent times, “traditional” bullying behaviors have been extended to include cyber-bullying, involving the use of the internet and mobile-phones ( Espelage, 2018 ). Disagreements have been noted in the literature about how bullying is defined by researchers linked to subject discipline and culture. Some researchers for example, disagree about the inclusion or not of repetition in definitions ( Griffin and Gross, 2004 ) and these disagreements have had an impact on interpreting findings and prevalence rates. However, evidence further suggests that young people also view bullying in different ways ( Guerin and Hennessy, 2002 ; Cuadrado-Gordillo, 2012 ; Eriksen, 2018 ). Vaillancourt et al. (2008) explored differences between researchers and young people’s definitions of bullying, and found that children’s definitions were usually spontaneous, and did not always encompass the elements of repetition, power imbalance and intent. They concluded, that children need to be provided with a bullying definition so similarities and comparisons can be drawn. In contrast, Huang and Cornell (2015) found no evidence that the inclusion of a definition effected prevalence rates. Their findings, they suggest, indicate that young people use their own perceptions of bullying when answering self-report questionnaires and they are not influenced by an imposed definition.

Nevertheless, differences in children and young people’s bullying definitions are evident in the research literature and have been explained by recourse to age and stage of development ( Smith et al., 2002 ) and their assumed lack of understanding about what constitutes bullying ( Boulton and Flemington, 1996 ). Naylor et al. (2001) for example, found that younger children think similarly in their definitions of bullying, while Smith et al. (2002) found that 8 year olds did not distinguish as clearly between different forms of behavioral aggression as 14 year olds. Methodological limitations associated with understanding bullying have been identified by Forsberg et al. (2018) and Maunder and Crafter (2018) . These authors postulate that quantitative approaches, although providing crucial insights in understanding bullying, are reliant on pre-defined variables, which can shield some of the complexities that qualitative designs can unravel, as individual experiences of bullying are brought to the fore. Indeed, La Fontaine (1991) suggests that unlike standard self-report questionnaires and other quantitative methods used to collect bullying data, analyzing qualitative data such as those collected from a helpline, enables the voice of young people to be heard and consequently empowers adults to understand bullying on their terms rather than relying solely on interpretations and perceptions of adults. Moore and Maclean (2012) collected survey, as well as interview and focus group data, on victimization occurring on the journey to and from school. They found that what young people determined as victimization varied and was influenced by a multifaceted array of circumstances, some of which adults were unaware of. Context for example, played an important role where certain behaviors in one situation could be regarded as victimization while in another they were not. Specific behaviors including ignoring an individual was particularly hurtful and supporting a friend who was the subject of victimization could lead to their own victimization.

Lee (2006) suggests that some bullying research does not reflect individual experiences, and are thus difficult for participants to relate to. Canty et al. (2016) reiterates this and suggests that when researchers provide young people with bullying definitions in which to position their own experiences, this can mask some of the complexities that the research intends to uncover. Such approaches result in an oversight into the socially constructed and individual experiences of bullying ( Eriksen, 2018 ). Griffin and Gross (2004) further argue that when researchers use vague or ambiguous definitions an “overclassification of children as bullies or victims” (p. 381) ensues. Consequently, quantitative research does not consider children as reliable in interpreting their own lived experiences and therefore some of the interactions they consider as bullying, that do not fit within the conventional definitions, are concealed. This approach favors the adult definition of bullying regarding it as “more reliable” than the definitions of children and young people Canty et al. (2016) . The perceived “seriousness” of bullying has also been explored. Overall, young people and adults are more likely to consider direct bullying (face-to-face actions including hitting, threatening and calling names) as “more serious” than indirect bullying (rumor spreading, social exclusion, forcing others to do something they do not want to do) ( Maunder et al., 2010 ; Skrzypiec et al., 2011 ). This perception of “seriousness,” alongside ambiguous definitions of bullying, has further implications for reporting it. Despite the advice given to young people to report incidents of school bullying ( Moore and Maclean, 2012 ), the literature suggests that many are reluctant to do so ( deLara, 2012 ; Moore and Maclean, 2012 ).

Several factors have been highlighted as to why young people are reluctant to report bullying ( Black et al., 2010 ). deLara (2012) , found apprehension in reporting bullying to teachers due to the fear that they will either not do enough or too much and inadvertently make the situation worse, or fear that teachers will not believe young people. Research also shows that young people are reluctant to tell their parents about bullying due to perceived over-reaction and fear that the bullying will be reported to their school ( deLara, 2012 ; Moore and Maclean, 2012 ). Oliver and Candappa (2007) suggest that young people are more likely to confide in their friends than adults (see also Moore and Maclean, 2012 ; Allen, 2014 ). However, if young people believe they are being bullied, but are unable to recognize their experiences within a predefined definition of bullying, this is likely to impact on their ability to report it.

Research from psychology, sociology, education and other disciplines, utilizing both quantitative and qualitative approaches, have enabled the generation of bullying knowledge to date. However, in order to understand why bullying happens and how it is influenced by wider social constructs there is a need for further qualitative studies, which hear directly from children and young people themselves. The next section of this paper discusses the theoretical underpinnings of this paper, which recognizes that young people are active agents in generating new bullying knowledge alongside adults.

Theoretical Underpinnings – Hearing From Children and Young People

The sociology of childhood ( James, 2007 ; Tisdall and Punch, 2012 ) and children’s rights agenda more broadly ( United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989 ) have offered new understandings and methods for research which recognize children and young people as active agents and experts on their own lives. From this perspective, research is conducted with rather than on children and young people ( Kellett, 2010 ).

Participatory methodologies have proven particularly useful for involving young people in research as co-researchers (see for example O’Brien and Moules, 2007 ; Stoudt, 2009 ; Kellett, 2010 ; Spears et al., 2016 ). This process of enquiry actively involves those normally being studied in research activities. Previously, “traditional” researchers devalued the experiences of research participants arguing that due to their distance from them, they themselves are better equipped to interpret these experiences ( Beresford, 2006 ). However, Beresford (2006) suggests that the shorter the distance between direct experience and interpretation, the less distorted and inaccurate the resulting knowledge is likely to be. Jones (2004) further advocates that when young people’s voices are absent from research about them the research is incomplete. Certainly Spears et al. (2016) , adopted this approach in their study with the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) in Australia. Young people played an active role within a multidisciplinary team alongside researchers, practitioners and policymakers to co-create and co-evaluate the learning from four marketing campaigns for youth wellbeing through participatory research. Through this methodological approach, findings show that young people were able to reconceptualize mental health and wellbeing from their own perspectives as well as share their lived experiences with others ( Spears et al., 2016 ). Bland and Atweh (2007) , Ozer and Wright (2012) , highlight the benefits afforded to young people through this process, including participating in dialog with decision-makers and bringing aspects of teaching and learning to their attention.

Against this background, data presented for this paper represents findings from four studies underpinned by the ethos that bullying is socially constructed and is best understood by exploring the context to which it occurs ( Schott and Sondergaard, 2014 ; Eriksen, 2018 ). This socially constructed view focusses on the evolving positions within young people’s groups, and argues that within a bullying situation sometimes a young person is the bully, sometimes the victim and sometimes the bystander/witness, which contrasts the traditional view of bullying ( Schott and Sondergaard, 2014 ). The focus therefore is on group relationships and dynamics. For that reason, Horton (2011) proposes that if bullying is an extensive problem including many young people, then focusing entirely on personality traits will not generate new bullying knowledge and will be problematic in terms of interventions. It is important to acknowledge that this change in focus and view of bullying and how it is manifested in groups, does not negate the individual experiences of bullying rather the focus shifts to the process of being accepted, or not, by the group ( Schott and Sondergaard, 2014 ).

The Studies

This section provides a broad overview of the four included studies underpinned by participatory methodologies. Table 1 presents the details of each study. Young people were involved in the research process as respondents, co-researchers and commissioners of research, along a continuum as identified by Bragg and Fielding (2005) . This ranged from “active respondents” to the left of the continuum, “students as co-researchers” in the middle and “students as researchers” to the right of the continuum. Young people were therefore recognized as equal to adults in terms of what they can bring to the project from their own unique perspectives ( Bradbury-Jones et al., 2018 ).

A key finding from study one ( O’Brien, 2009 ) was the lack of voice afforded to young people through the research process and can be seen to reflect the far left of Bragg and Fielding (2005) continuum, as young people were not directly involved as “active respondents” but their views were included in secondary data analysis and informed the studies that followed. For example, the quantitative studies used an agreed academic definition of bullying which may or may not have influenced how young participants defined bullying within the studies. On the other hand, the qualitative study involved a group of students in deciding which questions to ask of the research participants and in interpreting the findings.

In contrast, study two ( O’Brien and Moules, 2010 ) was commissioned and led by a group of young people called PEAR (Public health, Education, Awareness, Researchers), who were established to advise on public health research in England. PEAR members were based in two large English cities and comprised 20 young people aged between 13 and 20 years. The premise of the study was that PEAR members wanted to commission research into cyber bullying and the effects this has on mental health from the perspectives of young people rather than adult perspectives. This project was innovative as young people commissioned the research and participated as researchers ( Davey, 2011 ) and can be seen to reflect the middle “students as co-researchers” as well as moving toward to right “students as researchers” of Bragg and Fielding (2005) continuum. Although the young people did not carry out the day-to-day work on the project, they were responsible for leading and shaping it. More importantly, the research topic and focus were decided with young people and adults together.

Study three ( O’Brien, 2016 ) involved five self-selecting students from an independent day and boarding school who worked with me to answer this question: What do young people in this independent day and boarding school view as the core issue of bullying in the school and how do they want to address this? These students called themselves R4U (Research for You) with the slogan researching for life without fear . Three cycles of Participatory Action Research (PAR) ensued, where decision making about direction of the research, including methods, analysis and dissemination of findings were made by the research team. As current students of the school, R4U had a unique “insider knowledge” that complemented my position as the “academic researcher.” By working together to generate understanding about bullying at the school, the findings thus reflected this diversity in knowledge. As the project evolved so too did the involvement of the young researchers and my knowledge as the “outsider” (see O’Brien et al., 2018a for further details). Similar to study two, this project is situated between the middle: “students as co-researchers” and the right: “students as researchers” of Bragg and Fielding (2005) continuum.

Study four ( O’Brien, 2017 ) was small-scale and involved interviewing four young people who were receiving support from a charity providing therapeutic and educational support to young people who self-exclude from school due to anxiety, as a result of bullying. Self-exclusion, for the purposes of this study, means that a young person has made a decision not to go to school. It is different from “being excluded” or “truanting” because these young people do not feel safe at school and are therefore too anxious to attend. Little is known about the experiences of young people who self-exclude due to bullying and this study helped to unravel some of these issues. This study reflects the left of Bragg and Fielding (2005) continuum where the young people were involved as “active respondents” in informing adult understanding of the issue.

A variety of research methods were used across the four studies including questionnaires, interviews and focus groups (see Table 1 for more details). In studies two and three, young researchers were fundamental in deciding the types of questions to be asked, where they were asked and who we asked. In study three the young researchers conducted their own peer-led interviews. The diversity of methods used across the studies are a strength for this paper. An over-reliance on one method is not portrayed and the methods used reflected the requirements of the individual studies.

Informed Consent

Voluntary positive agreement to participate in research is referred to as “consent” while “assent,” refers to a person’s compliance to participate ( Coyne, 2010 ). The difference in these terms are normally used to distinguish the “legal competency of children over and under 16 years in relation to research.” ( Coyne, 2010 , 228). In England, children have a legal right to consent so therefore assent is non-applicable ( Coyne, 2010 ). However, there are still tensions surrounding the ability of children and young people under the age of 18 years to consent in research which are related to their vulnerability, age and stage of development ( Lambert and Glacken, 2011 ). The research in the three empirical studies (two, three and four) started from the premise that all young participants were competent to consent to participate and took the approach of Coyne (2010) who argues that parental/carer consent is not always necessary in social research. University Research Ethics Committees (RECs) are nonetheless usually unfamiliar with the theoretical underpinnings that children are viewed as social actors and generally able to consent for themselves ( Lambert and Glacken, 2011 ; Fox, 2013 ; Parsons et al., 2015 ).

In order to ensure the young people in these reported studies were fully informed of the intentions of each project and to adhere to ethical principles, age appropriate participant information sheets were provided to all participants detailing each study’s requirements. Young people were then asked to provide their own consent by signing a consent form, any questions they had about the studies were discussed. Information sheets were made available to parents in studies three and four. In study two, the parents of young people participating in the focus groups were informed of the study through the organizations used to recruit the young people. My full contact details were provided on these sheets so parents/carers could address any queries they had about the project if they wished. When young people participated in the online questionnaire (study two) we did not know who they were so could not provide separate information to parents. Consequently, all participants were given the opportunity to participate in the research without the consent of their parents/carers unless they were deemed incompetent to consent. In this case the onus was on the adult (parent or carer for example) to prove incompetency ( Alderson, 2007 ). Favorable ethical approval, including approval for the above consent procedures, was granted by the Faculty Research Ethics Committee at Anglia Ruskin University.

In the next section I provide a synthesis of the findings across the four studies before discussing how participatory research with young people can offer new understandings of bullying and its impacts on young people.

Although each study was designed to answer specific bullying research questions, the following key themes cut across all four studies 1 :

• Bullying definitions

◦ Behaviors

• Impact of bullying on victim

• Reporting bullying

Bullying Definitions

Young people had various understandings about what they considered bullying to be. Overall, participants agreed that aggressive direct behaviors, mainly focusing on physical aggression, constituted bullying:

“…if someone is physically hurt then that is bullying straight away.” (Female, study 3).

“I think [cyber-bullying is] not as bad because with verbal or physical, you are more likely to come in contact with your attacker regularly, and that can be disturbing. However, with cyber-bullying it is virtual so you can find ways to avoid the person.” (Female, study 2).

Name-calling was an ambiguous concept, young people generally believed that in isolation name-calling might not be bullying behavior or it could be interpreted as “joking” or “banter”:

“I never really see any, a bit of name calling and taking the mick but nothing ever serious.” (Male, study 3).

The concept of “banter” or “joking” was explored in study three as a result of the participatory design. Young people suggested “banter” involves:

“…a personal joke or group banter has no intention to harm another, it is merely playful jokes.” (Female, study 3).

