simple research paper about bullying

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Bullying Prevention in Adolescence: Solutions and New Challenges from the Past Decade

Christina salmivalli.

1 University of Turku

Lydia Laninga‐Wijnen

Sarah t. malamut.

2 Radboud University

Claire F. Garandeau

Bullying among youth at school continues to be a global challenge. Being exposed to bullying may be especially hurtful in adolescence, a vulnerable period during which both peer group belonging and status become key concerns. In the current review, we first summarize the effectiveness of the solutions that were offered a decade ago in the form of anti‐bullying programs. We proceed by highlighting some intriguing challenges concomitant to, or emerging from these solutions, focusing especially on their relevance during adolescence. These challenges are related to (1) the relatively weak, and highly variable effects of anti‐bullying programs, (2) the complex associations among bullying, victimization, and social status, (3) the questions raised regarding the beneficial (or possibly iatrogenic) effects of peer defending, and (4) the healthy context paradox , that is, the phenomenon of remaining or emerging victims being worse off in contexts where the average levels of victimization decrease. We end by providing some suggestions for the next decade of research in the area of bullying prevention among adolescents.

Bullying is a pervasive global problem that has attracted researchers’ attention for five decades. It is typically defined as repeated, intentional hurting of a person who is weaker or less powerful than the perpetrator(s) (e.g., Olweus, 1978 ; Salmivalli & Peets, 2018 ). Bullying can be direct, such as physical or verbal attacks, indirect (also referred to as relational bullying), such as social exclusion and rumor‐spreading, or it can happen online.

Although systematic bullying of selected peers already exists at a young age (e.g., Perren & Alsaker, 2006 ), adolescence is a period when the importance of peers—in terms of both belonging and prominence in the peer group—is pronounced (LaFontana & Cillessen, 2010 ; Newman & Newman, 2001 ). It is also a period of elevated risk for the onset of anxiety and depression, and peer victimization is predictive of both (Stapinski, Araya, Heron, Montgomery, & Stallard, 2015 ). Being bullied affects the development of personal identity as well (van Hoof, Raaijmakers, van Beek, Hale, & Aleva, 2008 )—a key developmental task of adolescence. Victimization can be even directed at one’s (ethnic, sexual, etc.) identity: bias‐based bullying targeted at youth with marginalized identities is common (Galán, Stokes, Szoko, Abebe, & Culyba, 2021 ). Peer‐victimized adolescents have often experienced victimization for a long time (Troop‐Gordon, 2017 ), are less likely than younger children to tell adults about it (Blomqvist, Saarento, & Salmivalli, 2020 ), and have little trust in adults’ capability to help solve the problem (Elledge et al., 2013 ). Aggressors tend to become more popular (Cillessen & Borch, 2006 ; Cillessen & Mayeux, 2004 ) and peer group norms are increasingly approving of bullying (Salmivalli & Voeten, 2004 ) in (pre)adolescence. Peer‐victimized adolescents’ plight certainly deserves attention.

The present review focuses on bullying and victimization among (pre)adolescents in the school context , with an eye to prevention and intervention . Rather than systematically reviewing research from the past decade and ending with implications for interventions, we start the current paper with a summary of the effectiveness of the solutions that were offered a decade ago (i.e., implementing school‐based anti‐bullying programs) and then selectively focus on a few timely topics that represent either enduring challenges in the field of bullying prevention, or new challenges raised by the solutions that have been developed and implemented. Although research on cyberbullying has grown exponentially, we chose to exclude it from the current review, due to the massive amount of research and reviews recently published on the topic (including a “mapping review of systematic reviews” (Kwan et al., 2020 ). Also, aggression and victimization in the romantic/dating context (Wincentak, Connolly, & Card, 2017 ) are beyond the scope of the present article. Finally, the decade ended with the covid‐19 pandemic, which affected many aspects of adolescents’ lives, including schooling and social contacts overall. This bears consequences for peer relations, including bullying and victimization. Studies have only started to emerge around this topic, and it is not the time to review them, yet.

The decade started with (at least modest) optimism regarding bullying prevention, which was soon mitigated by findings showing that not all youth benefited from school‐based prevention and intervention. First, adolescents , in particular , did not respond to interventions in the hoped‐for manner . Second, interventions continue to face challenges in reducing bullying in part related to the associations among bullying perpetration , victimization , and peer status that are not fully understood. Third, some interventions were based on elements involving unforeseen complexities; in our review, we ask whether peer defending , an important component of many anti‐bullying programs , might have some iatrogenic effects —either for the defenders themselves or for the victimized students they defend. Fourth, we review evidence regarding the healthy context paradox : even in the context of successful interventions, youth who remain victimized (or become new victims) might be even worse off than victimized students in contexts where the overall level of victimization remains high.

Our review concerns bullying prevention, rather than the prevention of aggression in general. When we refer to studies that looked at aggression more generally, we explicitly say this.

PREVENTION AND INTERVENTION

With respect to bullying prevention, the past decade started with good news. The largest‐so‐far meta‐analysis on the effects of school‐based anti‐bullying programs was published (Ttofi & Farrington, 2011 ; based on Farrington & Ttofi, 2009 ) and concluded that such programs are, on average, effective. The programs led to significant average reductions in the proportion of students who were bullied, as well as those bullying others. Other reviews and meta‐analyses echoed this finding (Fraguas et al., 2021 ; Jimenes‐Barbero, Ruiz‐Hernández, Llor‐Zaragoza, Pérez‐García, & Llor‐Esteban, 2016 ; Lee, Kim, & Kim, 2015 ; Ng, Chua, & Shorey, 2020 ). Some of them included—in addition to the prevalence of perpetrators and victimized youth—outcomes such as attitudes about bullying, school climate, and mental health problems (Fraguas et al., 2021 ; Jimenez‐Barbero et al., 2016 ) or bystander intervention (Polanin, Espelage, & Pigott, 2012 ). The positive effects were welcome, as previous reviews (Ferguson et al. 2007 ; Merrell, Gueldner, Ross, & Isava, 2008 ) had made more pessimistic conclusions regarding the effectiveness of anti‐bullying programs.

The good news were, however, accompanied with bad news: the average effects were disappointingly modest and there was large variation in effects across studies and programs. Both conclusions are still valid today. The updated meta‐analysis by Gaffney, Ttofi, and Farrington ( 2019 ), now including 100 program evaluations—almost twice as much as in the original work by Farrington and Ttofi—showed that the average reduction in the prevalence of bullying perpetrators and victims was 19–20% and 15–16%, respectively. These prevalence changes are slightly smaller than the ones reported 10 years earlier (20–23% and 17–20% for bullying and victimization, respectively). For adolescents, the conclusions might be even more pessimistic.

Effects of School‐Based Prevention and Intervention among Adolescents

An important debate from the past decade concerned the effects of anti‐bullying programs on adolescents versus younger children. Based on theoretical considerations and empirical findings, Smith ( 2010 ) argued that adolescents are more difficult to influence with school‐based interventions. More evidence was emerging; for instance, the KiVa anti‐bullying program was evaluated in all grade levels in Finnish elementary and middle schools (age range of 7–15 years), not only once but twice: in a massive randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving almost 30 000 students (Kärnä et al., 2013 ; Kärnä, Voeten, Little, Poskiparta, Kaljonen, et al., 2011 ) and during the first year of nationwide implementation using a cohort‐longitudinal design (Kärnä, Voeten, Little, Poskiparta, Alanen, et al., 2011 ). The findings consistently showed the weakest effects among 13‐ to 15‐year‐old middle school students.

In light of the above, it was somewhat surprising that the first Ttofi and Farrington meta‐analysis (2011) found larger effects among older (>11 years) students, suggesting that programs work better among adolescents than among younger children. The age effect found in another meta‐analysis, including only RCTs (Jiménez‐Barbero et al., 2016 ) was opposite to that of Ttofi and Farrington ( 2011 ): the interventions had a significantly greater impact on bullying perpetration among children younger than 10   years .