However, underpinning this understanding of “banter” was the importance of intentionality:

“Banter saying things bad as a joke and everyone knows it is a joke.” (Male, study 3).

“Banter” was thus contentious when perception and reception were ambiguous. In some cases, “banter” was considered “normal behavior”:

“…we’ve just been joking about, but it’s never been anything harsh it’s just been like having a joke…” (Male, study 3).

The same view was evident in relation to cyber-bullying. Some participants were rather dismissive of this approach suggesting that it did not exist:

“I don’t really think it exists. If you’re being cyber-“bullied” then there is something wrong with you- it is insanely easy to avoid, by blocking people and so on. Perhaps it consists of people insulting you online?” (Male, study 2).

When young people considered additional factors added to name calling such as the type of name-calling, or aspects of repetition or intention, then a different view was apparent.

“…but it has to be constant it can’t be a single time because that always happens.” (Male, study 3).

Likewise with words used on social media, young people considered intentionality in their consideration of whether particular behaviors were bullying, highlighting important nuances in how bullying is conceptualized:

“Some people they don’t want to sound cruel but because maybe if you don’t put a smiley face on it, it might seem cruel when sometimes you don’t mean it.” (Female, study 2).

Study one also found that young people were more likely to discuss sexist or racist bullying in interviews or focus groups but this information was scarce in the questionnaire data. This is possibly as a result of how the questions were framed and the researchers’ perspectives informing the questions.

Evident across the four studies was the understanding young people had about the effects of continuous name-calling on victims:

“…you can take one comment, you can just like almost brush it off, but if you keep on being bullied and bullied and bullied then you might kind of think, hang on a minute, they’ve taken it a step too far, like it’s actually become more personal, whereas just like a cheeky comment between friends it’s become something that’s more serious and more personal and more annoying or hurtful to someone.” (Female, study 3).

“Cyber-bullying is basically still verbal bullying and is definitely psychological bullying. Any bullying is psychological though, really. And any bullying is going to be harmful.” (Female, study 2).

Aspects of indirect bullying (social exclusion) were features of studies one and three. For the most part, the research reviewed in study one found that as young people got older they were less likely to consider characteristics of social exclusion in their definitions of bullying. In study three, when discussing the school’s anti-bullying policy, study participants raised questions about “ isolating a student from a friendship group .” Some contested this statement as a form of bullying:

“…. there is avoiding, as in, not actively playing a role in trying to be friends which I don’t really see as bullying I see this as just not getting someone to join your friendship group. Whereas if you were actually leaving him out and rejecting him if he tries to be friends then I think I would see that as malicious and bullying.” (Male, study 3).

“Isolating a student from a friendship group – I believe there are various reasons for which a student can be isolated from a group – including by choice.” (Female, study 3).

Cyber-bullying was explored in detail in study two but less so in the other three studies. Most study two participants considered that cyber-bullying was just as harmful, or in some cases worse than, ‘traditional’ bullying due to the use of similar forms of “harassment,” “antagonizing,” “tormenting,” and ‘threatening’ through online platforms. Some young people believed that the physical distance between the victim and the bully is an important aspect of cyber-bullying:

“I think it’s worse because people find it easier to abuse someone when not face to face.” (Male, study 2).

“I think it could be worse, because lots of other people can get involved, whereas when it’s physical bullying it’s normally just between one or two or a smaller group, things could escalate too because especially Facebook, they’ve got potential to escalate.” (Female, study 2).

Other participants in study two spoke about bullying at school which transfers to an online platform highlighting no “escape” for some. In addition, it was made clearer that some young people considered distancing in relation to bullying and how this influences perceptions of severity:

“…when there’s an argument it can continue when you’re not at school or whatever and they can continue it over Facebook and everyone can see it then other people get involved.” (Female, study 2).

“I was cyber-bullied on Facebook, because someone put several hurtful comments in response to my status updates and profile pictures. This actually was extended into school by the bully…” (Male, study 2).

Impact of Bullying on Victim

Although bullying behaviors were a primary consideration of young people’s understanding of bullying, many considered the consequences associated with bullying and in particular, the impact on mental health. In these examples, the specifics of the bullying event were irrelevant to young people and the focus was on how the behavior was received by the recipient.

In study two, young people divulged how cyber-bullying had adversely affected their ability to go to school and to socialize outside school. Indeed some young people reported the affects it had on their confidence and self-esteem:

“I developed anorexia nervosa. Although not the single cause of my illness, bullying greatly contributed to my low self-esteem which led to becoming ill.” (Female, study 2).

“It hurts people’s feelings and can even lead to committing suicide….” (Female, study 2).

Across the studies, young people who had been bullied themselves shared their individual experiences:

“….you feel insecure and it just builds up and builds up and then in the end you have no self-confidence.” (Female, study 2).

“…it was an everyday thing I just couldn’t take it and it was causing me a lot of anxiety.” (Male, study 4).

“I am different to everyone in my class …. I couldn’t take it no more I was upset all the time and it made me feel anxious and I wasn’t sleeping but spent all my time in bed being sad and unhappy.” (Male, study 4).

Young people who had not experienced bullying themselves agreed that the impact it had on a person was a large determiner of whether bullying had happened:

“When your self-confidence is severely affected and you become shy. Also when you start believing what the bullies are saying about you and start to doubt yourself.” (Female, study 3).

“…it makes the victim feel bad about themselves which mostly leads to depression and sadness.” (Male, study 2).

Further evidence around the impact of bullying was apparent in the data in terms of how relational aspects can affect perceived severity. In the case of cyber-bullying, young people suggested a sense of detachment because the bullying takes place online. Consequently, as the relational element is removed bullying becomes easier to execute:

“…because people don’t have to face them over a computer so it’s so much easier. It’s so much quicker as well cos on something like Facebook it’s not just you, you can get everyone on Facebook to help you bully that person.” (Female, study 2).

“Due to technology being cheaper, it is easier for young people to bully people in this way because they don’t believe they can be tracked.” (Male, study 2).

“The effects are the same and often the bullying can be worse as the perpetrator is unknown or can disguise their identity. Away from the eyes of teachers etc., more can be done without anyone knowing.” (Female, study 2).

Relational aspects of bullying were further highlighted with regards to how “banter” was understood, particularly with in-group bullying and how the same example can either be seen as “banter” or bullying depending on the nature of the relationship:

“…we’ve just been joking about, but it’s never been anything harsh it’s just been like having a joke. well, I haven’t done it but I’ve been in a crowd where people do it, so I don’t want to get involved just in case it started an argument.” (Female, study 3).

“But it also depends…who your groups with, for example, if I spoke to my friends from [School]… I wouldn’t like use taboo language with them because to them it may seem inappropriate and probably a bit shocked, but if I was with my friends outside of school we use taboo language, we’ll be ourselves and we’ll be comfortable with it, and if a stranger walked past and heard us obviously they’d be thinking that we’re being bullied ourselves.” (Female, study 3).

Furthermore, how individuals are perceived by others tended to influence whether they were believed or not. In study four for example, participants suggested that who the bullies were within the school might have impacted how complaints were acted upon by school officials:

“When I went to the school about it, the students said I had attacked them – all eight of them! I just realized that no one believes me….” (Female, study 4).

While in study three, a characteristic of bullying was the influence the aggressor has over the victim:

“When the victim starts to feel in danger or start to fear the other person. Consequently he or she tries to avoid the bad guy (or girl!)” (Male, study 3).

These relational and contextual issues also influenced a young person’s ability to report bullying.

Reporting Bullying

Young people were more likely to report bullying when they considered it was ‘serious’ enough. Just under half of participants in study two sought emotional/practical support if they worried about, or were affected by cyber-bullying, with most talking to their parents. In study three, young people were less likely to seek support but when they did, most went to their teachers. In study four, all participants reported bullying in school where they did not feel supported.

Fear of making the bullying worse was captured across the studies as a reason for not reporting it:

“I’m scared that if I tell then the bullying will still go on and they will do more.” (Female, study 3).

“The bully might bully you if he finds out.” (Male, study 3).

Being able to deal with the incident themselves was also a reason for non-reporting:

“…it’s embarrassing and not necessary, my friends help me through it, adults never seem to understand.” (Female, study 2).

“I don’t tend to talk to anyone about it, I just keep it to myself and obviously that’s the worst thing you should ever do, you should never keep it to yourself, because I regret keeping it to myself to be honest….” (Female, study 3).

“…but I think I’d deal with it myself ‘cos. I was quite insecure but now I’m quite secure with myself, so I’ll sort it out myself. I think it’s just over time I’ve just sort of hardened to it.” (Male, study 3).

Most young people seeking support for bullying said they spoke to an adult but the helpfulness of this support varied. This finding is important for understanding relationships between young people and adults. Those who felt supported by their teachers for example, suggested that they took the time to listen and understood what they were telling them. They also reassured young people who in turn believed that the adult they confided in would know what to do:

“So I think the best teacher to talk to is [Miss A] and even though people are scared of her I would recommend it, because she’s a good listener and she can sense when you don’t want to talk about something, whereas the other teachers force it out of you.” (Female, study 3).

“My school has had assemblies about cyber-bullying and ways you can stop it or you can report it anonymously…. you can write your name or you can’t, it’s all up to YOU.” (Male, study 2).

Others however had a negative experience of reporting bullying and a number of reasons were provided as to why. Firstly, young people stated that adults did not believe them which made the bullying worse on some level:

“I went to the teachers a couple of times but, no, I don’t think they could do anything. I did sort of go three times and it still kept on going, so I just had to sort of deal with it and I sort of took it on the cheek….” (Male, study 3).

Secondly, young people suggested that adults did not always listen to their concerns, or in some cases did not take their concerns seriously enough:

“…I had had a really bad day with the girls so I came out and I explained all this to my head of year and how it was affecting me but instead of supporting me he put me straight into isolation.” (Male, study 4).

“I could understand them thinking I maybe got the wrong end of the stick with one incident but this was 18 months of me constantly reporting different incidents.” (Female, study 4).

“If cyber-bullying is brought to our school’s attention, usually, they expect printed proof of the situation and will take it into their own hand depending on its seriousness. However this is usually a couple of detentions. And it’s just not enough.” (Female, study 2).

Finally, some young people suggested that teachers did not always know what to do when bullying concerns were raised and consequently punished those making the complaint:

“I think I would have offered support instead of punishment to someone who was suffering with anxiety. I wouldn’t have seen anxiety as bad behavior I think that’s quite ignorant but they saw it as bad behavior.” (Male, study 4).

It is worth reiterating, that the majority of young people across the studies did not report bullying to anybody , which further underscores the contextual issues underpinning bullying and its role in enabling or disabling bullying behaviors. Some considered it was “pointless” reporting the bullying and others feared the situation would be made worse if they did:

“My school hide and say that bullying doesn’t go on cos they don’t wanna look bad for Ofsted.” (Male, study 2).

“My school is oblivious to anything that happens, many things against school rules happen beneath their eyes but they either refuse to acknowledge it or are just not paying attention so we must suffer.” (Female, study 2).

“That’s why I find that when you get bullied you’re scared of telling because either, in most cases the teacher will – oh yeah, yeah, don’t worry, we’ll sort it out and then they don’t tend to, and then they get bullied more for it.” (Female, study 3).

Young people were concerned that reporting bullying would have a negative impact on their friendship groups. Some were anxious about disrupting the status quo within:

“I think everyone would talk about me behind my back and say I was mean and everyone would hate me.” (Female, study 3).

Others expressed concern about the potential vulnerability they were likely to experience if they raised concerns of bullying:

“I was worried it might affect my other friendships.”(Boy, study 2).

“I’m scared that if I tell, then the bullying will still go on and they will do more.” (Female, study 3).

“….because they might tell off the bullies and then the bullies will like get back at you.” (Female, study 3).

These findings underscore the importance of contextual and relational factors in understanding bullying from the perspectives of young people and how these factors influence a young person’s ability or willingness to report bullying.

Finally one young person who had self-excluded from school due to severe bullying suggested that schools:

“…need to be looking out for their students’ mental wellbeing – not only be there to teach them but to support and mentor them. Keep them safe really… I missed out on about three years of socializing outside of school because I just couldn’t do it. I think it’s important that students are encouraged to stand up for each other.” (Female, study 4).

The studies presented in this paper illustrate the multitude of perceptions underpinning young people’s understandings of what constitutes bullying, both in terms of the behavior and also the impact that this behavior has on an individual. In turn, the ambiguity of what constitutes bullying had an impact on a young person’s ability to seek support. Discrepancies in bullying perceptions within and between young people’s groups are shown, highlighting the fluid and changing roles that occur within a bullying situation. Findings from quantitative studies have demonstrated the differing perceptions of bullying by adults and young people (see for example Smith et al., 2002 ; Vaillancourt et al., 2008 ; Maunder et al., 2010 ; Cuadrado-Gordillo, 2012 ). However, by combining findings from participatory research, new understandings of the relational and contextual factors important to young people come to the fore.

Young people participating in these four studies had unique knowledge and experiences of bullying and the social interactions of other young people in their schools and wider friendship groups. The underpinning participatory design enabled me to work alongside young people to analyze and understand their unique perspectives of bullying in more detail. The research teams were therefore able to construct meaning together, based not entirely on our own assumptions and ideologies, but including the viewpoint of the wider research participant group ( Thomson and Gunter, 2008 ). Together, through the process of co-constructing bullying knowledge, we were able to build on what is already known in this field and contribute to the view that bullying is socially constructed through the experiences of young people and the groups they occupy ( Schott and Sondergaard, 2014 ).

With regards to understanding what bullying is, the findings from these studies corroborate those of the wider literature from both paradigms of inquiry (for example Naylor et al., 2001 ; Canty et al., 2016 ); that being the discrepancies in definitions between adults and young people and also between young people themselves. Yet, findings here suggest that young people’s bullying definitions are contextually and relationally contingent. With the exception of physical bullying, young people did not differentiate between direct or indirect behaviors, instead they tended to agree that other contextual and relational factors played a role in deciding if particular behaviors were bullying (or not). The participatory research design enabled reflection and further investigation of the ideas that were particularly important to young people such as repetition and intentionality. Repetition was generally seen as being indicative of bullying being “serious,” and therefore more likely to be reported, and without repetition, a level of normality was perceived. This finding contradicts some work on bullying definitions, Cuadrado-Gordillo (2012) for example found that regardless of the role played by young people in a bullying episode (victim, aggressor or witness), the criteria of ‘repetition’ was not important in how they defined bullying.