Yeager, Fong, Lee, and Espelage ( 2015 ) pointed out that previous analyses comparing program effects across age groups were all between‐study (and thus, between‐program) tests of moderation. A more correct strategy would be to analyze within‐study moderation of efficacy by age (comparing the effects of the same programs in various age groups) to estimate age trends in responsiveness to interventions. Their multilevel meta‐analysis using this approach showed that bullying behavior was effectively reduced in youth younger than 14 years, after which the effect sizes dropped sharply.

Besides testing the effects of school‐based multi‐component programs, some studies looked specifically into indicated interventions targeting students who had been directly involved in bullying (i.e., teachers or other school adults addressing the bullying case by discussions with students). The first study comparing the effects of such discussions across school levels (Garandeau, Poskiparta, & Salmivalli, 2014 ) found them equally effective in elementary and middle schools and across different forms of bullying. In this study, however, success (whether bullying had stopped) was reported to school adults in a follow‐up discussion 2 weeks after the intervention. Based on a large data set collected with anonymous annual questionnaires over6 years in more than 1,200 schools implementing the KiVa program in Finland, Johander, Turunen, Garandeau, and Salmivalli ( 2020 ) found that the success rate of intervention discussions—a component of the program—was higher in elementary school grades (students with 10–12 years of age) than in middle schools (students with 13–15 years of age). This effect was consistently present, whether success was reported by the teachers doing the intervention or the students who had been victimized. Another study (E. Johander, T. Turunen, J. Trach, C. Garandeau & C. Salmivalli, unpublished data) found that being in a higher grade did in and of itself make it less likely that bullying stopped after an intervention, regardless of how long it had lasted. This time, the finding was confirmed by both victim and perpetrator reports.

Program Components Contributing to Effects: “What Works?”

In the past 10 years, researchers started to pay attention to disentangling the “effective ingredients” of anti‐bullying programs from less effective (or even iatrogenic) ones. Ttofi and Farrington ( 2009 ) took an important first step in this direction. They coded the whole‐school anti‐bullying programs involved in their meta‐analysis with respect to whether or not they included 20 components, and investigated the association between program effects and the presence of each component. These efforts were followed by other meta‐analyses focusing on effective components (Huang et al., 2019 ; Jimenez‐Narbero et al., 2016 ; Ng et al., 2020 ).

The most recent work in this area, also including the largest number of studies, is the updated meta‐analysis by Gaffney, Ttofi, and Farrington ( 2021 ). The findings indicated that two components were effective in reducing the prevalence of bullying as well as victimization: information provided for parents, and informal peer involvement. In addition, several components were effective in reducing bullying perpetration only: whole‐school approach, anti‐bullying policies, classroom rules, and work with victims. There was no association between the effectiveness of a program and the number of intervention components included in it, contrary to what was found in the 2011 analysis.

With respect to the role of parental involvement, Gaffney et al. ( 2021 ) concluded that providing information for parents is more effective than involving parents in meetings and discussions. However, another recent meta‐analysis by Huang et al. ( 2019 ) synthesized evidence regarding the effects of bullying prevention programs involving a parental component (e.g., information meetings, workshops for parents, or communication sent home). They found that these programs were overall effective in reducing bullying and victimization, and their effects were not moderated neither by the degree of parental involvement nor by school level. It is worth noting that the programs included many other components besides parental involvement, and the authors did not compare the effects with those of programs not involving parents (as in Gaffney et al., 2021 ).

“Work with peers”, which had originally been found counterproductive (Ttofi & Farrington, 2011 ), was in the more recent analysis by Gaffney et al. ( 2021 ) divided into three components which were coded as present or absent in the programs. These were “informal peer involvement” (small group or whole‐class discussions and activities related to bullying experiences and attitudes, thus targeting bystanders indirectly rather than directly), “formal peer involvement” (such as peer‐led anti‐bullying activities, peer‐mentoring schemes, or training students to provide active support to participants experiencing bullying), and “encouraging bystanders”. The findings now suggested that informal peer involvement was the only of the three components that contributed significantly to reductions in both bullying perpetration and victimization. It is not completely clear, however, when a component was coded as “informal peer involvement” versus “encouraging bystanders”. The names of the categories may be misleading, as many anti‐bullying programs aim at mobilizing bystanders to behave constructively when witnessing bullying (not reinforcing bullying but rather supporting the peers who are victimized) exactly by whole‐class discussions and activities around this topic, that is, through informal peer involvement.

It is not surprising that the findings of the 2011 and 2021 meta‐analyses were somewhat different; the more recent one included a theoretically better justified, more precise coding and a substantially larger number of studies. The differences in results, as well as discrepancies in the findings from other meta‐analytic studies (e.g., Huang et al., 2019 ; Jimenez‐Narbero et al., 2016 ; Ng et al., 2020 ) show, however, that the search for the most effective components is still at an early stage and clear policy implications may not yet be warranted.

Overall, although analyses on effective components are an important step toward understanding “what works”, it involves several pitfalls. First, analyses are correlational, and thus inferring causality is a stretch. Experimental work testing the effects of different components is needed, but also very costly. Second, researchers are coding components that are included in program manuals, rather than components that were actually implemented by schools. Some components may not have been implemented at all, or perhaps were being implemented in rare cases (e.g., “disciplinary methods” targeted at very few identified bullies; anti‐bullying lessons delivered in a limited number of classrooms) or implemented differently than recommended (Johander et al., 2020 ). Third, some components may only work, or work better, in the presence of other component(s), and the examination of unique contributions of components might hide such interactive effects. Fourth, and most relevant for the present article, findings regarding the components associated with larger effect sizes may radically change when the effects of different components are examined in various subgroups, for instance, young children versus adolescent samples.

Altogether different strategies might be needed when preventing and intervening in bullying among adolescents, as compared with younger children. For instance, bullying is likely to be increasingly driven by the need to gain or demonstrate peer status in adolescence; yet, many prevention programs focus on factors, such as social‐emotional learning or theory of mind skills, which may not play a major role in bullying during this developmental period (Yeager et al., 2015 ). In addition, the effects of parental and peer involvement in bullying prevention might well be age specific. It is conceivable that while parental involvement is a key in early and middle childhood, involvement of peers turns out more effective among adolescents, due to the role of peer bystanders in bullying (Pouwels, Lansu, & Cillessen, 2016 ), adolescents’ heightened sensitivity to peer feedback (Albert, Chein, & Steinberg, 2013 ), as well as their tendency to mimic the aggressive behavior of their popular peers (Juvonen & Ho, 2008 ). So far, effective components have not been studied separately in different age groups, and the decisions regarding relevant components to include have not been developmentally informed.

What (Might) Work Among Adolescents

Thus far, most of the available evidence seems to support the view that adolescents are less responsive to school‐based interventions (whether preventive programs as a whole or their specific, targeted components) than younger students. There are both developmental and contextual factors that might explain this trend.

Developmental changes include puberty‐related hormonal changes and maturation of the brain. Increased testosterone levels, for instance, have been associated with a higher activation of the neural systems regulating reward and social motivation (Murray‐Close, 2012 ). Brain areas processing emotional experiences change more rapidly than those mediating cognitive regulation (Albert et al., 2013 ). All these changes may contribute to adolescents’ self‐focus, risk‐taking, and sensitivity to peer feedback, as well as to their status needs and socially dominant behaviors (Albert et al., 2013 ; Murray‐Close, 2012 ).

With respect to contextual changes, adolescents transfer from small elementary schools to larger middle schools. The transition involves re‐shuffling of the peer landscape, which may create increasing concerns about peer relationships and status. Although empirical evidence of the effect of middle school transition on bullying is mixed (Farmer, Hamm, Leung, Lambert, & Gravelle, 2011 ; Pellegrini, 2002 ; Pellegrini et al., 2010 ), and difficult to disentangle from developmental changes, the transition is often assumed to influence the prevalence as well as prevention of bullying. Besides changes in classroom compositions, friendships, and peer group dynamics, the transition brings along a more complex organizational structure and changing role of teachers (who may feel less responsible for anti‐bullying work in middle, as compared with elementary school)—such changes might make the implementation of anti‐bullying programs especially demanding.

Adolescence is also characterized by strains in relationships with adults, especially those in authority positions. Attempts to control youth’s behavior may, therefore, lead to psychological reactance against adult injunctions to think or behave in a certain way, leading even to behaviors opposite to the adult suggestions. Teacher‐led lessons or suggestions to change one’s behavior may indeed be counterproductive among adolescents. Yeager et al. ( 2015 ) suggest using autonomy‐supportive approaches and language, rather than direct injunctions (e.g., “you might” instead of “you should”). They provide an example from smoking prevention: campaigns directly telling youth they should not smoke are less effective than campaigns portraying tobacco companies as the “authority” seeking to manipulate adolescents, and non‐smoking youth as rebellious for standing up to them. Another example, also from smoking prevention, is the ASSIST program, where influential students are identified and trained to act as peer supporters during informal interactions, encouraging their peers not to smoke. The intervention successfully reduced the likelihood of being a smoker among 12‐ to 13‐year‐old adolescents.

The idea of avoiding adult‐imposed rules or injunctions to behave in certain ways has also been applied in the context of preventing conflict, violence, and bullying. One approach is to identify highly influential students who will generate solutions and initiatives, make these solutions visible to others, and take a public stance against problem behaviors (Paluck, Shepherd, & Aronow, 2016 ). Bowes et al. ( 2019 ) utilized students as change‐makers in their schools in the ROOTS Indonesia adolescent bullying intervention, where highly influential students led activities and sessions around themes, such as violence prevention and constructive bystander behaviors. The intervention also included a teacher‐training component. The program was considered feasible, but the effects on bullying and victimization were mixed.

Another example of mobilizing peers in bullying prevention is the Italian NoTrap! program, which has produced promising effects on both traditional and cyberbullying among 14‐ to 15‐year‐old adolescents (Palladino, Nocentini, & Menesini, 2016 ). After an adult‐led phase, trained peer educators lead both online and offline activities around empathy, problem‐solving, and bullying, including positive bystander behaviors. The Meaningful Roles intervention (Ellis, Volk, Gonzalez, & Embry, 2015 ), currently under evaluation in the Netherlands, acknowledges adolescents’ goals for status and attempts to work with, rather than against, such goals in preventing bullying. Students are assigned to roles in which they can fulfill their status goals in prosocial ways, taking social responsibility—this is expected to reduce bullying behaviors, as it provides youth with alternative ways of gaining status.

Moderators of Prevention Effects

Research on moderators of anti‐bullying program effects is scarce in adolescent samples. With respect to gender, a recent meta‐analysis suggested that anti‐bullying programs overall work slightly better among boys than among girls (Kennedy, 2020 ). Among adolescents in particular, there is some indication of stronger anti‐bullying program effects among boys, as well as in classrooms with a larger proportion of boys (Kärnä et al., 2013 ), but also studies that found no gender moderation of effects between (pre‐)adolescent boys and girls (Gradinger, Yanagida, Strohmeier, & Spiel, 2015 ; Palladino et al., 2016 ). Research on other moderators consists of single studies (mostly done in middle school/preadolescent samples) that await replication. They have looked, for instance, at environmental sensitivity (Nocentini, Menesini, & Pluess, 2018 ), temperament (Nocentini, Palladino, & Menesini, 2019 ), and popularity among peers (Garandeau, Poskiparta, et al., 2014 ).

Building on the frameworks of differential susceptibility and vantage sensitivity tested whether individual differences in environmental sensitivity moderated the effects of a bullying prevention program. The study was conducted in the context of a large (> 2000 fourth and sixth graders) RCT of the KiVa program in Italy. The findings provided some evidence that highly sensitive children (especially boys) benefited more from the intervention, showing larger decreases in victimization. In a sample of sixth graders (12‐year‐old early adolescents) from the same trial, Nocentini et al. ( 2019 ) examined whether temperament moderated the effects of the program on bullying perpetration and victimization. Both effortful control and negative emotionality moderated the effects of the KiVa program on bullying perpetration: effects were only seen among youth with high effortful control and those with low and medium levels of negative emotionality. Positive emotionality, on the other hand, strengthened the intervention effects on victimization.

Garandeau, Lee, and Salmivalli ( 2014 ) categorized 10‐ to 12‐year‐old preadolescents into three groups (low, moderate, and high) on the basis of their perceived popularity among classmates. They found that popularity moderated the effect of the KiVa program on students’ peer‐reported bullying behavior, such that intervention effects were only found among low‐ and medium‐popular, but not among the highly popular students. This finding might be particularly relevant among adolescents, as bullying is believed to be increasingly driven by status needs in this developmental period. Whereas the Meaningful Roles intervention described above assumes that popular students (or the ones aiming for high popularity) will decrease bullying when they gain popularity by other means (Ellis et al., 2015 ), the finding by Garandeau, Lee, et al. ( 2014 ) suggests that popular students’ bullying behavior is especially hard to change. Rather than refraining from aggression, these adolescents may end up using both prosocial and aggressive strategies to maximize their status (Hawley, 2003 ; Laninga‐Wijnen et al., 2020 ).

Intervention trials targeted at adolescents should carefully consider the role of peer status, as well as goals, and investigate moderation of intervention effects by these factors. Also other, developmentally relevant factors such as psychological reactance have not yet been assessed in the context of anti‐bullying interventions. There are also potential contextual moderators of intervention effects, such as school climate (see Low & van Ryzin, 2014 , for a study in elementary schools). From the developmental perspective, the most relevant contextual moderators of intervention effects in adolescence might have to do with peer group norms. Peer dynamics may be difficult to change in classrooms where bullying is rewarded by popularity (Dijkstra & Gest, 2015 ) or by encouraging gestures from bystanders (Pouwels, van Noorden, Lansu, & Cillessen, 2018 ).

THE ROLE OF STATUS IN BULLYING AND VICTIMIZATION

A challenge to anti‐bullying programs (particularly in adolescence) is that bullies may be rewarded with high status, which is increasingly important to adolescents (e.g., LaFontana & Cillessen, 2010 ). Given the importance of peer relationships and peer status (e.g., popularity, peer acceptance/rejection) in adolescence, a substantial amount of studies have examined the associations between bullying, victimization, and status among youth. One of the key contributions of this research has been a shift in the conceptualization of bullying perpetrators from maladjusted and socially isolated to socially adept and skilled. Through this lens, research in the last decade has increasingly recognized bullying as a strategic, goal‐directed behavior (e.g., Hawley, 2015 ; Volk, Dane, & Marini, 2014 ), and has led to important advances in the field. In this section, we review three key questions related to bullying and status: 1. how bullying and status are related to one another over time, 2. how youth’s status cognitions and goals are related to bullying, and 3. whether high status is always a protective factor against victimization. We primarily consider two forms of status: popularity (i.e., social visibility, prestige, and/or dominance) and peer acceptance/rejection (i.e., the extent to which adolescents are (dis)liked by peers).

Longitudinal Associations between Bullying and Status

Numerous studies have demonstrated a positive concurrent association between bullying perpetration and popularity (e.g., de Bruyn et al., 2010 ), and between bullying and peer rejection (e.g., Pouwels et al., 2016 ). Based on these cross‐sectional findings, a common perspective is that perpetrators are generally popular, but disliked. At the potential cost of being disliked, adolescents with high status (particularly popularity) may use aggression over time to maintain their status, such that they demonstrate their dominance to their peers (e.g., van den Berg, Burk, & Cillessen, 2019 ). Likewise, bullying is thought to be one tool that youth may use to gain popularity (e.g., by acquiring material and/or social resources; Volk, Camilleri, Dane, & Marini, 2012 ). However, research from the past decade has resulted in a more complex picture of the direction of this association over time.