Relational factors underpinning young people’s perception of bullying and indeed it’s “seriousness” were further reflected in their willingness or otherwise to report it. Fear of disrupting the status quo of the wider friendship group, potentially leading to their own exclusion from the group, was raised as a concern by young people. Some were concerned their friends would not support them if they reported bullying, while others feared further retaliation as a result. Friendship groups have been identified as a source of support for those who have experienced bullying and as a protective factor against further bullying ( Allen, 2014 ). Although participants did not suggest their friendship groups are unsupportive it is possible that group dynamics underscore seeking (or not) support for bullying. Other literature has described such practices as evidence of a power imbalance ( Olweus, 1995 ; Cuadrado-Gordillo, 2012 ) but young people in these studies did not describe these unequal relationships in this way and instead focused on the outcomes and impacts of bullying. Indeed Cuadrado-Gordillo (2012) also found that young people in their quantitative study did not consider “power imbalance” in their understanding of bullying and were more likely to consider intention. This paper, however, underscores the relational aspects of definitions of bullying and, how the dynamics of young people’s friendships can shift what is understood as bullying or not. Without such nuances, some behaviors may be overlooked as bullying, whereas other more obvious behaviors draw further attention. This paper also shows that contextual issues such as support structures can shift how young people see bullying. Contextual factors were evident across the four studies through the recognition of bullying being enabled or disabled by institutional factors, including a school’s ability to respond appropriately to bullying concerns. Young people suggested that schools could be influenced by bullies, perceiving them as non-threatening and consequently not dealing appropriately with the situation. Indeed some young people reported that their schools placed the onus on them as victims to change, consequently placing the “blame” on victims instead. These findings raise questions about who young people feel able to confide in about bullying as well as issues around training and teacher preparedness to deal with bullying in schools. Evidenced in these four studies, is that young people feel somewhat disconnected from adults when they have bullying concerns. Those who did report bullying, identified particular individuals they trusted and knew would support them. Novick and Isaacs (2010) identified teachers who young people felt comfortable in approaching to report bullying and described them as “most active, engaged and responsive.” (p. 291). The bullying literature suggests that as young people get older they are more likely to confide in friends than adults ( Moore and Maclean, 2012 ; Allen, 2014 ). However, findings from this paper indicate that although fewer young people reported bullying, those who did confided in an adult. Young people have identified that a variety of supports are required to tackle bullying and that adults need to listen and work with them so nuanced bullying behaviors are not recognized as “normal” behaviors. Within the data presented in this paper, “banter” was portrayed as “normal” behavior. Young people did not specify what behaviors they regarded as “banter,” but suggested that when banter is repeated and intentional the lines are blurred about what is bullying and what is banter.

Exploring bullying nuances in this paper, was enhanced by the involvement of young people in the research process who had a unique “insider” perspective about what it is like to be a young person now and how bullying is currently affecting young people. In studies one and four, young people were “active respondents” ( Bragg and Fielding, 2005 ) and provided adults with their own unique perspectives on bullying. It could be argued that study one did not involve the participation of young people. However, this study informed the basis of the subsequent studies due to the discrepancies noted in the literature about how bullying is understood between adults and young people, as well as the lack of young people’s voice and opportunity to participate in the reviewed research. Accordingly, young people’s data as “active respondents” informed adult understanding and led to future work involving more active research engagement from other young people. Participation in study four provided an opportunity for young people to contribute to future participatory research based on lived experiences as well as informing policy makers of the effects bullying has on the lives of young people ( O’Brien, 2017 ). In studies two and three, young people were involved further along Bragg and Fielding (2005) continuum as “co-researchers” and “students as researchers” with these roles shifting and moving dependent on the context of the project at the time ( O’Brien et al., 2018a ). These young researchers brought unique knowledge to the projects ( Bradbury-Jones et al., 2018 ) that could not be accessed elsewhere. Perspectives offered by the young researchers supported adults in understanding more about traditional and cyber-bullying from their perspectives. Furthermore, this knowledge can be added to other, quantitative studies to further understand why bullying happens alongside bullying prevalence, risk and protective factors, and negative outcomes.

Findings from the four studies offer an alternative perspective to how bullying is understood by young people. Complexities in defining bullying have been further uncovered as understanding is informed by individual factors, as well as wider social and relational contexts ( Horton, 2011 ; Schott and Sondergaard, 2014 ). This has implications for the type of support young people require. This paper highlights how definitions of bullying shift in response to relational and contextual aspects deemed important to young people. Because of this, further nuances were uncovered through the research process itself as the respective studies showed discrepancies in bullying perceptions within and between young people’s groups.

These understandings can act as a starting point for young people and adults to collaborate in research which seeks to understand bullying and the context to which it occurs. Furthermore, such collaborations enable adults to theorize and understand the complexities associated with bullying from the perspective of those at the center. There is a need for additional participatory research projects involving such collaborations where adults and young people can learn from each other as well as combining findings from different methodologies to enable a more comprehensive picture of the issues for young people to emerge. Further research is needed to unravel the complexities of bullying among and between young people, specifically in relation to the contextual and relational factors underscoring perceptions of bullying.

Data Availability

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this manuscript will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation, to any qualified researcher.

Ethics Statement

Ethical approval was granted for all four studies from the Faculty of Health, Education, Medicine and Social Care at the Anglia Ruskin University. The research was conducted on the premise of Gillick competency meaning that young people (in these studies over the age of 12 years) could consent for themselves to participate. Parents/carers were aware the study was happening and received information sheets explaining the process.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

These four studies were conducted at the Anglia Ruskin University. Study one was part of a wider masters degree funded by the Anglia Ruskin University, Study two was funded by a group of young people convened by the National Children’s Bureau with funding from the Wellcome Trust (United Kingdom). Study three was a wider Doctoral study funded by the Anglia Ruskin University and Study four was also funded by the Anglia Ruskin University.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Grace Spencer, Ruskin Fellow at the Anglia Ruskin University for providing the critical read of this manuscript and offering constructive feedback. I would also like to thank the two independent reviewers for their feedback on the drafts of this manuscript.

^ These findings focus on perceptions and data from the young people in the four studies. For a full discussion on adult perceptions please refer to the individual studies.

Alderson, P. (2007). Competent children? Minors’ consent to health care treatment and research. Soc. Sci. Med. 65, 2272–2283. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2007.08.005

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Allen, M. (2014). Local Action on Health Inequalities: Building Children and Young People’s Resilience in Schools , London: Public Health England.

Google Scholar

Beresford, P. (2006). Making the connections with direct experience: from the western front to user-controlled research. Educ. Action Res. 14, 161–170.

Black, S., Weinles, D., and Washington, E. (2010). Victim strategies to stop bullying. Youth Violence Juv. Justice 8, 138–147. doi: 10.1177/1541204009349401

CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Bland, D., and Atweh, B. (2007). Students as researchers: engaging students’ voices in PAR. Educ. Action Res. 15, 337–349. doi: 10.1080/09650790701514259

Boulton, M. J., and Flemington, I. (1996). The effects of a short video intervention on secondary school Pupils’ involvement in definitions of and attitudes towards bullying. Sch. Psychol. Int. 17, 331–345. doi: 10.1177/0143034396174003

Bradbury-Jones, C., Isham, L., and Taylor, J. (2018). The complexities and contradictions in participatory research with vulnerable children and young people: a qualitative systematic review. Soc. Sci. Med. 215, 80–91. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.08.038

Bragg, S., and Fielding, M. (2005). “It’s an equal thing. It’s about achieving together: student voices and the possibility of a radical collegiality,” in Improving Schools Through Collaborative Enquiry , eds H. Street, and J. Temperley, (London: Continuum), 105–135.

Braun, V., and Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in Psychology. Qual. Res. Psychol. 3, 77–101.

Canty, J., Stubbe, M., Steers, D., and Collings, S. (2016). The trouble with bullying–deconstructing the conventional definition of bullying for a child-centred investigation into Children’s use of social media. Child. Soc. 30, 48–58. doi: 10.1111/chso.12103

Coyne, I. (2010). Research with children and young people: the issue of parental (proxy) consent. Child. Soc. 24, 227–237.

Cuadrado-Gordillo, I. (2012). Repetition, power imbalance, and intentionality: do these criteria conform to teenagers’ perception of bullying? A role-based analysis. J. Interpers. Violence 27, 1889–1910. doi: 10.1177/0886260511431436

Davey, C. (2011). Evaluation of the PEAR Project. London: National Children’s Bureau.

deLara, E. W. (2012). Why adolescents Don’t disclose incidents of bullying and harassment. J. Sch. Violence 11, 288–305. doi: 10.1080/15388220.2012.705931

Eriksen, I. M. (2018). The power of the word: students’ and school staff’s use of the established bullying definition. Educ. Res. 60, 157–170. doi: 10.1080/00131881.2018.1454263

Espelage, D. L. (2018). Understanding the complexity of school bully involvement. Chautauqua J. 2:20.

Forsberg, C., Wood, L., Smith, J., Varjas, K., Meyers, J., Jungert, T., et al. (2018). Students’ views of factors affecting their bystander behaviors in response to school bullying: a cross-collaborative conceptual qualitative analysis. Res. Pap. Educ. 33, 127–142. doi: 10.1080/02671522.2016.1271001

Fox, R. (2013). Resisting participation: critiquing participatory research methodologies with young people. J. Youth Stud. 16, 986–999. doi: 10.1080/13676261.2013.815698

Griffin, R. S., and Gross, A. M. (2004). Childhood bullying: current empirical findings and future directions for research. Aggr. Violent Behav. 9, 379–400. doi: 10.1016/s1359-1789(03)00033-8

Guerin, S., and Hennessy, E. (2002). Pupils’ definitions of bullying. Eur. J. Psychol. Educ. 17, 249–261. doi: 10.1007/bf03173535

Horton, P. (2011). School bullying and social and moral orders. Child. Soc. 25, 268–277. doi: 10.1111/j.1099-0860.2011.00377.x

Huang, F. L., and Cornell, D. G. (2015). The impact of definition and question order on the prevalence of bullying victimization using student self-reports. Psychol. Assess. 27:1484. doi: 10.1037/pas0000149

James, A. (2007). Giving voice to children’s voices: practices and problems, pitfalls and potentials. Am. Anthropol. 109, 261–272. doi: 10.1525/aa.2007.109.2.261

Jones, A. (2004). “Involving children and yong people as researchers,” in Doing Research with Children and Young People , eds S. Fraser, V. Lewis, S. Ding, M. Kellett, and C. Robinson, (London: Sage Publications), 113–130.

Kellett, M. (2010). Small shoes, Big Steps! Empowering children as active researchers. Am. J. Commun. Psychol. 46, 195–203. doi: 10.1007/s10464-010-9324-y

La Fontaine, J. (1991). Bullying: The Child’s View – an Analysis of Telephone Calls to ChildLIne about Bullying. London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

Lambert, V., and Glacken, M. (2011). Engaging with children in research: theoretical and practical implications of negotiating informed consent/assent. Nurs. Ethics 18, 781–801. doi: 10.1177/0969733011401122

Lee, C. (2006). Exploring teachers’ definitions of bullying. Emot. Behav. Diffic. 11, 61–75. doi: 10.1080/13632750500393342

Maunder, R. E., and Crafter, S. (2018). School bullying from a sociocultural perspective. Aggr. Violent Behav. 38, 13–20. doi: 10.1016/j.avb.2017.10.010

Maunder, R. E., Harrop, A., and Tattersall, A. J. (2010). Pupil and staff perceptions of bullying in secondary schools: comparing behavioural definitions and their perceived seriousness. Educ. Res. 52, 263–282. doi: 10.1080/00131881.2010.504062

Moore, S., and Maclean, R. (2012). Victimization, friendship and resilience: crossing the land in-between. Pastor. Care Educ. 30, 147–163. doi: 10.1080/02643944.2012.679956

Naylor, P., Cowie, H., and del Rey, R. (2001). Coping strategies of secondary school children in response to being bullied. Child Psychol. Psychiatry Rev. 6, 114–120. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2009.02137.x

Novick, R. M., and Isaacs, J. (2010). Telling is compelling: the impact of students reports of bullying on teacher intervention. Educ. Psychol. 30, 283–296. doi: 10.1080/01443410903573123

O’Brien, N. (2009). Secondary school teachers’ and pupils’ definitions of bullying in the UK: a systematic review. Evid. Policy 5, 399–426.

PubMed Abstract | Google Scholar

O’Brien, N. (2014). “I Didn’t Want to be Known as a Snitch”: Using PAR to Explore Bullying in a Private day and Boarding School. Childhood Remixed. Conference Edition. Suffolk: University Campus Suffolk, 86–96.

O’Brien, N. (2016). To ‘Snitch’ or Not to ‘Snitch’? Using PAR to Explore Bullying in a Private Day and Boarding School. Available at: http://arro.anglia.ac.uk/700970/ (accessed September 20, 2018).

O’Brien, N. (2017). An Exploratory Study of Bullied Young People’s Self-Exclusion from School. Evidence: Presented at Meetings of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Bullying 2011-2016. Project Report. All Party Parliamentary Group on Bullying. Available at: http://arro.anglia.ac.uk/id/eprint/702024 (accessed September 20, 2018).

O’Brien, N., and Moules, T. (2007). So round the spiral again: a reflective participatory research project with children and young people. Educ. Action Res. J. 15, 385–402. doi: 10.1080/09650790701514382

O’Brien, N., and Moules, T. (2010). The Impact of Cyber-Bullying on Young People’s Mental Health. Project Report. Chelmsford: Anglia Ruskin University.

O’Brien, N., and Moules, T. (2013). Not sticks and stones but tweets and texts: findings from a national cyberbullying project. Pastor. Care Educ. 31, 53–65. doi: 10.1080/02643944.2012.747553

O’Brien, N., Moules, T., and Munn-Giddings, C. (2018a). “Negotiating the research space between young people and adults in a PAR study exploring school bullying,” in Reciprocal Relationships and Well-Being: Implications for Social Work and Social Policy , eds M. Torronen, C. Munn-Giddings, and L. Tarkiainen, (Oxon: Routledge), 160–175. doi: 10.4324/9781315628363-11

O’Brien, N., Munn-Giddings, C., and Moules, T. (2018b). The repercussions of reporting bullying: some experiences of students at an independent secondary school. Pastor. Care Educ. 36, 29–43. doi: 10.1080/02643944.2017.1422004

O’Brien, N., Munn-Giddings, C., and Moules, T. (2018c). The Ethics of Involving Young People Directly in the Research Process. Childhood Remixed. Conference Edition , 115–128. Available at: www.uos.ac.uk/content/centre-for-study-children-childhood (accessed May 2018).

Oliver, C., and Candappa, M. (2007). Bullying and the politics of ‘telling’. Oxford Rev. Educ. 33, 71–86. doi: 10.1080/03054980601094594

Olweus, D. (1995). Bullying or peer abuse at school: facts and intervention. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 4, 196–200. doi: 10.1111/1467-8721.ep10772640

Ozer, E. J., and Wright, D. (2012). Beyond school spirit: the effects of youth-led participatory action research in two urban high schools. J. Res. Adolesc. 22, 267–283. doi: 10.1111/j.1532-7795.2012.00780.x

Parsons, S., Abbott, C., McKnight, L., and Davies, C. (2015). High risk yet invisible: conflicting narratives on social research involving children and young people, and the role of research ethics committees. Br. Educ. Res. J. 41, 709–729. doi: 10.1002/berj.3160

Patton, D. U., Hong, J. S., Patel, S., and Kral, M. J. (2017). A systematic review of research strategies used in qualitative studies on school bullying and victimization. Trauma Violence Abuse 18, 3–16. doi: 10.1177/1524838015588502

Popay, J., Roberts, H., Sowden, A., Petticrew, M., Arai, L., Rodgers, M., et al. (2006). Guidance on the conduct of narrative synthesis in systematic reviews. Eur. Soc. Res. Council Methods Program. doi: 10.13140/2.1.1018.4643

Schott, R. M., and Sondergaard, D. M. (2014). “Introduction: new approaches to school bullying,” in School Bullying: New Theories in Context , eds R. M. Schott, and D. M. Sondergaard, (Massachusetts, MA: Cambridge University Press), 1–17.

Skrzypiec, G., Slee, P., Murray-Harvey, R., and Pereira, B. (2011). School bullying by one or more ways: does it matter and how do students cope? Sch. Psychol. Int. 32, 288–311. doi: 10.1177/0143034311402308

Smith, P. K., Cowie, H., Olafsson, R. F., and Liefooghe, A. P. D. (2002). Definitions of bullying: a comparison of terms used, and age and gender differences, in a fourteen-country international comparison. Child Dev. 73, 1119–1133. doi: 10.1111/1467-8624.00461

Spears, B., Taddeo, C., Collin, P., Swist, T., Razzell, M., Borbone, V., et al. (2016). Safe and Well Online: Learnings from Four Social Marketing Campaigns for Youth Wellbeing. Available at: https://researchdirect.westernsydney.edu.au/islandora/object/uws:36405/datastream/PDF/view (accessed July 1, 2019).

Stoudt, B. G. (2009). The role of language & discourse in the investigation of privilege: using participatory action research to discuss theory. Dev. Methodol. Interrupt. Power Urban Rev. 41, 7–28.

Thomson, P., and Gunter, H. (2008). Researching Bullying with students: a lens on everyday life in an ‘innovative school’. Int. J. Inclusive Educ. 12, 185–200. doi: 10.1080/13603110600855713

Tisdall, E. K. M., and Punch, S. (2012). Not so ‘new’? Looking critically at childhood studies. Child. Geogr. 10, 249–264. doi: 10.1080/14733285.2012.693376

United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Available at: http://www.unicef.org.uk/Documents/Publication-pdfs/UNCRC_PRESS2009 10web.pdf (accessed January 19, 2014).

Vaillancourt, T., McDougall, P., Hymel, S., Krygsman, A., Miller, J., Stiver, K., et al. (2008). Bullying: are researchers and children/youth talking about the same thing? Int. J. Behav. Dev. 32, 486–495. doi: 10.1177/0165025408095553

Keywords : bullying, young people, participatory research, social constructionism, young people as researchers, collaboration, bullying supports

Citation: O’Brien N (2019) Understanding Alternative Bullying Perspectives Through Research Engagement With Young People. Front. Psychol. 10:1984. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01984

Received: 28 February 2019; Accepted: 13 August 2019; Published: 28 August 2019.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2019 O’Brien. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Niamh O’Brien, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Open Science: Recommendations for Research on School Bullying

Original Article
Open access
Published: 30 June 2022
Volume 5 , pages 319–330, ( 2023 )

Cite this article

You have full access to this open access article

Nathalie Noret ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4393-1887 1 ,
Simon C. Hunter ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3922-1252 2 , 3 ,
Sofia Pimenta ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9680-514X 4 ,
Rachel Taylor ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1803-1449 4 &
Rebecca Johnson ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7359-6595 2

3481 Accesses

12 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

The open science movement has developed out of growing concerns over the scientific standard of published academic research and a perception that science is in crisis (the “replication crisis”). Bullying research sits within this scientific family and without taking a full part in discussions risks falling behind. Open science practices can inform and support a range of research goals while increasing the transparency and trustworthiness of the research process. In this paper, we aim to explain the relevance of open science for bullying research and discuss some of the questionable research practices which challenge the replicability and integrity of research. We also consider how open science practices can be of benefit to research on school bullying. In doing so, we discuss how open science practices, such as pre-registration, can benefit a range of methodologies including quantitative and qualitative research and studies employing a participatory research methods approach. To support researchers in adopting more open practices, we also highlight a range of relevant resources and set out a series of recommendations to the bullying research community.

Q Methodology as an Innovative Addition to Bullying Researchers’ Methodological Repertoire

The Importance of Being Attentive to Social Processes in School Bullying Research: Adopting a Constructivist Grounded Theory Approach

Pseudoscience, an Emerging Field, or Just a Framework Without Outcomes? A Bibliometric Analysis and Case Study Presentation of Social Justice Research

Explore related subjects.

Artificial Intelligence

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Bullying in school is a common experience for many children and adolescents. Such experiences relate to a range of adverse outcomes, including poor mental health, poorer academic achievement, and anti-social behaviour (Gini et al., 2018 ; Nakamoto & Schwartz, 2010 ; Valdebenito et al., 2017 ). Bullying research has increased substantially over the past 60 years, with over 5000 articles published between 2010 and 2016 alone (Volk et al., 2017 ). Much of this research focuses on the prevalence and antecedents of bullying, correlates of bullying, and the development and evaluation of anti-bullying interventions (Volk et al., 2017 ). The outcomes of this work for children and young people can therefore be life changing, and researchers should strive to ensure that their work is trustworthy, reliable, and accessible to a wide range of stakeholders both inside and outside of academia.

In recent years, the replication crisis has led to growing concern regarding the standard of research practices in the social sciences (Munafò et al., 2017 ). To address this, open science practices, such as openly sharing publications and data, conducting replication studies, and the pre-registration of research protocols, have provided the opportunity to increase the transparency and trustworthiness of the research process. In this paper, we aim to discuss the replication crisis and highlight the risks that questionable research practices pose for bullying research. We also aim to summarise open science practices and outline how these can benefit the broad spectrum of bullying research as well as to researchers themselves. Specifically, we aim to highlight how such practices can benefit both quantitative and qualitative research and studies employing a participatory research methods approach.

The Replication Crisis

In 2015, the Open Science Collaboration (Open Science Collaboration, 2015 ) conducted a large-scale replication of 100 published studies from three journals. The results questioned the replicability of research findings in psychology. In the original 100 studies, 97 reported a significant effect compared to only 35 of the replications. Furthermore, the effect sizes reported in the original studies were typically much larger than those found in the replications. The findings of the Open Science Collaboration received significant academic and mainstream media attention, which concluded that psychological research is in crisis (Wiggins & Chrisopherson, 2019 ). While these findings are based on the analysis of psychological research, challenges in replicating research findings have been reported in a range of disciplines including sociology (Freese & Peterson, 2017 ) and education studies (Makel & Pluker, 2014 ). Shrout and Rodgers ( 2018 ) suggest that the notion that science is in crisis is further supported by (1) the number of serious cases of academic misconduct such as that of Diederick Stapel (Nelson et al., 2018 ) and (2) the prevalence of questionable research practices and misuse of inferential statistics and hypothesis testing (see Ioannidis, 2005 ). The replication crisis has called into question the degree to which research across the social sciences accurately describes the world that we live in or whether this literature is overwhelmingly populated by misleading claims based on weak and error-strewn findings.

The trustworthiness of research reflects the quality of the method, rigour of the design, and the extent to which results are reliable and valid (Cook et al., 2018 ). Research on school bullying has grown exponentially in recent years (Smith & Berkkun, 2020 ) and typically focuses on understanding the nature, prevalence, and consequences of bullying to inform prevention and intervention efforts. If our research is not trustworthy, this can impede theory development and call into question the reliability of our research and meta-analytic findings (Friese & Frankenbach, 2020 ). Ultimately, if our research findings are untrustworthy, this undermines our efforts to prevent bullying and help and support young people. Bullying research exists within a broader academic research culture, which facilitates and incentivises the ways that research is undertaken and shared. As such, the issues that have been identified have direct relevance to those working in bullying.

The Incentive Culture in Academia

“The relentless drive for research excellence has created a culture in modern science that cares exclusively about what is achieved and not about how it is achieved.”

Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust (Farrar, 2019 ).

In academia, career progression is closely tied to publication record. As such, academics feel under considerable pressure to publish frequently in high-quality journals to advance their careers (Grimes et al., 2018 ; Munafò et al., 2017 ). Yet, the publication process itself is biased toward accepting novel or statistically significant findings for publication (Renkewitz & Heene, 2019 ). This bias fuels a perception that non-significant results will not be published (the “file drawer problem”: Rosenthal, 1979 ). This can result in researchers employing a range of questionable research practices to achieve a statistically significant finding in order to increase the likelihood that a study will be accepted for publication. Taken together, this can lead to a perverse “scientific process” where achieving statistical significance is more important than the quality of the research itself (Frankenhuis & Nettle, 2018 ).

Questionable Research Practices

Questionable research practices (QRPs) can occur at all stages of the research process (Munafò et al., 2017 ). These practices differ from research misconduct in that they do not typically involve the deliberate intent to deceive or engage in fraudulent research practices (Stricker & Günther, 2019 ). Instead, QRPs are characterised by misrepresentation, inaccuracy, and bias (Steneck, 2006 ). All are of direct relevance to the work of scholars in the bullying field since each weakens our ability to achieve meaningful change for children and young people. QRPs emerge directly from “researcher degrees of freedom” that occur at all stages of the research process and which simply reflect the many decisions that researchers make with regard to their hypotheses, methodological design, data analyses, and reporting of results (see Wicherts et al., 2016 for an extensive list of researcher degrees of freedom). These decisions pose fundamental threats to how robust a study is as each compromises the likelihood that findings accurately model a psychological or social process (Munafò et al., 2017 ). QRPs include p -hacking; hypothesising after the result is known (HARKing); conducting studies with low statistical power; and the misuse of p values (Chambers et al., 2014 ). Such QRPs may reflect a misunderstanding of inferential statistics (Sijtsma, 2016 ). A misunderstanding of statistical theory can also lead to a lack of awareness regarding the nature and impact of QRPs (Sijtsma, 2016 ). This includes the prevailing approach to quantitative data analysis, Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) (Lyu et al., 2018 ; Travers et al., 2017 ), which is overwhelmingly the approach used in the bullying field. QRPs can fundamentally threaten the degree to which research in bullying can be trusted, replicated, and effective in efforts to implement successful and impactful intervention or prevention programs.

P -hacking (or data-dredging) reflects methods of re-analysing data in different ways to find a significant result (Raj et al., 2018 ). Such methods can include the selective deletion of outliers, selectively controlling for variables, recoding variables in different ways, or selectively reporting the results of structural equation models (Simonsohn et al., 2014 ). While there are various methods of p -hacking, the end goal is the same: to find a significant result in a data set, often when initial analyses fail to do so (Friese & Frankenbach, 2020 ).

There are no available data on the degree to which p -hacking is a problem in bullying research per se, but the nature of the methods commonly used mean it is a clear and present danger. For example, the inclusion of multiple outcome measures (allowing those with the “best” results to be cherry-picked for publication), measures of involvement in bullying that can be scored or analysed in multiple ways (e.g. as a continuous measure or as a method to categorise participants as involved or not), and the presence of a diverse selection of demographic variables (which can be selectively included or excluded from analyses) all provide researchers with an array of possible analytic approaches. Such options pose a risk for p -hacking as decisions can be made on the results of statistical fishing (i.e. hunting to find significant effects) rather than on any underpinning theoretical rationale.

P -hacking need not be driven by a desire to deceive; rather, it can be used by well-meaning researchers and their wish to honestly identify useful or interesting findings (Wicherts et al., 2016 ). Sadly, even in this case, the impact of p- hacking remains profoundly problematic for the field. The p- hacking process biases the literature towards erroneous significant results and inflated effect sizes, impacting on our understanding of any issue that we seek to understand better, and biasing effect size estimates reported in meta-analyses (Friese & Frankenbach, 2020 ). While such effects may seem remote or of only academic interest, they compromise all that we in the bullying field seek to accomplish because they make it much less likely that effective, impactful, and meaningful intervention and prevention strategies can be identified and implemented.

Typically, quantitative research follows the hypothetico-deductive model (Popper, 1959 ). From this perspective, hypotheses are formulated based on appropriate theory and previous research (Rubin, 2017 ). Once written, the study is designed, and data are collected and analysed (Rubin, 2017 ). Hypothesising after the result is known, or HARKing (Kerr, 1998 ), occurs when researchers amend their hypotheses to reflect their completed data analysis (Kerr, 1998 ). HARKing results in confusion between confirmatory and exploratory data analysis (Shrout & Rodgers, 2018 ), creating a literature where hypotheses are always confirmed and never falsified. This inhibits theory development (Rubin, 2017 ) in part because “progress” is, in fact, the accumulation of type 1 errors.