Although there are reasons to expect bidirectional associations between bullying and status, the extant literature is quite inconsistent. In a large Finnish sample of early adolescents, no significant longitudinal associations were found between bullying and popularity (Sentse, Kretschmer, & Salmivalli, 2015 ; Sentse, Veenstra, Kiuru, & Salmivalli, 2015 ). In contrast, a recent study found a positive, bidirectional association between bullying and popularity over the span of 1 year in a sample of Italian early adolescents (Pozzoli & Gini, 2021 ). Other studies have found evidence that popularity is more likely to predict aggression over time, rather than aggression predicting popularity (e.g., Lu, Li, Niu, Jin, & French, 2018 ; Malamut, van den Berg, Lansu, & Cillessen, 2020 ; Ojanen & Findley‐Van Nostrand, 2014 ). Furthermore, Pouwels et al. ( 2016 ) found that youth who belonged to a stable popular group in late childhood/early adolescence were more likely to be bullies later in adolescence. A different study using joint trajectory analysis of bullying, popularity, and peer acceptance concluded that stable high levels of bullying often overlapped with stable high levels of popularity, but that bullying was not a prerequisite to achieving popularity (Reijntjes et al., 2013 ). They found that most early adolescents who belonged in the high‐bullying group also belonged to the high‐popularity group, whereas less than half of those in the high‐popularity group were simultaneously high in bullying. de Vries, Kaufman, Veenstra, Laninga‐Wijnen, and Huitsing ( 2021 ) found that bullies had higher popularity than other groups, but belonging to a bully group did not predict changes in popularity over time. Thus, popularity generally appears to be a robust predictor of aggression, whereas less consistent evidence has been found for aggression predicting popularity. Similar patterns have been found for both physical (e.g., hitting others) and indirect/relational (e.g., excluding others) forms of aggression (e.g., Lu et al., 2018 ; Malamut, Berg, Lansu, & Cillessen, 2020 ; Ojanen & Findley‐Van Nostrand, 2014 ).

Our understanding of the longitudinal links between bullying and status is further complicated by the fact that peers may not have a uniform reaction to bullying. Indeed, person‐centered approaches have found that some subgroups of bullies are rejected by peers, whereas other subgroups of bullies have average social acceptance (e.g., Reijntjes et al., 2013 ), or even have high levels of acceptance and number of friends (e.g., De Vries et al., 2021 ). These findings are consistent with a cross‐sectional study that found that bullies (and victims) were not particularly disliked by their classmates—instead, bullies’ and victims’ reputations for being disliked were primarily driven by mutual antipathies between bullies and victims (Hafen, Laursen, Nurmi, & Salmela‐Aro, 2013 ). In one longitudinal study, limited prospective associations were found between bullying and rejection: for adolescent boys, peer rejection predicted higher levels of bullying 5 months later, but bullying did not predict becoming more rejected by peers (Sentse, Kretschmer, et al., 2015 ; Sentse, Veenstra, et al., 2015 ). Similarly, Pozzoli and Gini ( 2021 ) found a weak, negative association between social preference (i.e., being well‐liked) and subsequent bullying, but did not find that bullying was a significant predictor of social preference over time. Taken together, these studies suggest that bullies may not incur as many social costs amongst peers (in terms of likeability or affection) as previously suggested by most cross‐sectional research.

Therefore, somewhat surprisingly, the extent to which bullying and status reinforce each other over time remains unclear, despite years of research on this topic. One challenge to disentangling the temporal associations of bullying and status is the high stability of status (particularly popularity). Thus, it may be more difficult to identify the impact of bullying on popularity over time; especially as popularity has many behavioral and personality correlates other than aggression (Vaillancourt & Hymel, 2006 ). Another challenge is that bullies represent a heterogenous group (Peeters, Cillessen, & Scholte, 2010 )—some bullies may be high in status, whereas others are low in status. For example, bullies who are also victimized by peers (i.e., bully‐victims) are generally lower in popularity and social preference than “pure” bullies (e.g., Guy, Lee, & Wolke, 2019 ). Yet, longitudinal studies on the associations between bullying and status often do not take this into account.

Moreover, a growing body of research in the past decade has highlighted that the extent to which bullying and aggression are normative or rewarded with status varies across contexts (e.g., schools, classrooms; Dijkstra & Gest, 2015 ; Garandeau, Laninga‐Wijnen, & Salmivalli, 2011 ; Laninga‐Wijnen et al., 2017 ). Following the social misfit model (Wright, Giammarino, & Parad, 1986 ), adolescents experience social sanctions if they behave in ways that are inconsistent with the norms or values of their peer group. Indeed, peer norms appear to impact how accepted or rejected bullies are in the peer group (Dijkstra & Gest, 2015 ). Still, these studies have been primarily cross‐sectional, and the few longitudinal studies (e.g., Berger & Caravita, 2016 ; Sentse, Kretschmer, et al., 2015 ; Sentse, Veenstra, et al., 2015 ) have not found a consistent pattern of results in adolescence. Further research is still needed to understand how the peer norms influence the bidirectional, longitudinal associations between bullying and status.

Due to these challenges, it is difficult to evaluate the extent to which interventions can impact the associations between bullying and status. Importantly, and contrary to common conceptions, there is little to no evidence that bullying is costly in terms of peer acceptance or social preference over time. This poses a challenge for intervention efforts, as it may be difficult to persuade adolescents to cease bullying if they do not perceive there to be any social costs to their behavior. In adolescence, being reprimanded by teachers or adults may not be seen as a salient “cost” to the same extent as low peer status. Furthermore, more tailored intervention strategies may be needed for classrooms or schools with differing bullying norms.

Bullying and Status Goals

Another challenge to understanding the link between bullying and status is that adolescents vary in the extent to which they value popularity and peer acceptance. Although research on the impact of adolescents’ status goals on aggression and bullying originated a long time ago (e.g., Hawley, 1999 ; Pellegrini, 2002 ), the shift in focus to bullying as a strategic, goal‐directed behavior in the last decade corresponded with an increased interest in the underlying goals, motivations, and status cognitions of youth who bully.

The idea that bullying may be used strategically to gain status presumes that the individual engaging in bullying wants to gain status, which suggests that status goals should be a unique predictor of aggression. Cross‐sectional studies have found that status goals (e.g., popularity goals, agentic goals, social demonstration goals, and social dominance goals) are positively related to bullying (e.g., van den Broek, Deutz, Schoneveld, Burk, & Cillessen, 2016 ) and aggression more generally (e.g., Cillessen, Mayeux, Ha, de Bruyn, & LaFontana, 2014 ). In a sample of Canadian high schoolers, high popularity motivations in the beginning of the school year were associated with elevated levels of indirect/relational aggression at the end of the school year (Dumas, Davis, & Ellis, 2019 ). Moreover, adolescents high in bullying are more likely to find it more important to be popular than well‐liked (Garandeau & Lansu, 2019 ). Although status goals related to popularity or dominance may be one explanation for why adolescents bully, not all youth will be equally equipped to act on those goals. Several studies suggest that aggression and popularity are more likely to be longitudinally associated when youth have high motivation to be popular or socially dominant (e.g., Dawes & Xie, 2014 ). For example, in a sample of Finnish early adolescents, both physical and indirect/relational aggression only predicted elevated popularity over time when youth had higher agentic goals (Ojanen & Findley‐Van Nostrand, 2014 ). Still, not all studies have found a significant interaction between status and status goals in predicting aggression (e.g., Dumas et al., 2019 ).

In addition to individual characteristics, there are also contextual factors to consider that may impact the association between status goals and bullying. In a study of Chinese early adolescents, Pan et al. ( 2020 ) found that social dominance goals were only associated with increasing bullying perpetration across 1 year in classrooms where popularity was asymmetrically distributed (i.e., high status hierarchy). This further suggests that adolescents strategically use aggression: adolescents with high social dominance goals were more likely to bully in contexts where there are likely to be social benefits to bullying.

Victimization and Status

Insofar as bullying in adolescence is strategic, goal‐directed behavior, youth should also be strategic about who they target with aggression. In keeping with this perspective, research has traditionally conceptualized victims of aggression as low status, socially marginalized youth—in other words, “easy” targets. Through this lens, bullies would presumably not be taking a large risk of losing affection or facing retaliation (e.g., Veenstra, Lindenberg, Munniksma, & Dijkstra, 2010 ). However, even though targeting low‐status peers may be seen as “low risk”, it also may not be seen as “high reward”. From a strategic standpoint, there is more to potentially gain by strategically targeting a social competitor (i.e., instrumental targeting) than a peer who is already low in the social hierarchy (e.g., normative targeting) (e.g., Andrews, Hanish, & Santos, 2017 ; Faris, 2012 ).