Low Statistical Power

Statistical power reflects the power in a statistical test to find an effect if there is one to find (Cohen, 2013 ). There are concerns regarding the sample sizes used in bullying research, as experiences of bullying are typically of a low frequency and positively skewed (Vessey et al., 2014 ; Volk et al., 2017 ). Low statistical power is problematic in two ways. First, it increases the type II error rate (the probability of falsely rejecting the null hypothesis), meaning that researchers may fail to report important and meaningful effects. Statistically significant effects can still be found under the conditions of low statistical power; however, the size of these effects is likely to be exaggerated due to a lower positive predictive value (the probability of a statistically significant result being genuine) (Button et al., 2013 ). In this case, researchers may find significant effects even in small samples, but those effects are at risk of being inflated.

QRPs in Qualitative Research

Apart from the previously discussed issues, there are also QRPs in qualitative work. Mainly, these involve issues pertaining to trustworthiness such as credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability (See Shenton, 2004 ). One factor that can influence perceptions about qualitative work is the possibility of subjectivity or different interpretations of the same data (Haven & Van Grootel, 2019 ). Additionally, the idea that the researcher will be biased and that their experiences, beliefs, and personal history will all influence how they both collect and interpret data has also been discussed (Berger, 2015 ). Clearly stating the positionality of the researcher and how their experiences informed their current research (the process of reflexivity) can help others better understand their interpretation of the data (Berger, 2015 ). Finally, one decision that qualitative researchers should consider when thinking about their designs is their stopping criteria. This might imply code or meaning saturation (see Hennink et al., 2017 , for more detail on how these two types are different from one another). Thus, making it clear in the conceptualisation process when and how the data collection will stop is important to assure transparency and high-quality research. This is not a complete list of QRPs in qualitative research, but these seem to be the most urgent when it comes to bullying research when thinking about open science.

The Prevalence and Impact of QRPs

Identifying the prevalence of QRPs and academic misconduct is challenging as this is reliant on self-reports. In their survey of 2155 psychologists, John et al. ( 2012 ) identified that 78% of participants had not reported all dependent measures, 72% had collected more data after finding their statistical effects were not statistically significant, 67% reported selective reporting of studies that “worked” (yielded a significant effect), and 9% reported falsifying data. Such problematic practices have serious implications for the reliability of effects reported in the research literature (John et al., 2012 ), which can impact interventions and treatments such evidence may inform. Furthermore, De Vries et al. ( 2018 ) have highlighted how biases in the publication process threaten the validity of treatment results reported in the literature. Although focused on the treatment of depression, their work has clear lessons for the bullying research community. They demonstrate how the bias towards reporting more positive, significant effects, distorts a literature in favour of treatments that appear efficacious but are much less so in practice (Box 1 ).

Box 1 The Replication Crisis

Munafò et al. ( 2017 ) outline a manifesto for reproducible research, highlighting problems with current research practices.

Shrout and Rodgers ( 2018 ) provide an overview of the replication crisis and questionable research practices.

Steneck ( 2006 ) provides a detailed overview of definitions of academic misconduct, questionable research practices, and academic integrity.

Open Science

Confronting these challenges can be daunting, but open science offers several strategies that researchers in the bullying field can use to increase the transparency, reproducibility, and openness of their research. The most common practices include openly sharing publications and data, encouraging replication, pre-registration, and open peer-review. Below, we provide an overview of open science practices, with a particular focus on pre-registration and replication studies. We recommend that researchers begin by using those practices that they can most easily integrate into their work, building their repertoire of open science actions over time. We provide a series of recommendations for the school bullying research community alongside summaries of useful supporting resources (Box 2 ).

Box 2 Key Reading on Open Science

Banks et al. ( 2019 ) discuss frequently asked questions about open science providing a good overview of open science practices and contemporary debates.

Crüwell et al. ( 2019 ) provide an annotated reading list on important papers in open science.

Gehlbach and Robinson ( 2021 ) in their introduction to a special edition of the journal Educational Psychologist they discuss the adoption of open science practices in the context of what they term “old school” research practices.

Lindsay ( 2020 ) outlines a series of steps researchers can take to integrate open science practices into their research.

Open Publication, Open Data, and Reporting Standards

Open publication.

Ensuring research publications are openly available by providing access to pre-print versions of papers or paying for publishers to make articles openly available is now a widely adopted practice (Concannon et al., 2019 ; McKiernan et al., 2016 ). Articles can be hosted on websites such as ResearchGate and/or on institutional repositories, allowing a wider pool of potential stakeholders to access relevant bullying research and increasing the impact of research (Concannon et al., 2019 ). This process also supports access for the research and practice communities in low- and middle-income countries where even Universities may be unable to pay journal subscriptions. The authors can also share pre-print versions of their papers for comment and review before submitting them to a journal for review using an online digital repository, such as PsyArXiv. Sharing publications in this way can encourage both early feedback on articles and the faster dissemination of research findings (Chiarelli et al., 2019 ).

Making data and data analysis scripts openly available is also encouraged, can enable further data analysis (e.g. meta-analysis), and facilitates replication (Munafò et al., 2017 ; Nosek & Bar-Anan, 2012 ). It also enables the collation of larger data sets, and secondary data analyses to test different hypotheses. Several publications on bullying in school are based on the secondary analysis of openly shared data (e.g. Dantchev & Wolke, 2019 ; Przybylski & Bowes, 2017 ) and highlight the benefits of such analyses. Furthermore, although limited in number, examples of papers on school bullying where data, research materials, and data analysis scripts are openly shared are emerging (e.g. Przybylski, 2019 ).

Bullying data often includes detailed personal accounts of experiences and the impact of bullying. Such data are highly sensitive, and there may be a risk that individuals can be identified. To address such sensitivities, Meyer ( 2018 ) (see box 3 ) proposes a tiered approach to the consent process, where participants are actively involved in decisions around what parts of their data and where their data are shared. Meyer ( 2018 ) also highlights the importance of selecting the right repository for your data. Some repositories are entirely open, whereas others only provide access to suitably qualified researchers. While bullying data pose particular ethical challenges, the sharing of all data is encouraged (Bishop, 2009 ; McLeod & O’Connor, 2020 ).

Reporting Standards

Reporting standards are standards for reporting a research study and provide useful guidance on what methodological and analytical information should be included in a research paper (Munafò et al., 2017 ). Such guidelines aim to ensure sufficient information is provided to enable replication and promote transparency (Munafò et al., 2017 ). Journal publishers are now beginning to outline what open science practices should be reported in articles. For example, from July 2021, when submitting a paper for review in one of the American Psychological Association journals, the authors are now required to state whether their data will be openly shared and whether or not their study was pre-registered. In a bullying context, Smith and Berkkun ( 2020 ) have highlighted that important contextual data is often missing from publications and recommend, for example, that the gender and age of participants alongside the country and date of data collection should be included as standard in papers on bullying in school.

Recommendations:

Researchers to start to share all research materials openly using an online repository. Box 3 provides some useful guidance on how to support the open sharing of research materials.

Journal editors and publishers to further promote the open sharing of research material.

Researchers to follow the recommendations set out by Smith and Berkkun ( 2020 ) and follow a set of reporting standards when reporting bullying studies.

Reviewers be mindful of Smith and Berkkun ( 2020 ) recommendations when reviewing bullying papers.

Box 3 Useful Resources on Openly Sharing Research Materials & Reporting Standards

Banks et al. ( 2019 ) provide a helpful overview of open science practices, alongside a set of recommendations for ensuring research is more open.

Meyer ( 2018 ) provides some useful guidance on managing the ethical issues of openly sharing data.

The Equator Network ( https://www.equator-network.org/reporting-guidelines/ ) is a useful resource for the sharing of different reporting standards, for example, the PRISMA guidelines for systematic reviews and STROBE standards for observational studies.

The Foster website is an online e-learning portal with a wealth of resources to help researchers develop open science practices https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/ , including sharing resources and pre-prints.

The Open Science Framework has resources to support open science practices and to use their platform https://www.cos.io/products/osf .

Smith and Berkkun ( 2020 ) provide a review of contextual information reported in bullying research papers and offer recommendations on what information to include.

The PsyArXiv https://psyarxiv.com and SocArXiv https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv repositories accept pre-print publications in psychology and sociology.

Replication Studies

Replicated findings increase confidence in the reliability of that finding, ensuring research findings are robust and enabling science to self-correct (Cook et al., 2018 ; Drotar, 2010 ). Replication reflects the ability of a researcher to duplicate the results of a prior study with new data (Goodman et al., 2018 ). There are different forms of replication that can be broadly categorised into two: those that aim to recreate the exact conditions of an earlier study (exact/direct replication) and those that aim to test the same hypotheses again using a different method (conceptual replication) (Schmidt, 2009 ). Replication studies are considered fundamental in establishing whether study findings are consistent and trustworthy (Cook et al., 2018 ).

To date, few replication studies have been conducted on bullying in schools. A Web of Science search using the Boolean search term bully* alongside the search term “replication” identified two replication studies (Berdondini & Smith, 1996 ; Huitsing et al., 2020 ). Such a small number of replications may reflect concerns regarding the value of these and concerns about how to conduct such work when data collection is so time and resource-intensive. In addition, school gatekeepers are themselves interested in novelty and addressing their own problems and may be reluctant to participate in a study which has “already been done”. One possible solution to this challenge is to increase the number of large-scale collaborations among bullying researchers (e.g. multiple researchers across many sites collecting the same data). Munafò et al. ( 2017 ) highlight the benefits of collaboration and “team science” to build capacity in a research project. They argue that greater collaboration through team science would enable researchers to undertake higher-powered studies and relieve the pressure on single researchers. Such projects also have the benefit of increasing generalisability across settings and populations.

Undertake direct replications or, as a more manageable first step, include aspects of replication within larger studies.

Journal editors to actively promote the submission of replication studies on school bullying.

Journal editors, editorial panels, and reviewers to recognise the value of replication studies rather than favouring new or novel findings (Box 4 ).

Box 4 Useful Resources on Replication Studies

Brandt et al. ( 2014 ) provide a useful step by step guide on conducting replication studies, including a registration template form for pre-registering a replication study (available here: https://osf.io/4jd46/ ).

Coyne et al. ( 2016 ) discuss the benefits of replication to research in educational research (with a particular focus on special education).

Duncan et al. ( 2014 ) discuss the benefits of replication to research in developmental psychology.

Pre-Registration

Pre-registration requires researchers to set out, in advance of any data collection, their hypotheses, research design, and planned data analysis (van’t Veer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016 ). Pre-registering a study reduces the number of researcher degrees of freedom as all decisions are outlined at the start of a project. However, to date, there have been few pre-registered studies in bullying. There are two forms of pre-registration: the pre-registration of analysis plans and registered reports. In a pre-registered analysis plan, the hypotheses, research design, and analysis plan are registered in advance. These plans are then stored in an online repository (e.g. the Open Science Framework (OSF) or AsPredicted website), which is then time-stamped as a record of the planned research project (van’t Veer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016 ). Registered reports, however, integrate the pre-registration of methods and analyses into the publication process (Chambers et al., 2014 ). With a registered report, researchers can submit their introduction and proposed methods and analyses to a journal for peer review. This creates a two-tier peer-review process, where the registered reports can be accepted in principle or rejected in the first stage of review, based on the rigour of the proposed methods and analysis plans rather than on the findings of the study (Hardwicke & Ioannidis, 2018 ). In the second stage of the review process, the authors then submit the complete paper (at a later date after data have been collected and analyses completed), and this is also reviewed. The decision to accept a study is therefore explicitly based on the quality of the research process rather than the outcome (Frankenhuis & Nettle, 2018 ) and in practice, almost no work is ever rejected following an in-principal acceptance at stage 1 (C. Chambers, personal communication, December 11, 2020). At the time of writing, over 270 journals accept registered reports, many of which are directly relevant to bullying researchers (e.g. Developmental Science, British Journal of Educational Psychology, Journal of Educational Psychology).

Pre-registration offers one approach for improving the validity of bullying research. Employing greater use of pre-registration would complement other recommendations on how to improve research practices in bullying research. For example, Volk et al. ( 2017 ) propose a “bullying research checklist” (see Box 5 ).

Box 5 Volk et al. ( 2017 ) Bullying Research Checklist ( reproduced with permission )

State and justify your chosen definition of bullying.

Outline the theoretical logic underlying your hypotheses and how it pertains to your chosen definition and program of research/intervention.

Use one's logic model and theoretical predictions to determine which kind of measurements are most appropriate for testing one's hypotheses. There is no gold standard measure of bullying, but be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the different types of measures. Where possible, use complementary forms of measurement and reporters to offset any weaknesses.

Implement an appropriate research or intervention design (longitudinal if possible) and recruit an appropriate sample.

Reflect upon the final product, its associations with the chosen logic model and theory, and explicitly discuss important pertinent limitations with a particular emphasis on issues concerning the theoretical validity of one's findings.

Volk et al.’s ( 2017 ) checklist highlights the importance of setting out in advance the definition of bullying, alongside the theoretical underpinnings for the hypotheses.

Pre-Registering Quantitative Studies

The pre-registration of quantitative studies requires researchers to state the hypotheses, method, and planned data analysis in advance of any data collection (van’t Veer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016 ). When outlining the hypotheses being tested, researchers are required to outline the background and theoretical underpinning of the study. This reflects the importance of theoretically led hypotheses (van’t Veer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016 ), which are more appropriately tested using NHST and inferential statistics in a confirmatory rather than exploratory design (Wagenmakers et al., 2012 ). Requiring researchers to state their hypotheses in advance of any data collection adheres to the confirmatory nature of inferential statistics and reduces the risk of HARKing (van’t Veer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016 ). Following a description of the hypotheses, researchers outline the details of the planned method, including the design of the study, the sample, the materials and measures, and the procedure. Information on the nature of the study and how materials and measures will be used and scored are outlined in full. Researchers are required to provide a justification for and an indication of the desired sample size.

The final stage of the pre-registration process requires researchers to consider and detail all steps of the data analysis process. The data analysis plan should be outlined in terms of what hypotheses are tested using what analyses and any plans for follow-up analysis (e.g. post hoc testing and any exploratory analyses). Despite concerns to the contrary (Banks et al., 2019 ; Gonzales & Cunningham, 2015 ), the aim of pre-registration is not to devalue exploratory research, but rather, to make more explicit what is exploratory and what is confirmatory (van’t Veer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016 ). While initially, the guidance on pre-registration focused more on confirmatory analyses, more recent guidance considers how researchers can pre-register exploratory studies (Dirnagl, 2020 ), and make a distinction between confirmatory versus exploratory research in the publication process (McIntosh, 2017 ). Irrespective of whether confirmatory or exploratory analyses are planned, pre-registering an analysis reduces the risk of p -hacking (van’t Veer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016 ). A final point, often a concern to those unfamiliar with open science practices, is that a pre-registration does not bind a researcher to a single way of analysing data. Changes to plans are entirely acceptable when they are deemed necessary and are described transparently.

Pre-Registering Qualitative Studies

Pre-registration of qualitative studies is still relatively new (e.g. Kern & Gleditsch, 2017a , b ; Piñeiro & Rosenblatt, 2016 ). This is because most of the work uses inductive and hypothesis-generating approaches. Coffman and Niederle ( 2015 ) argue that this hypothesis-generation is one of the most important reasons why pre-registering qualitative work is so important. This could help distinguish between what hypotheses are generated from the data and which were hypotheses conceptualised from the start. Therefore, it could even be argued that pre-registering qualitative research encourages exploratory work. Using pre-registration prior to a hypothesis-generating study will also help with the internal validity of this same study, as it will be possible to have a sense of how the research evolved from before to post data collection.

Using investigator triangulation, where multiple researchers share and discuss conclusions and findings of the data, and reach a common understanding, could improve the trustworthiness of a qualitative study (Carter et al., 2014 ). Similarly, where establishing intercoder reliability is appropriate, the procedures demonstrating how this is achieved can be communicated and recorded in advance. One example of this would be the use of code books. When analysing qualitative data, developing a code book that could be used by all the coders could help with intercoder reliability and overall trustworthiness (Guest et al., 2012 ). These are elements that could be considered in the pre-registration process by clearly outlining if intercoder reliability is used and, if so, how this is done. To improve the transparency of pre-registered qualitative work, it has also been suggested that researchers should clearly state whether, if something outside the scope of the interview comes to light, such novel experiences will also be explored with the participant (Haven & Van Grootel, 2019 ; Kern & Gleditsch, 2017a , b ). Issues of subjectivity, sometimes inherent to qualitative work, can be reduced as a result of pre-registering because it allows the researcher to clearly consider all the elements of the study and have a plan before data collection and analysis, which reduces levels of subjectivity.

Kern and Gleditsch ( 2017a , b ) provide some practical suggestions on how to use pre-registration with qualitative studies. For example, when using in-depth interviews, one should make the interview schedule and questions available to help others to comprehend what the participants were asked. Similarly, they suggest that all recruitment and sampling strategy plans should be included to improve transparency (Haven & Van Grootel, 2019 ; Kern & Gleditsch, 2017a , b ). Piñeiro and Rosenblatt ( 2016 ) provide an overview of how these pre-registrations could be achieved. They suggested three main elements: conceptualisation of the study, theory (inductive or deductive in nature), and design (working hypothesis, sampling, tools for data collection). More recently, Haven and Van Grootel ( 2019 ) highlighted a lack of flexibility in the existing pre-register templates to adapt to qualitative work, as such, they adapted an OSF template to a qualitative study.

Integrating Participatory Research Methods into Pre-Registration

Participatory research methods (PRMs) aim to address power imbalances within the research process and validate the local expertise and knowledge of marginalised groups (Morris, 2002 ). The key objective of PRM is to include individuals from the target population, also referred to as “local experts”, as meaningful partners and co-creators of knowledge. A scoping review of PRM in psychology recommends wider and more effective use (Levac et al., 2019 ). Researchers are calling specifically for youth involvement in bullying studies to offer their insight, avoid adult speculation, and assist in the development of appropriate support materials (O’Brien, 2019 ; O’Brien & Dadswell, 2020 ). PRM is particularly appropriate for research with children and young people who experience bullying behaviours given their explicit, defined powerlessness. Research has shown that engaging young people in bullying research, while relatively uncommon, provides lasting positive outcomes for both researchers and participants (Gibson et al., 2015 ; Lorion, 2004 ).

Pre-registration has rarely been used in research undertaking a PRM approach. It is a common misconception that pre-registration is inflexible and places constraints on the participant-driven nature of PRM (Frankenhuis & Nettle, 2018 ). However, pre-registration still allows for the exploratory and subjective nature of PRM but in a more transparent way, with clear rationale and reasoning. An appropriate pre-registration method for PRM can utilise a combination of both theoretical and iterative pre-registration. Using a pre-registration template, researchers should aim to document the research process highlighting the main contributing theoretical underpinnings of their research, with anticipatory hypotheses and complementary analyses (Haven & Van Grootel, 2019 ). This initial pre-registration can then be supported using iterative documentation detailing ongoing project development. This can include utilising workflow tools or online notebooks, which show insights into the procedure of co-researchers and collaborative decision making (Kern & Gleditsch, 2017a , b ). This creates an evidence trail of how the research evolved, providing transparency, reflexivity, and credibility to the research process.

The Perceived Challenges of Pre-Registration.

To date, there have been few pre-registered studies in bullying. A Web of Science search using the Boolean search terms bully* peer-vict*, pre-reg*, and preregist* identified four pre-registered studies on school bullying (Kaufman et al., 2022 ; Legate et al., 2019 ; Leung, 2021 ; Noret et al., 2021 ). The lack of pre-registrations may reflect concerns that it is a difficult, rigid, and time-consuming process. Reischer and Cowan ( 2020 ) note that pre-registration should not be seen as a singular time-stamped rigid plan but as an ongoing working model with modifications. Change is possible so long as this is clearly and transparently articulated, for example, in an associated publication or in an open lab notebook (Schapira et al., 2019 ). The move to pre-registering a study requires a change in workflow rather than more absolute work. However, this early and detailed planning (especially concerning analytical procedures) can improve the focus on the quality of the research process (Ioannidis, 2008 ; Munafò et al., 2017 ).

The Impact of Pre-Registration.

The impact of pre-registration on reported effects can be extensive. The pre-registration of funded clinical trials in medicine has been a requirement since 2000. In an analysis of randomised control trials examining the role of drugs or supplements for intervening in or treating cardiovascular disease, Kaplan and Irvin ( 2015 ) identified a substantial change in the number of significant effects reported once pre-registration was introduced (57% reported significant effects prior to the requirement but and only 8% after). More recently, Scheel et al. ( 2021 ) compared the results of 71 pre-registered studies in psychology with the results published in 152 studies that were not pre-registered. They found that only 44% of the pre-registered studies reported a significant effect, compared to 96% of studies that were not pre-registered. As a result, the introduction of pre-registration has increased the number of null effects reported in the literature and presents a more reliable picture of the effects of particular interventions.

When conducting your next research study on bullying, consider pre-registering the study.

Journal editors and publishers to actively encourage registered reports as a submission format.

The Benefits of Open Science for Researchers

Employing more open science practices can often be challenging, in part because they force us to reconsider methods that are already “successful” (often synonymous with “those which result in publication”). Based on our own experience, this takes time and is best approached by beginning small and building up to a wider application of the practices we have outlined in this article. Alongside increasing the reliability of research, open science practices are associated with several career benefits for the researcher. Articles which use open science practices are more likely to be accepted for publication, are more visible, and are cited more frequently (Allen & Mehler, 2019 ). Open science can also lead to the development of more supportive networks for collaboration (Allen & Mehler, 2019 ). In terms of career advancement, Universities are beginning to reward engagement with science principals in their promotion criteria. For example, the University of Bristol (UK) will consider open research practices such as data sharing and pre-registration in promotion cases in 2020–21. Given that formal recognition such as this has been recommended by the European Union for some time (O’Carroll et al., 2017 ), it is likely to be an increasingly important part of career progression in academia (Box 6 ).

Box 6 Pre-Registration

van't Veer and Giner-Sorolla ( 2016 ) provide a clear overview of the pre-registration process and provide a template for the pre-registration of studies.

Center for Open Science YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PboPpcg6ik4 includes several webinars on pre-registration and the replication crisis. The OSF website also includes a number of pre-registration templates for researchers to use https://osf.io/zab38/wiki/home/?view , and provide a list of journals that accept registered reports https://www.cos.io/initiatives/registered-reports

Haven and Van Grootel ( 2019 ) review the issues around pre-registering of qualitative work and adapted an existing pre-registering OSF template to suit these types of studies.

This paper sought to clarify the ways in which bullying research is undermined by a failure to engage with open science practices. It highlighted the potential benefits of open science for the way we conduct research on bullying. In doing so, we aimed to encourage the greater use of open science practices in bullying research. Given the importance of this for the safety and wellbeing of children and young people, the transparency and reliability of this research is paramount and is enhanced via greater use of open science practices. Ultimately, researchers working in the field of bullying are seeking to accurately understand and describe the experiences of children and young people. Open science practices make it more likely that we will achieve this goal and, as a result, be well-placed to develop and implement successful evidence-based intervention and prevention programs.

Allen, C., & Mehler, D. (2019). Open science challenges, benefits and tips in early acreer and beyond. PLoS Biology, 17 (5), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000246

Article Google Scholar

Banks, G. C., Field, J. G., Oswald, F. L., O’Boyle, E. H., Landis, R. S., Rupp, D. E., & Rogelberg, S. G. (2019). Answers to 18 questions about open science practices. Journal of Business and Psychology, 34 (3), 257–270. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-018-9547-8

Berdondini, L., & Smith, P. K. (1996). Cohesion and power in the families of children involved in bully/victim problems at school: An Italian replication. Journal of Family Therapy , 18 , 99–102. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6427.1996.tb00036.x

Berger, R. (2015). Now I see it, now I don’t: Researcher’s position and reflexivity in qualitative research. Qualitative Research, 15 (2), 219–234. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794112468475

Bishop, L. (2009). Ethical sharing and reuse of qualitative data. Australian Journal of Social Issues, 44 (3), 255–272. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1839-4655.2009.tb00145.x

Brandt M. J., IJzerman, H., Dijksterhuis, A., Farach, F. J., Geller, J., Giner-Sorolla, R., Grange, J. A., Perugini, M., Spies, J. R., & van ’t Veer, A. (2014). The replication recipe: What makes for a convincing replication? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , 50 (1) 217 224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2013.10.005

Button, K. S., Ioannidis, J. P. A., Mokrysz, C., Nosek, B. A., Flint, J., Robinson, E. S. J., & Munafò, M. R. (2013). Power failure: Why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 14 (5), 365–376. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3475

Article PubMed Google Scholar

Carter, N., Bryant-Lukosius, D., Dicenso, A., Blythe, J., & Neville, A. J. (2014). The use of triangulation in qualitative research. Oncology Nursing Forum, 41 (5), 545–547. https://doi.org/10.1188/14.ONF.545-547

Chambers, C. D., Feredoes, E., Muthukumaraswamy, S. D., & Etchells, P. J. (2014). Instead of “playing the game” it is time to change the rules: Registered reports at AIMS neuroscience and beyond. AIMS Neuroscience, 1 (1), 4–17. https://doi.org/10.3934/Neuroscience.2014.1.4

Chiarelli, A., Johnson, R., Richens, E., & Pinfield, S. (2019). Accelerating Scholarly Communication: the Transformative Role of Preprints. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.3357727

Coffman, L. C., & Niederle, M. (2015). Pre-analysis plans have limited upside, especially where replications are feasible. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29 (3), 81–98. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.29.3.81

Cohen, J. (2013). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences . Academic Press.

Book Google Scholar

Concannon, F., Costello, E., & Farrelly, T. (2019). Open science and educational research: An editorial commentary. Irish Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning , 4 (1), ii–v. https://doi.org/10.22554/ijtel.v4i1.61

Cook, B. G., Lloyd, J. W., Mellor, D., Nosek, B. A., & Therrien, W. J. (2018). Promoting open science to increase the trustworthiness of evidence in special education. Exceptional Children, 85 (1), 104–118. https://doi.org/10.1177/0014402918793138

Coyne, M. D., Cook, B. G., & Therrien, W. J. (2016). Recommendations for replication research in special education: A framework of systematic, conceptual replications. Remedial and Special Education, 37 (4), 244–253. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741932516648463

Crüwell, S., Doorn, J. Van, Etz, A., Makel, M. C., Niebaum, J. C., Orben, A., Parsons, S., & Schulte, M. (2019). Seven easy steps to open science. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 227 (4), 237–248. https://doi.org/10.1027/2151-2604/a000387

Dantchev, S., & Wolke, D. (2019). Trouble in the nest: Antecedents of sibling bullying victimization and perpetration. Developmental Psychology , 55 (5), 1059–1071. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000700

De Vries, Y. A., Roest, A. M., De Jonge, P., Cuijpers, P., Munafò, M. R., & Bastiaansen, J. A. (2018). The cumulative effect of reporting and citation biases on the apparent efficacy of treatments: The case of depression. Psychological Medicine, 48 (15), 2453–2455. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291718001873

Article PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Dirnagl, U. (2020). Preregistration of exploratory research: Learning from the golden age of discovery. PLoS Biology, 18 (3), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000690

Drotar, D. (2010). Editorial: A call for replications of research in pediatric psychology and guidance for authors. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 35 (8), 801–805. https://doi.org/10.1093/jpepsy/jsq049

Duncan, G. J., Engel, M., Claessens, A., & Dowsett, C. J. (2014). Replication and robustness in developmental research. Developmental Psychology, 50 (11), 2417–2425. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037996

Farrar, J. (2019). Why we need to reimagine how we do research. https://wellcome.org/news/why-we-need-reimagine-how-we-do-research . Accessed 18 December 2020.