Although many victims of bullying do have low status (e.g., de Bruyn et al., 2010 ), growing evidence has highlighted that youth with high status can also be victims of bullying and aggression (see Dawes & Malamut, 2020 for a review). This idea originated in the 1990s (e.g., see Adler & Adler, 1995 ; Merten, 1997 ; Prinstein & Cillessen, 2003 ), but research in the last decade has increasingly called attention to this phenomenon. For example, Sainio, Veenstra, Huitsing, and Salmivalli ( 2012 ) found that being seen as highly popular by other‐sex peers increased the likelihood of being bullied by other‐sex peers. High‐status victims were also found in a recent study using latent profile analysis to identify different subtypes of victimized youth (Malamut, Dawes, et al., 2021 ). Although there is evidence of popular youth being targeted with multiple forms of victimization (Dawes & Malamut, 2020 ), they are particularly likely to be targeted with indirect/relational forms of victimization (e.g., Badaly, Kelly, Schwartz, & Dabney‐Lieras, 2013 ; Closson, Hart, & Hogg, 2017 ; Dyches & Mayeux, 2012 ; Malamut, Dawes, & Xie, 2018 ; Malamut, Luo, & Schwartz, 2020 ).

Consistent with ideas of instrumental targeting, popular bullies are more likely to target high‐status peers (Malamut, van den Berg, Lansu, & Cillessen, 2020 ; Peets & Hodges, 2014 ), and targeting peers with higher status (e.g., social centrality) can lead to increased social network prestige for the aggressor (Andrews et al., 2017 ). Moreover, bistrategic youth who engage in both aggressive and prosocial behavior (Hawley, 2003 ) were more likely to target popular peers with social aggression (Wurster & Xie, 2014 ). There is also some indication that popular youth are likely to be victimized within the contexts of friendships (e.g., Closson & Watanabe, 2018 ); perhaps, because friends (and friends‐of‐friends) are likely direct social competitors (see Faris, Felmlee, & McMillan, 2020 ).

This growing body of research challenges long‐standing assumptions that high status is always a desirable characteristic associated with positive outcomes, as popular youth appear to be more at risk for negative outcomes than previously thought (e.g., Dawes & Malamut, 2020 ; Schwartz & Gorman, 2011 ), including psychosocial maladjustment (e.g., lower social satisfaction and social self‐concept, poorer best friendship quality: Ferguson & Ryan, 2019 ). High‐status victims were found to have larger increases in internalizing symptoms compared to low‐status victims, possibly because they have “more to lose” (Faris & Felmlee, 2014 ). Moreover, the overlap between high status and victimization may be one factor contributing to aggression in the peer group. Highly popular adolescents who reported high levels of indirect victimization were more indirectly aggressive 1 year later (Malamut, Luo, et al., 2020 ).

Thus, it is critical to understand the consequences of victimization amongst popular youth; however, there are some methodological challenges to identify high‐status victims. Other informants (e.g., peers, teachers) may not always recognize or report popular youth as being victimized, because these youth do not fit the idea of a typical victim (e.g., Bjereld, Daneback, & Mishna, 2021 ; Dawes, Norwalk, Chen, Hamm, & Farmer, 2019 ). Distinguishing between specific forms of victimization, examining curvilinear associations between status and victimization, and measuring victimization via dyadic nominations all may assist with identifying victims with high status (Dawes & Malamut, 2020 ). It is essential to account for the victimization experiences of popular adolescents to have a comprehensive understanding of victimization dynamics, and their experiences may also have important implications for intervention efforts. For example, there is already evidence that interventions are less effective for popular bullies (Garandeau, Poskiparta, et al., 2014 )—popular adolescents’ experiences with, or their perceptions of, being the target of aggression may partially explain the limited effectiveness of interventions on popular bullies.

CONSEQUENCES OF DEFENDING

Bullying is not solely a matter between bullies and victims—it often is a group process in which multiple peers are involved (Salmivalli, 2010 ). Some peers may assist the bully whereas others merely observe the situation. Prior work shows that peers are present in 80% of bullying episodes on average (e.g., Craig & Pepler, 1997 ; Jones et al., 2015 ), and even though most students disapprove of bullying (Pouwels, Lansu, & Cillessen, 2017 ), often only a minority of bystanders (10–25%) reaches out to help victims (Trach et al., 2010 ; Quirk & Campbell, 2015 ). The silence of passive bystanders can hurt even more than the bullying itself (Jones et al., 2015 ).

The observation that most peers remain passive in bullying situations has led various anti‐bullying programs to adopt the encouragement of peer defending as a central component in combatting bullying (Gaffney et al., 2021 ). Defending can be defined as a type of prosocial behavior that is shown in response to bullying situations. Studies have recently started to distinguish two main types of defending: direct, bully‐oriented defending (such as publicly confronting bullies) and indirect, victim‐oriented defending (comforting victims or asking help from adults; often occurring more privately; Lambe & Craig, 2020 ; Reijntjes et al., 2016 ; Yun & Juvonen, 2020 ).

Adolescents are assumed to undertake several sequential steps before they decide upon defending a victimized peer (bystander intervention model; Latané & Darley, 1968 ). These steps include: 1) noticing the event, 2) interpreting it as an emergency situation, that is, someone is suffering and in need of help, 3) feeling personally responsible for defending, 4) knowing how to defend, and 5) endorsing this defending behavior. Interventions tap into these steps in various ways. For instance, they might aim to raise empathy for victims (Garandeau et al., 2021 ), or increase individuals’ feelings of responsibility for defending (Peets, Pöyhönen, Juvonen, & Salmivalli, 2015 ). Moreover, regarding the fourth and fifth steps, the various—direct and indirect—ways in which individuals can defend are brainstormed and discussed with youth, and practiced in online environments or role‐play sessions (e.g., Salmivalli, 2014 ).

Theoretically, it can be argued that encouraging defending is beneficial for victims: psychological stress‐buffering theories posit that receiving help in stressful circumstances promotes adaptive appraisal and coping, which should buffer against psychosocial problems (Cohen & Wills, 1985 ). Moreover, social protection theory suggests that bullies are less likely to target children who are protected by peers, due to fear of retaliation (Hodges & Perry, 1999 ). Thus, peer defending should reduce bullying and promote victims’ psychosocial adjustment. Despite the theorized benefits of defending, researchers have started to ask whether—under some circumstances—defending can be risky for defenders or even for victims.

Is Defending Risky for Defenders?

It has been theorized that intervening in favor of victims could have detrimental social and psychological consequences for defenders (Meter & Card, 2015 ; Pozzoli & Gini, 2012 ). In terms of social consequences , it has been argued that defending can result in a loss of social status, or increase the risk of becoming a victim oneself. Bullies are powerful peers who often do not operate on their own. Preventing aggressors from reaching their goals (Pozzoli & Gini, 2012 ) and challenging the status and power of perpetrators (Salmivalli, Voeten, & Poskiparta, 2011 ) can be risky and result in retaliation—particularly if defending proves to be unsuccessful (retaliation hypothesis; Spadafora et al., 2018 ). In qualitative studies, one of the main reasons why adolescents are hesitant to defend a victimized peer is that they are afraid they will lose status or become the target of bullying themselves (Strindberg, Horton, & Thornberg, 2020 ). This fear is not wholly unfounded: some studies have suggested that defending can result in a decrease in social preference (Meter & Card, 2015 ; Pozzoli & Gini, 2012 ). A social network study on an elementary school sample also indicated that defenders ran the risk of becoming victimized by the bullies of the peers that they defended (Huitsing, Snijders, Van Duijn, & Veenstra, 2014 ). It is likely that this risk of defending is particularly present during adolescence. First, compared to childhood, adolescent bullies are more powerful and have higher status (Dawes & Xie, 2014 )—which makes it riskier to stand up against them. Moreover, if defending is encouraged by adults in interventions, defending may be seen as less genuinely driven by a feeling of moral injustice (Healy, 2020 ) and rather “soft”, teacher‐obedient behavior, and hence may be sanctioned with lower status among peers.