Frankenhuis, W. E., & Nettle, D. (2018). Open science is liberating and can foster creativity. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13 (4), 439–447. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618767878

Freese, J., & Peterson, D. (2017). Replication in social science. Annual Review of Sociology , 43 , 147–165. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-060116-053450

Friese, M., & Frankenbach, J. (2020). p-Hacking and publication bias interact to distort meta-analytic effect size estimates. Psychological Methods, 25 (4), 456–471. https://doi.org/10.1037/met0000246

Gehlbach, H., & Robinson, C. D. (2021). From old school to open science: The implications of new research norms for educational psychology and beyond. Educational Psychologist, 56 (2), 79–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2021.1898961

Gibson, J., Flaspohler, P. D., & Watts, V. (2015). Engaging youth in bullying prevention through community-based participatory research. Family & Community Health, 38 (1), 120–130. https://doi.org/10.1097/FCH.0000000000000048

Gini, G., Card, N. A., & Pozzoli, T. (2018). A meta-analysis of the differential relations of traditional and cyber-victimization with internalizing problems. Aggressive Behavior, 44 (2), 185–198. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.21742

Gonzales, J. E., & Cunningham, C. A. (2015). The promise of pre-registration in psychological research. Psychological Science Agenda , 29 (8), 2014–2017. https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2015/08/pre-Registration . Accessed 18 December 2020.

Goodman, S. N., Fanelli, D., & Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2018). What does research reproducibility mean? Science Translational Medicine, 8 (341), 96–102. https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.aaf5027

Grimes, D. R., Bauch, C. T., & Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2018). Modelling science trustworthiness under publish or perish pressure. Royal Society Open Science, 5 (1), 171511. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171511

Guest, G., MacQueen, K. M., & Namey, E. E. (2012). Applied thematic analysis . Sage.

Hardwicke, T. E., & Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2018). Mapping the universe of registered reports. Nature Human Behaviour , 2 , 793–796. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0444-y

Haven, L. T., & Van Grootel, D. L. (2019). Preregistering qualitative research. Accountability in Research, 26 (3), 229–244. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2019.1580147

Hennink, M. M., Kaiser, B. N., & Marconi, V. C. (2017). Code saturation versus meaning saturation: How many interviews are enough? Qualitative Health Research, 27 (4), 591–608. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732316665344

Huitsing, G., Lodder, M. A., Browne, W. J., Oldenburg, B., Van Der Ploeg, R., & Veenstra, R. (2020). A large-scale replication of the effectiveness of the KiVa antibullying program: A randomized controlled trial in the Netherlands. Prevention Science, 21 , 627–638. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-020-01116-4

Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2005). Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Medicine, 2 (8), 2–8. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2008). Why most discovered true associations are inflated. Epidemiology, 19 (5), 640–648. https://doi.org/10.1097/EDE.0b013e31818131e7

John, L. K., Loewenstein, G., & Prelec, D. (2012). Measuring the prevalence of questionable research practices with incentives for truth telling. Psychological Science, 23 (5), 524–532. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611430953

Kaplan, R. M., & Irvin, V. L. (2015). Likelihood of null effects of large NHLBI clinical trials has increased over time. PLoS ONE, 10 (8), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0132382

Kaufman, T. M., Laninga-Wijnen, L., & Lodder, G. M. (2022). Are victims of bullying primarily social outcasts? Person-group dissimilarities in relational, socio-behavioral, and physical characteristics as predictors of victimization. Child development, Early view. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13772

Kern, F., & Gleditsch, K. S. (2017a). Exploring pre-registration and pre-analysis plans for qualitative inference. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.14428.69769

Kern, F. G., & Gleditsch, K. S. (2017b). Exploring pre-registration and pre-analysis plans for qualitative inference. Pre-Print , 1–15. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.14428.69769

Kerr, N. L. (1998). HARKing: Hypothesizing after the results are known. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2 (3), 196–217. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0203_4

Legate, N., Weinstein, N., & Przybylski, A. K. (2019). Parenting strategies and adolescents’ cyberbullying behaviors: Evidence from a preregistered study of parent–child dyads. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 48 (2), 399–409. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-018-0962-y

Leung, A. N. M. (2021). To help or not to help: intervening in cyberbullying among Chinese cyber-bystanders. Frontiers in Psychology, 2625. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.483250

Levac, L., Ronis, S., Cowper-Smith, Y., & Vaccarino, O. (2019). A scoping review: The utility of participatory research approaches in psychology. Journal of Community Psychology, 47 (8), 1865–1892. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcop.22231

Lindsay, D. S. (2020). Seven steps toward transparency and replicability in psychological science. Canadian Psychology/psychologie Canadienne, 61 (4), 310–317. https://doi.org/10.1037/cap0000222

Lorion, R. P. (2004). The evolution of community-school bully prevention programs: Enabling participatory action research. Psykhe, 13 (2), 73–83.

Lyu, Z., Peng, K., & Hu, C. P. (2018). P-Value, confidence intervals, and statistical inference: A new dataset of misinterpretation. Frontiers in Psychology , 9 (JUN), 2016–2019. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00868

Makel, M. C., & Plucker, J. A. (2014). Facts are more important than novelty: Replication in the education sciences. Educational Researcher, 43 (6), 304–316. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X14545513

McIntosh, R. D. (2017). Exploratory reports: A new article type for Cortex. Cortex, 96 , A1–A4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2017.07.014

McKiernan, E. C., Bourne, P. E., Brown, C. T., Buck, S., Kenall, A., Lin, J., McDougall, D., Nosek, B. A. Ram, K., Soderberg, C. K., Spies, J. R., Thaney, K., Updegrove, A., Woo, K. H., Yarkoni, T. (2016). How open science helps researchers succeed. ELife , 1–19. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.16800

McLeod, J., O’Connor, K. (2020). Ethics, archives and data sharing in qualitative research. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1805310

Meyer, M. N. (2018). Practical tips for ethical data sharing. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 1 (1), 131–144.

Morris, M. (2002). Participatory research and action: A guide to becoming a researcher for social change. In Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women . https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353506067853

Munafò, M. R., Nosek, B. A., Bishop, D. V. M., Button, K. S., Chambers, C. D., Sert, P. D., & N., Simonsohn, U., Wagenmakers, E. J., Ware, J. J., & Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2017). A manifesto for reproducible science. Nature Human Behaviour, 1 (1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-016-0021

Nakamoto, J., & Schwartz, D. (2010). Is peer victimization associated with academic achievement? A Meta-Analytic Review. Social Development, 19 (2), 221–242. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9507.2009.00539.x

Nelson, L. D., Simmons, J., & Simonsohn, U. (2018). Psychology’s renaissance. Annual Review of Psychology, 69 , 511–534. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-122216-011836

Noret, N., Hunter, S. C., & Rasmussen, S. (2021). The role of cognitive appraisals in the relationship between peer-victimization and depressive symptomatology in adolescents: A longitudinal study. School mental health, 13 (3), 548–560. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12310-021-09414-0

Nosek, B. A., & Bar-Anan, Y. (2012). Scientific Utopia: I. Opening Scientific Communication. Psychological Inquiry, 23 (3), 217–243. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2012.692215

O’Brien, N. (2019). Understanding alternative bullying perspectives through research engagement with young people Frontiers in Psychology , 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01984

O’Brien, N., & Dadswell, A. (2020). Reflections on a participatory research project exploring bullying and school self-exclusion: Power dynamics, practicalities and partnership working. Pastoral Care in Education, 38 (3), 208–229. https://doi.org/10.1080/02643944.2020.1788126

O’Carroll, C., Rentier, B., Cabello Valdes, C., Esposito, F., Kaunismaa, E., Maas, K., Metcalfe, J., McAllister, D., & Vandevelde, K. (2017). Evaluation of Research Careers fully acknowledging Open Science Practices-Rewards, incentives and/or recognition for researchers practicing Open Science. Publication Office of the Europen Union . https://doi.org/10.2777/75255

Open Science Collaboration. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science , 349 . https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac4716

Piñeiro, R., & Rosenblatt, F. (2016). Pre-analysis plans for qualitative research. Revista De Ciencia Política (santiago), 36 (3), 785–796. https://doi.org/10.4067/s0718-090x2016000300009

Popper, K. (1959). The logic of scientific discovery . Hutchins and Company.

Przybylski, A. K. (2019). Exploring adolescent cyber victimization in mobile games: Preliminary evidence from a British cohort. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 22 (3), 227–231. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2018.0318

Przybylski, A. K., & Bowes, L. (2017). Cyberbullying and adolescent well-being in England: A population-based cross-sectional study. The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health, 1 (1), 19–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2352-4642(17)30011-1

Raj, A. T., Patil, S., Sarode, S., & Salameh, Z. (2018). P-Hacking: A wake-up call for the scientific community. Science and Engineering Ethics, 24 (6), 1813–1814. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-017-9984-1

Reischer, H. N., & Cowan, H. R. (2020). Quantity over quality? Reproducible psychological science from a mixed methods perspective. Collabra: Psychology , 6 (1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.284

Renkewitz, F., & Heene, M. (2019). The replication crisis and open science in psychology: Methodological challenges and developments. Zeitschrift Fur Psychologie, 227 (4), 233–236. https://doi.org/10.1027/a000001

Rosenthal, R. (1979). The “File Drawer Problem” and tolerance for null results. Psychological Bulletin, 86 (3), 638–641.

Rubin, M. (2017). When does HARKing hurt? Identifying when different types of undisclosed post hoc hypothesizing harm scientific progress. Review of General Psychology, 21 (4), 308–320. https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000128

Scheel, A. M., Schijen, M. R., & Lakens, D. (2021). An excess of positive results: Comparing the standard psychology literature with registered reports. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 4 (2), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459211007467

Schmidt, S. (2009). Shall we really do it again? The powerful concept of replication is neglected in the social sciences. Review of General Psychology, 13 (2), 90–100. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015108

Schapira, M., The Open Lab Notebook Consortium, & Harding, R. J. (2019). Open laboratory notebooks: Good for science, good for society, good for scientists. F1000Research , 8 :87. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.17710.2

Shenton, A. K. (2004). Strategies for ensuring trustworthiness in qualitative research projects. Education for Information, 22 (2), 63–75. https://doi.org/10.3233/EFI-2004-22201

Shrout, P. E., & Rodgers, J. L. (2018). Psychology, science, and knowledge construction: Broadening perspectives from the replication crisis. Annual Review of Psychology, 69 (1), 487–510. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-122216-011845

Sijtsma, K. (2016). Playing with data—Or how to discourage questionable research practices and stimulate researchers to do things right. Psychometrika, 81 (1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11336-015-9446-0

Simonsohn, U., Nelson, L. D., & Simmons, J. P. (2014). P-curve: A key to the file-drawer. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143 (2), 534–547. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0033242

Smith, P. K., & Berkkun, F. (2020). How prevalent is contextual information in research on school bullying? Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 61 (1), 17–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjop.12537

Steneck, N. (2006). Fostering integrity in research: Definitions, current knowledge, and future directions. Science and Engineering Ethics, 12 (1), 53–74. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-006-0006-y

Stricker, J., & Günther, A. (2019). Scientific misconduct in psychology: A systematic review of prevalence estimates and new empirical data. Zeitschrift Fur Psychologie, 227 (1), 53–63. https://doi.org/10.1027/2151-2604/a000356

Travers, J. C., Cook, B. G., & Cook, L. (2017). Null hypothesis significance testing and p values. Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 32 (4), 208–215. https://doi.org/10.1111/ldrp.12147

Valdebenito, S., Ttofi, M. M., Eisner, M., & Gaffney, H. (2017). Weapon carrying in and out of school among pure bullies, pure victims and bully-victims: A systematic review and meta-analysis of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 33 , 62–77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2017.01.004

van ’t Veer, A. E., & Giner-Sorolla, R. (2016). Pre-registration in social psychology—A discussion and suggested template. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 67 , 2–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2016.03.004

Vessey, J., Strout, T. D., DiFazio, R. L., & Walker, A. (2014). Measuring the youth bullying experience : A systematic review of the psychometric. Journal of School Health , 84 (12).

Volk, A. A., Veenstra, R., & Espelage, D. L. (2017). So you want to study bullying? Recommendations to enhance the validity, transparency, and compatibility of bullying research. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 36 , 34–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2017.07.003

Wagenmakers, E. J., Wetzels, R., Borsboom, D., van der Maas, H. L. J., & Kievit, R. A. (2012). An agenda for purely confirmatory research. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7 (6), 632–638. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612463078

Wicherts, J. M., Veldkamp, C. L. S., Augusteijn, H. E. M., Bakker, M., van Aert, R. C. M., & van Assen, M. A. L. M. (2016). Degrees of freedom in planning, running, analyzing, and reporting psychological studies: A checklist to avoid P-hacking. Frontiers in Psychology, 7 , 1–12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01832

Wiggins, B. J., & Chrisopherson, C. D. (2019). The replication crisis in psychology: An overview for theoretical and philosophical psychology. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 39 (4), 202–217. https://doi.org/10.1037/teo0000137

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Education, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD, UK

Nathalie Noret

Department of Psychology, Glasgow Caledonian University, Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow, G4 0BA, UK

Simon C. Hunter & Rebecca Johnson

Graduate School of Education, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia

Simon C. Hunter

School of Psychological Sciences and Health, University of Strathclyde, Graham Hills Building, 40 George Street, Glasgow, G1 1QE, UK

Sofia Pimenta & Rachel Taylor

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nathalie Noret .

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Noret, N., Hunter, S.C., Pimenta, S. et al. Open Science: Recommendations for Research on School Bullying. Int Journal of Bullying Prevention 5 , 319–330 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42380-022-00130-0

Download citation

Accepted : 01 June 2022

Published : 30 June 2022

Issue Date : December 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s42380-022-00130-0

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Bullying research
Open science
Pre-registration
Replication
Find a journal
Publish with us
Track your research

Bullying and Cyberbullying

Introduction, ebooks + books, suggested websites.

What is bullying?

Bullying is unwanted, aggressive behavior among school aged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. The behavior is repeated, or has the potential to be repeated, over time. Bullying includes actions such as making threats, spreading rumors, attacking someone physically or verbally, and excluding someone from a group on purpose.

Cyberbullying is the use of electronic communication (cell phone, computer, tablet) to bully a person by sending messages of an intimidating or threatening nature.

stopbullying.gov

A stop sign with the words "stop bullying."