Besides these social consequences, defending may have psychological costs , perhaps because defenders actively intervene in bullying—a stressful and potentially traumatic situation (Lambe et al., 2017 ). Prior work on other stressful experiences, such as interparental conflict, has shown that youth who actively intervened experienced more internalizing and externalizing problems than youth who just passively observed it (Jouriles et al., 2014 ). Similarly, youth who actively try to stop a bullying episode could suffer more from psychosocial consequences than youth who just observe passively. Moreover, often, defenders are higher on affective empathy, which could also make them more susceptible to feel along with how victims feel (Olivia et al., 2014 ). Accordingly, several studies detected a positive concurrent association between defending and psychosomatic and internalizing problems among defenders (e.g., Callaghan et al., 2019 ; Jenkins & Fredrick, 2017 ; Lambe et al., 2017 ; Malamut, Trach, Garandeau, & Salmivalli, 2021 ). These studies point to potential adverse consequences of defending which poses a dilemma: should peer defending be encouraged if it is risky for defenders themselves?

In response to this emerging debate, an increasing number of studies started examining whether defending indeed is risky for defenders longitudinally , as there were also reasons to assume that defending could work out positively for them on the longer term. Specifically, defending could enhance someone’s popularity, because defenders show that they are powerful and brave enough to take a stance against bullying, which may foster respect and admiration among other peers (Reijntjes et al., 2016 ). Defending may also increase social preference among peers because they undertake prosocial actions that are helpful for others (Pronk et al., 2020 ). Indeed, qualitative work indicated that students believe defending may also result in higher social status (social preference and popularity) over time (Spadafora et al., 2018 ). Further, being able to help somebody in times of harassment may improve defenders’ self‐views and well‐being.

Most longitudinal work indicates that defending can promote social status. Two studies found that defending positively predicted social preference, but not popularity (Pronk et al., 2020 ; Pozzoli & Gini, 2021 ). Another study showed that defending predicted popularity 1 year later (Van der Ploeg, Kretschmer, Salmivalli, & Veenstra, 2017 ). An experimental study found that adolescents regarded defenders as most favorable compared to bullies, bystanders, or victims: actual and hypothetical defenders received more “liking” nominations; and in a computerized reaction task, defenders were evaluated more positively implicitly (Pouwels et al., 2017 ). Regarding psychological consequences, a longitudinal investigation (Malamut, Trach, et al., 2021 ) found that, in general, defending was unpredictive of future internalizing problems. Importantly, initial victimization status of defenders appeared to play a role in the extent to which defending related to internalizing symptoms: defending was associated with elevated depressive symptoms for low‐status, highly victimized youth, whereas defending related to lower levels of depressive symptoms for high‐status youth. Two intervention studies found that high school female students who were trained in a brief, bystander bullying intervention reported a greater decrease in internalizing symptoms over a 3‐month time span compared to female students in a control group (Dumas et al., 2019 ; Midgett & Doumas, 2019 ). However, these studies did not assess whether this decrease in internalizing symptoms could be explained by an increase in actual defending behavior as a result of this intervention.

To conclude, the preliminary longitudinal evidence suggests that defending is generally not a risky behavior for defenders, which means that most youth presumably can defend safely. However, more research is needed to further understand whether all youth can defend safely under all circumstances. For instance, victimized youth were more likely to develop internalizing symptoms when defending others (Malamut, Trach, et al., 2021 ), thus for some youth, defending may pose an additional risk. Moreover, classroom norms may affect the extent to which defenders are regarded favorably by their peers or not (Pouwels, van Noorden, & Caravita, 2019 ). Consequently, more research is needed to identify moderators of the effects of defending on adjustment and determine why and when defending may be risky for defenders. Even though qualitative studies indicate that some students fear the negative social consequences of defending, an important area for research is to which extent defenders actually care about a potential drop in status—students vary in the extent to which they strive for popularity or being liked (Dawes & Xie, 2017 ), and may predominantly defend because they feel empathy for the victim or because they consider bullying as morally wrong (Pouwels et al., 2019 ).

Is Defending Risky for Victims?

Theoretically, it seems plausible that being defended would be beneficial for victims. Bullies are less likely to target youth who are protected by other peers presumably for fear of retaliation (Hodges & Perry, 1999 ) and defending may signal to victims that others care about them and do not condone the bullying, which may be comforting for victims and help them cope with their plight (McDougall & Vaillancourt, 2015 ; Scardera et al., 2020 ). Thus, being defended by peers should logically reduce bullying and promote victims’ psychosocial adjustment over time.

Despite these clear theoretical arguments, empirical findings on the role of being defended in diminishing bullying and improving victims’ psychosocial functioning vary considerably across prior studies, and most studies have been conducted on elementary school samples—leaving it unknown whether defending can be helpful in adolescence. With regard to decreases in bullying, one longitudinal study found higher classroom levels of defending to relate to lower levels of bullying perpetration (Saarento, Garandeau, & Salmivalli, 2015 ; Saarento, Boulton, & Salmivalli, 2015 . However, not every defending attempt effectively ends bullying episodes: a naturalistic observation study showed that this was true in about two‐third of the cases (Hawkins, Pepler, & Craig, 2001 ). Moreover, an intervention study on children and preadolescents found victims without a support group to report decreased victimization at the end of the school year, whereas victims with a support group did not report such a change. A support group was a teacher‐assigned group of six to eight students, including bullies and their assistants, defenders or friends of the victim, and prosocial classmates, designed to create mutual concern for the well‐being of victims and to encourage bullies to alter their behavior. Strikingly, a third of victims with a support group even reported that their victimization levels had increased—despite having more defenders (van der Ploeg et al., 2016 ). A longitudinal study indicated that defended and non‐defended victims (at the start of the school year) had comparable levels of victimization at the end of the school year ( Laninga‐Wijnen, van den Berg, Garandeau, Mulder, & de Castro, in press ).

Studies examining the role of being defended on victims’ psychological functioning also report mixed findings. Two cross‐sectional studies on (pre‐)adolescents demonstrated that defended victims had lower anxiety and depression (Ma et al., 2019 ; Sainio, Veenstra, Huitsing, & Salmivalli, 2011 ) and higher self‐esteem (Sainio et al., 2011 ) than non‐defended victims. Another study, however, detected no effect of being defended in victims’ distress (Jones et al., 2015 ) —even though this study also indicated that victims were particularly hurt if bystanders did nothing to intervene. Longitudinal work on the role of being defended in victims’ adjustment is scarce. Three longitudinal studies have examined the moderating effect of a related construct, namely, friendship support—such as having friends one can trust and rely on—in the association between victimization and future psychological adjustment. One study did not detect any significant role of friendship support in changes in victims’ psychological functioning (Burke, Sticca, & Perren, 2017 ). Results from the two other longitudinal studies were counter‐intuitive; receiving emotional support from friends increased victims’ depressive symptoms (Desjardins & Leadbeater, 2011 ) and enhanced maladaptive coping and distress among victimized girls (but not among victimized boys; Thompson & Leadbeater, 2013 ). To our knowledge, the impact of being defended on victims’ adjustment has been examined longitudinally only in one study. This study demonstrated that defended victims were higher on their feelings of connectedness to the classroom, but did not differ from non‐defended victims in terms of depressive symptoms or self‐esteem at the end of the school year ( Laninga‐Wijnen et al., in press ). Lastly, a recent meta‐analysis indicated that interventions that included informal peer involvement (such as group discussions) and encouragement of defending were effective in reducing victimization; however, interventions that did not include encouragement of peer defending were more effective than interventions that did include it (Gaffney et al., 2021 ).

These findings may indicate that tackling bullying by encouraging defending can be difficult, and that the benefits of defending for victims may be more limited than once assumed. As with every intervention, defending may go together with both positive and negative consequences. A recent commentary (Healy, 2020 ) theorizes that defended victims may be even worse off than non‐defended victims because defending could disempower victims by making them dependent on their helpers and encouraging the belief that they cannot solve problems themselves. Defending could also provoke additional bullying attempts if this defending is enacted in inappropriate or aggressive ways—this could elicit retaliation of bullies, or stigmatize victims by making them stand out from other peers as the ones needing special treatment in contrast to those who can stand up for themselves.

Even though the literature does not provide strong evidence for the statement that defending would work out adversely, it is clear that more research is needed to inform interventions on how to increase the effectiveness of defending attempts. This requires knowledge on the factors that may explain why defending can work out adversely versus beneficially (i.e., mediators), as well as on victim‐, defender‐, and contextual characteristics that may either exacerbate or mitigate the effectiveness of defending attempts (i.e., moderators).

Underlying reasons on why being defended either helps or hurts victims may be both internal and external to the victim. One internal reason for adverse effects of defending could be that being defended promotes maladaptive cognitions in victims about the solution for the bullying issue. For instance, defending may undermine victims’ feeling of autonomy; it can enhance victims’ beliefs that they are powerless to stand up against bullies themselves and that they need others to make the bullying stop (i.e., learned helplessness; Healy, 2020 ). Moreover, indirect forms of defending such as providing comfort or listening to the victims’ story may stimulate co‐rumination processes in which victims dwell on negative affect and repeatedly think about their negative experiences together with their defenders (Schacter & Juvonen, 2020 ). These maladaptive cognitions and rumination processes put victims at risk for further psychological maladjustment. On the other hand, an internal reason explaining why defending promotes victims’ adjustment is because defending promotes adaptive appraisal and adequate coping styles within victims, which, in turn, helps them to restore their self‐esteem or diminishes symptoms of depression (Cohen & Will, 1985 ).

External reasons why defending may work out adversely is that it can set victims even more apart from others: these victims are not only considered as weak because they are victimized, but also because they apparently are the ones in need of help. Because of this deviation from others, classmates may start blaming victims for their plight or see these victims as “social misfits”, which may backfire in victims’ psychological functioning (Healy, 2020 ). An external reason for why defending may work out beneficially for victims is that it clearly signals that the bullying is not condoned by other peers, which could discourage bullies in their behaviors.

The extent to which these internal or external processes occur after being defended may depend on the type of defending that is enacted, as well as on victim‐, defender‐, and contextual characteristics. For instance, regarding the type of defending , victims were found to have better psychosocial adjustment in classrooms where it was more common to defend victims in direct ways (i.e., by confronting the bully; Yun & Juvonen, 2020 ). It could be that these direct ways of defending signal to the victim that others blame the bully for the situation, which could diminish victims’ self‐blame (Yun & Juvonen, 2020 ). Furthermore, regarding victim characteristics , gender may play a role: victimized girls who received support from their victimized friends were found to have more internalizing problems compared to victimized boys who received support from their victimized friends (Schacter & Juvonen, 2020 ). It could be that girls tend to discuss emotions frequently, which may result in co‐rumination processes. Regarding defender characteristics , defending may be more effective if defenders possess sufficient popularity to deflect the bully’s dominance. Accordingly, a former study in classrooms where defending is endorsed by popular peers rather than by unpopular peers, all students—including victims—have higher well‐being at school and regard the classroom as more positive (Laninga‐Wijnen et al., 2021 ). At last, contextual factors such as the context of the bullying may play into how helpful defending is viewed to be by the victim. For instance, victims’ perceptions of the effectiveness of defending may depend upon whether there is an audience to the bully, or on the severity of the bullying. Broader classroom factors, such as how teachers react to bullying or classroom norms, may also play a role, because they determine the value of defending behaviors among youth. If teachers are strongly disapproving of the bullying and if classmates consistently consider bullying as an inappropriate behavior (an anti‐bullying norm), defenders may be more likely to be regarded favorably by their classmates and bullies may be more likely to comply to their anti‐bullying messages.

To conclude, more research is needed to understand which factors play a role in the effectiveness of defending in diminishing victimization and promoting victims’ adjustment. Teaching students to defend other peers is of vital importance: victims should not be left alone in their plight and previous studies have shown that having passive bystanders hurts victims even more than the bullying itself (Jones et al., 2015 ). Moreover, standing up for others in general (i.e., when somebody is being discriminated or threatened) is a general citizen skill which should be transferred to youth. Defending does not only have the potential to benefit victims, but also defenders , particularly in adolescence: a growing body of research indicates that adolescents are driven by a strong desire to contribute to society and to others’ well‐being, and that they reap emotional benefits from helping others (see Fuligni, 2019 for review). Thus, it is essential to gain more insights in the factors that contribute to the effectiveness of defending for victims, not only for victims themselves, but also for their defenders.

THE HEALTHY CONTEXT PARADOX

The past 20 years have seen increased recognition of the importance of the social environment in bullying and significant advances in the identification of contextual factors that promote bullying behavior (e.g., Saarento, Boulton, et al., 2015 ; Saarento, Garandeau, et al., 2015 ). This has led prevention efforts to increasingly focus on improving the classroom or school context as a whole. In the past decade, however, new findings have emerged to suggest that desirable or sought‐after features of the social context, such as low levels of victimization, could in fact have adverse effects on the adjustment of victimized youth (Garandeau & Salmivalli, 2019 ). The idea that “healthier” (i.e., more prosocial or less aggressive) classrooms may paradoxically increase maladjustment risks for vulnerable students was suggested in earlier research (e.g., Bellmore, Witkow, Graham, & Juvonen, 2004 ; Sentse, Scholte, Salmivalli, & Voeten, 2007 ), but the last 10 years have witnessed a renewed interest in this issue and a growing number of studies from different countries on a phenomenon that has come to be known as the healthy context paradox (Salmivalli, 2018 ; Huitsing et al., 2019 ).

Victimized adolescents have been found to have lower self‐esteem (Huitsing, Veenstra, Sainio, & Salmivalli, 2012 ) and higher levels of depressive symptoms (Yun & Juvonen, 2020 ), somatic complaints (Gini, Holt, Pozzoli, & Marino, 2020 ), and externalizing problems (Liu et al., 2021 ), in classrooms with lower levels of victimization. Verbally victimized fifth graders were also found to have more negative self‐views in low‐aggression than in high‐aggression classrooms (Morrow, Hubbard, & Sharp, 2019 ). These concurrent findings have been further supported by longitudinal research internationally. In a Finnish sample, youth who remained victimized across 1 year felt more depressed, more socially anxious, and were less liked at the end of the year in classrooms where the proportion of victims had decreased compared to stable victims in other classrooms (Garandeau, Lee, & Salmivalli, 2018 ). In a Chinese sample, victimized students had higher depression, lower self‐concept, and fewer opportunities for friends after 1 year in classrooms where victimization was less prevalent (Pan et al., 2021 ). Moreover, in an ethnically diverse sample of American adolescents, victimized youth showed stronger increases in characterological self‐blame (i.e., beliefs that they deserve their plight) one semester later in schools with lower levels of victimization (Schacter & Juvonen, 2015 ).

Empirical support for the healthy context paradox is not limited to evidence of a moderating effect of the average level of victimization in the classroom or school. Mean classroom levels of defending behavior were also found to be associated with victims’ maladjustment in adolescence. Research has shown that highly victimized youth had lower feelings of belonging and perceived less cooperation and cohesion in classrooms where defending was more common (Laninga‐Wijnen, Van den Berg, Mainhard, & Cillessen, 2021 ). Moreover, victimized youth may be worse off in schools implementing anti‐bullying interventions. In a study by Huitsing et al. ( 2019 ), chronic victims, as well as newly victimized students, had lower self‐esteem and higher depressive symptoms after 1 year in schools implementing an effective anti‐bullying program than their counterparts in control schools. It should be noted, however, that the intervention helped decrease bullying and was, therefore, beneficial for most students who were victimized at baseline.