Image credit: Wikipedia Commons

Frequency of Bullying
Possible Warning Signs that a Child is being Bullied
Get Help for Bullying
Nebraska State Laws

In 2015, about 21 percent of students ages 12–18 reported being bullied at school during the school year. Of students ages 12–18, about 13 percent reported that they were made fun of, called names, or insulted; 12 percent reported being the subject of rumors; 5 percent reported that they were pushed, shoved, tripped, or spit on; and 5 percent reported being excluded from activities on purpose. Additionally, 4 percent of students reported being threatened with harm, 3 percent reported that others tried to make them do things they did not want to do, and 2 percent reported that their property was destroyed by others on purpose.

In 2015, a higher percentage of female than of male students ages 12–18 reported being bullied at school during the school year (23 vs. 19 percent), as well as being the subject of rumors (15 vs. 9 percent). In contrast, a higher percentage of male than of female students reported being threatened with harm (5 vs. 3 percent).

Higher percentages of Black students (25 percent) and White students (22 percent) than of Hispanic students (17 percent) reported being bullied at school in 2015. The percentage of students who reported being made fun of, called names, or insulted was also higher for Black students (17 percent) and White students (14 percent) than for Hispanic students (9 percent). The percentage of students who reported being the subject of rumors was higher for Black students (14 percent), White students (13 percent), and Hispanic students (10 percent) than for Asian students (5 percent).

A higher percentage of students in grade 6 than of students in grades 8 through 12 reported being bullied at school during the school year. In 2015, about 31 percent of 6th-graders reported being bullied at school, compared with 22 percent of 8th-graders, 19 percent of 9th-graders, 21 percent of 10th-graders, 16 percent of 11th-graders, and 15 percent of 12th-graders. In addition, a higher percentage of 7th-graders (25 percent) than of 11th- and 12th-graders reported being bullied at school. The percentage was also higher for 8th- and 10th-graders than for 12th-graders. No measurable differences were observed in the percentage of students who reported being bullied at school by urbanicity or between those in public and private schools.

National Center for Education

Comes home with torn, damaged, or missing pieces of clothing
Has unexplained cuts, bruises, and scratches
Has few, if any friends, with whom he or she spends time
Seems afraid of going to school, walking to and from school, riding the school bus, or taking part in organized activities with peers
Takes a long, "illogical" route when walking to or from school
Has lost interest in school work or suddenly begins to do poorly in school
Appears sad, moody, teary, or depressed when he or she comes home
Complains frequently of headaches, stomaches, or other physical ailments
Has trouble sleeping or has frequent bad dreams
Experiences a loss of appetite
Appears anxious and suffers from low self-esteem

stopbullying.gov

If you are bullied or see bullying, you may feel pretty helpless. But there are things you can do, and you are not alone! Talk to your parents or guardians, or to other trusted adults, such as a teacher or school nurse.

Some people worry that reporting a bully is tattling. The truth is that talking to an adult is the responsible thing to do. And adults may be able to help without the bully knowing how they learned about the problem.

If you are bullied, remember that the person who bullies is wrong — not you! If you see other kids being bullied, they need your help. And you might also be helping the bully, who may have problems that can be worked through with an adult.

girlshealth.gov

GET HELP NOW

Bullying can affect you in many ways. You may lose sleep or feel sick. You may want to skip school. You may even be thinking about suicide. If you are feeling hopeless or helpless or know someone that is, please call the LIFELINE at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

The Nebraska state laws that pertain to bullying:

Nebraska Revised Statutes §79-267 – Student conduct constituting grounds for long-term suspension, expulsion, or mandatory reassignment; enumerated; alternatives for truant or tardy students
Nebraska Revised Statutes §79-2,137 – School district; development and adoption of bullying prevention and education policy; review

Nebraska Legislature

Explore library databases .

Discover eBook collections or find print books/materials through the catalog for each campus:

American Library Association GLBRTR: S peaking out against bullying.

American Psychological Association Bullying article from the American Psychological Association.

Bully Prevention Guide for Educators

An educators guide to combat bullying and bully prevention.

Cyberbullying & Internet Harassment

Prevent cyberbullying and Internet harassment/

Medline Plus Bullying article from Medline Plus.

Nebraska Department of Education Bullying prevention article from the Nebraska Department of Education

See a Bully, Stop a Bully, Make a Difference Bullying Prevention

StopBullying Provides information from various government agencies on what bullying is, what cyberbullying is, who is at risk, and how you can prevent and respond to bullying.

Stop Bullying Now Research-based strategies for reducing bullying in schools.

ThinkB4YouSpeak Words have consequences. Know the effects of verbal bullying.

What's Cyberbulling?

It's an unfortunate truth of the internet: Some online spaces can be full of negative, rude, or downright mean behavior. But what kinds of behaviors qualify as cyberbullying? Help your students learn what is -- and what isn't -- cyberbullying, and give them important tools they'll need to combat the problem.

Last Updated: May 16, 2024 1:04 PM
URL: https://libguides.cccneb.edu/bullying

COMMENTS

1 Introduction
1 Introduction. Bullying, long tolerated by many as a rite of passage into adulthood, is now recognized as a major and preventable public health problem, one that can have long-lasting consequences (McDougall and Vaillancourt, 2015; Wolke and Lereya, 2015).Those consequences—for those who are bullied, for the perpetrators of bullying, and for witnesses who are present during a bullying event ...
PDF Four Decades of Research on School Bullying
Four Decades of Research on School Bullying An Introduction Shelley Hymel University of British Columbia Susan M. Swearer University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Born This Way Foundation, Los Angeles, California This article provides an introductory overview of ﬁndings from the past 40 years of research on bullying among school-aged children and ...
Four decades of research on school bullying: An introduction
Abstract. This article provides an introductory overview of findings from the past 40 years of research on bullying among school-aged children and youth. Research on definitional and assessment issues in studying bullying and victimization is reviewed, and data on prevalence rates, stability, and forms of bullying behavior are summarized ...
Four Decades of Research on School Bullying: An Introduction
Four Decades of Research on School Bullying: An Introduction. Shelley Hymel, Faculty of Education, Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology and Special Education, University of British Columbia. Susan M. Swearer, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Born This Way Foun-dation, Los Angeles ...
Bullying in children: impact on child health
Introduction. Bullying in childhood has been classified by the WHO as a major public health problem 1 and for decades has been known to increase the risk of poor health, social and educational outcomes in childhood and adolescence. 2 Characterised by repeated victimisation within a power-imbalanced relationship, bullying encompasses a wide range of types, frequencies and aggression levels ...
Introduction
The chapter uses the Institute of Medicine's multi-tiered framework ( National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2009) to present the different levels of approaches to preventing bullying behavior. Chapter 6 reviews what is known about federal, state, and local laws and policies and their impact on bullying.
Four decades of research on school bullying: An introduction.
This article provides an introductory overview of findings from the past 40 years of research on bullying among school-aged children and youth. Research on definitional and assessment issues in studying bullying and victimization is reviewed, and data on prevalence rates, stability, and forms of bullying behavior are summarized, setting the stage for the 5 articles that comprise this American ...
Bullying: What We Know Based On 40 Years of Research
WASHINGTON — A special issue of American Psychologist® provides a comprehensive review of over 40 years of research on bullying among school age youth, documenting the current understanding of the complexity of the issue and suggesting directions for future research. "The lore of bullies has long permeated literature and popular culture.
Bullying in schools: the state of knowledge and effective interventions
Research on bullying started more than forty years ago, when the phenomenon was defined as 'aggressive, intentional acts carried out by a group or an individual repeatedly and over time against a victim who cannot easily defend him- or herself'. ... Four decades of research on school bullying: An introduction. American Psychologist, 70, 293 ...
Tackling Bullying from the Inside Out: Shifting Paradigms in Bullying
Introduction. The decision to have a university Chair dedicated to tackling bullying and cyberbullying was achieved through a partnership between the Government of Ireland, Dublin City University and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). ... So, if we start our anti-bullying research and initiatives to ...
Five decades of research on school bullying: What have we learned?
It is only in the last five decades that school bullying has become a major focus in psychological and educational research. This chapter outlines how research on school bullying has unfolded during that time and describes some of the current understandings of the problem and our efforts to address it. Following a description of the forms that bullying can take, findings regarding the ...
Bullying at school and mental health problems among adolescents: a
Bullying involves repeated hurtful actions between peers where an imbalance of power exists [].Arseneault et al. [] conducted a review of the mental health consequences of bullying for children and adolescents and found that bullying is associated with severe symptoms of mental health problems, including self-harm and suicidality.Bullying was shown to have detrimental effects that persist into ...
Full article: The Effect of Social, Verbal, Physical, and Cyberbullying
Introduction. Research on bullying victimization in schools has developed into a robust body of literature since the early 1970s. Formally defined by Olweus (Citation 1994), "a student is being bullied or victimized when he or she is exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more other students and where a power imbalance exists" (p. 1173).
Full article: Understanding bullying from young people's perspectives
Introduction. With its negative consequences for wellbeing, bullying is a major public health concern affecting the lives of many children and adolescents (Holt et al. 2014; Liu et al. 2014 ). Bullying can take many different forms and include aggressive behaviours that are physical, verbal or psychological in nature (Wang, Iannotti, and Nansel ...
Bullying: Definition, Types, Causes, Consequences and Intervention
Bullying is repetitive aggressive behaviour with an imbalance of power. Research, especially on school bullying, has increased massively in the last decade, fuelled in part by the rise of cyberbullying. Prevalence rates vary greatly. This is in part because of measurement issues, but some persons, and groups, are more at risk of involvement.
Four decades of research on school bullying: An introduction.
This article provides an introductory overview of findings from the past 40 years of research on bullying among school-aged children and youth. Research on definitional and assessment issues in studying bullying and victimization is reviewed, and data on prevalence rates, stability, and forms of bullying behavior are summarized, setting the stage for the 5 articles that comprise this American ...
Bullying: issues and challenges in prevention and intervention
Bullying is a public health issue that persists and occurs across several contexts. In this narrative review, we highlight issues and challenges in addressing bullying prevention. Specifically, we discuss issues related to defining, measuring, and screening for bullying. These include discrepancies in the interpretation and measurement of power imbalance, repetition of behavior, and ...
Bullying: What we know based on 40 years of research
May 14, 2015. Source: American Psychological Association (APA) Summary: Psychologists have reviewed over 40 years of research on bullying among school age youth, documented the current ...
Understanding Alternative Bullying Perspectives Through Research
Introduction. Research on school bullying has developed rapidly since the 1970s. Originating in social and psychological research in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, this body of research largely focusses on individualized personality traits of perpetrators and victims (Olweus, 1995).Global interest in this phenomenon subsequently spread and bullying research began in the United Kingdom, Australia ...
Full article: Bullying and cyberbullying: a bibliometric analysis of
Introduction. Bullying has been considered "one of the most outstanding topics in educational research" (Espinosa, Citation 2018), a public health problem among children and adolescents (Chester et al., Citation 2015), and also a reason for concern in schools and communities (Bradshaw, Citation 2015).According to the PISA 2018 report, on average, 23% of students reported being bullied at ...
Open Science: Recommendations for Research on School Bullying
Bullying in school is a common experience for many children and adolescents. Such experiences relate to a range of adverse outcomes, including poor mental health, poorer academic achievement, and anti-social behaviour (Gini et al., 2018; Nakamoto & Schwartz, 2010; Valdebenito et al., 2017).Bullying research has increased substantially over the past 60 years, with over 5000 articles published ...
PDF The Impact of School Bullying On Students' Academic Achievement from
Introduction Bullying exists in all communities since long time. Bullying exists either in developed or developing societies. ... The research importance stems from the importance of the topic it deals with, which is considered very important for many parties. Moreover it will enable those concerned know how to deal with the problem of
Introduction
Cyberbullying is the use of electronic communication (cell phone, computer, tablet) to bully a person by sending messages of an intimidating or threatening nature. stopbullying.gov. Image credit: Wikipedia Commons. In 2015, about 21 percent of students ages 12-18 reported being bullied at school during the school year.

Preventing Bullying Through Science, Policy, and Practice (2016)

STUDY CHARGE

CONTEXT FOR THE STUDY

Historical Context

Federal Efforts to Address Bullying and Related Topics

Definitional Context

THE COMMITTEE’S APPROACH

Information Gathering

Terminology

ORGANIZATION OF THE REPORT

Welcome to OpenBook!

Get Email Updates

Save citation to file

Add to My Bibliography

Four decades of research on school bullying: An introduction

Similar articles

Publication types

Related information

LinkOut - more resources

Miscellaneous

Bullying: What We Know Based On 40 Years of Research

Tackling Bullying from the Inside Out: Shifting Paradigms in Bullying Research and Interventions

Introduction

Defining and Contextualising Bullying

Bullying Research

Recent Influence of the New Sociology of Childhood

Bullying at school and mental health problems among adolescents: a repeated cross-sectional study

Conclusions

Introduction

Participants

Study outcome

Primary exposure

Statistical analyses

Prevalence of bullying at school and mental health problems

Associations between bullying at school and mental health problems

Strengths and limitations

Availability of data and materials

Code availability

Acknowledgements

Author information

Contributions

Corresponding author

Ethics declarations

Consent for publication

Additional information

Supplementary Information

Rights and permissions

About this article

Share this article

Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Introduction

What Is Bullying?

Theoretical Underpinnings – Hearing From Children and Young People

The Studies

Informed Consent

Bullying Definitions

Impact of Bullying on Victim

Reporting Bullying

Data Availability

Ethics Statement

Author Contributions

Conflict of Interest Statement

Acknowledgments

Open Science: Recommendations for Research on School Bullying

Cite this article

Similar content being viewed by others

Q Methodology as an Innovative Addition to Bullying Researchers’ Methodological Repertoire

The Importance of Being Attentive to Social Processes in School Bullying Research: Adopting a Constructivist Grounded Theory Approach

Pseudoscience, an Emerging Field, or Just a Framework Without Outcomes? A Bibliometric Analysis and Case Study Presentation of Social Justice Research

The Replication Crisis

The Incentive Culture in Academia

Questionable Research Practices

Low Statistical Power

QRPs in Qualitative Research

The Prevalence and Impact of QRPs

Box 1 The Replication Crisis

Open Science

Box 2 Key Reading on Open Science

Open Publication, Open Data, and Reporting Standards