These findings are obviously concerning, as they bring to light possible iatrogenic effects of successful anti‐bullying interventions for those who remain or become victimized despite the intervention. It is urgent to understand why improved social contexts may exacerbate the psychological and social difficulties that victims of bullying experience. So far, only one study has tested potential mechanisms accounting for the adverse effects of low‐victimization classrooms on the development of internalizing problems in victimized students (Pan et al., 2021 ). First, they demonstrated that such classrooms exacerbated victims’ depressive symptoms by reducing their opportunities for friendships. Indeed, victims tend to affiliate with other victims (Huitsing et al., 2014 ) and their non‐victimized peers are often reluctant to form friendships with them (Sentse, Dijkstra, Salmivalli, & Cillessen, 2013 ; Sijtsema, Rambaran, & Ojanen, 2013 ). Moreover, individuals who are dissimilar from the rest of the group—“social misfits” —are more likely to be rejected by their peers (Sentse et al., 2007 ; Wright et al., 1986 ). For these reasons, being in a social environment with fewer victims likely makes victimized students more socially isolated, with fewer friends, which, in turn, increases their depressive symptoms (Pedersen, Vitaro, Barker, & Borge, 2007 ). Second, the effect of lower levels of classroom victimization on future depressive symptoms was partly explained by its negative effect on victimized students’ self‐concept (Pan et al., 2021 ). When few peers in the classroom are subjected to bullying, youth who are bullied should be more apt to engage in upward social comparisons (Wills, 1981 ), which can be damaging to their self‐regard (Tesser, Millar, & Moore, 1988 ). Another likely mechanism for these effects is the increase in characterological self‐blame that contexts of lower victimization have been shown to promote (Schacter & Juvonen, 2015 ), since self‐blame tends to play an important role in depressive disorder (e.g., Zahn et al., 2015 ). With regard to the moderating effect of classroom victimization level on the link between victimization and externalizing problems, one cross‐sectional study has suggested that increased hostile attribution bias was at play (Liu et al., 2021 ). In classrooms with lower levels of victimization, frequent victims of bullying were more likely to attribute hostile intent to peers, which was associated with higher levels of externalizing problems.

A growing body of studies conducted with a diversity of samples is providing support for a healthy context paradox. However, it is important to keep in mind that these findings are not unanimous; for instance, one study with middle schoolers found that friendless victims felt less anxious, lonely, and unsafe after 1 year in schools with stronger peer prosocial norms (Schacter & Juvonen, 2018 ). Also, many of the above‐mentioned studies were conducted with pre‐ or early adolescents, and therefore it remains uncertain whether the healthy context paradox is still occurring later in adolescence. More longitudinal studies using samples from older age groups and examining different types of healthy contexts are needed for a better understanding of the phenomenon.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Bullying prevention programs have desirable effects, as compared with treatment as usual. However, the effects are modest, and they seem to be especially weak in adolescence. Furthermore, research carried out in the past decade has shown that some of the solutions proposed may rest on shaky assumptions—especially when targeted at adolescent populations—or involve components that pose new challenges, such as potential iatrogenic effects for some youth in some circumstances.

Several explanations have been proposed for why adolescents are less responsive to prevention and intervention efforts than younger children. However, few studies have directly tested whether factors such as strong status needs (Sijtsema, Veenstra, Lindenberg, & Salmivalli, 2009 ), or psychological reactance (Yeager et al., 2015 ) undermine the effects of school‐based prevention programs in adolescence. Even evidence regarding the much‐discussed effect of school transition on bullying is mixed (Farmer et al., 2011 ; Pellegrini, 2002 ; Pellegrini et al., 2010 ), and there are no studies investigating whether transition affects the success of interventions.

Analyses on effective components of anti‐bullying programs emerged 10 years ago and so far, they have not been done separately among younger versus older youth. Decisions regarding relevant components to include should be considered through a developmental lens. We acknowledge, however, that, for instance, autonomy supportive intervention components were not taken into account in meta‐analyses aiming to identify effective ingredients of programs, simply because there were not enough of them.

Due to the importance of peers, as well as the difficulty of accepting adult injunctions in adolescence, mobilizing peers in prevention work seems like a fruitful approach. But even then, it is necessary to first get the influential peers on board. In addition, it is critical to increase our knowledge about the kind of peer involvement that is most beneficial in interventions (see Gaffney et al., 2021 ). For instance, the consequences of defending for both defenders and victims need to be better understood. Even though there are strong reasons to assume that refraining from defending is hurtful for victims (Jones et al., 2015 ), more insight is needed in the relative effectiveness of different types of defending and the moderators of their effects (which victim‐, defender‐, and contextual factors may mitigate or even turn around the beneficial effects of peer defending for victimized youth).

There is some indication that popular youth might not respond to existing interventions by decreasing their bullying behavior. A recently developed Meaningful Roles intervention attempts to utilize adolescents’ need for status by providing prosocial, constructive roles for youth to gain status, rather than trying to stop them from doing something (bullying) that is rewarded with status. It is not clear, however, whether alternate ways to gain status would make youth refrain from aggression; in contrast, they may end up using both prosocial and aggressive strategies to maximize their status (Hawley, 2003 ; Laninga‐Wijnen et al., 2020 ). Overall, the longitudinal associations among high status, status goals, bullying behavior, and victimization are not as clear as one might think they are; this is an area in need of further inquiry.

Besides age, other moderators of the effects of anti‐bullying programs have been identified, such as students’ temperament, or their popularity among peers. These findings raise new challenges, especially the question of whether (and to what extent) tailoring interventions is realistic. Universal interventions can be adapted to better fit the classroom, school, and broader context, but even such adaptations should be informed by evidence. Tailoring targeted interventions for different individuals and situations is even more complex, and would need some kind of a decision model for adults. Kaufman et al. ( 2021 ) recently provided a preliminary process model for this; however, in their model the actual “tailoring” (deciding what should be done in a particular case) is still up to individual teachers. Future research will hopefully inform evidence‐based recommendations regarding intervention approaches that are most likely to be effective among specific subgroups of youth (such as popular bullies) or across different classrooms.

We argue that extensive focus on the average program effects no longer moves the field forward, even when based on stringent RCTs. We hope to see an increase in adolescence‐specific interventions models and studies investigating the moderators and mediators of their effects. The outcomes of program effects could be widened to look at different forms of bullying and victimization, including bullying in online contexts (see Salmivalli et al., 2011 ; Williford et al., 2013 ) and identity‐based bullying (Earnshaw et al., 2018 ). Very little is known about individual‐ and group‐level moderators of intervention effects in decreasing bullying and victimization, especially in adolescence. Also, despite the attention to the importance of studying mediation in intervention trials (e.g., Bradshaw, 2015 ; Eisner & Malti, 2013 ), studies doing this are almost non‐existent (for an exception, see Saarento, Boulton, et al., 2015 ; Saarento, Garandeau, et al., 2015 ).

Besides intended effects, intervention trials should examine both positive and negative side effects of prevention programs, including mental health outcomes (e.g., Williford, Noland, Little, Kärnä, & Salmivalli, 2012 ). Specifically, we call for more longitudinal tests of the mechanisms explaining the adverse effects of “healthy contexts” on victims’ adjustment. Researchers should examine different types of “healthy” contexts, such as average levels of classroom defending, or implementation of a particular anti‐bullying intervention. Future studies should also seek to identify mitigating factors for the healthy context paradox. In other words, are there individual or contextual characteristics that can make victims less susceptible to the adverse influence of healthier contexts? The strong practical implications of the healthy context paradox make this research particularly important. School professionals should not be discouraged from aiming for less aggressive and more prosocial classroom climates; however, a higher awareness and better understanding of these effects should make it easier to counteract them and better protect students who remain victimized.

It should be noted that preventing adolescent bullying and victimization does not only need to happen in adolescence; quite the contrary, it may be critical to start much earlier. If programs implemented at a younger age (e.g., elementary school) had long‐term effects, their implementation would be another way to reduce bullying and victimization in adolescence. Whether this is the case is not established, as most program evaluations to date are short‐term trials. However, there are reasons to believe that intervention work started early on lays the foundation for successful anti‐bullying work in adolescence.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing of the current review was supported by the Academy of Finland Flagship Program (decision number: 320162), ERC Advanced Grant for the first author (ERC AdG 2019 Challenge, 884434), and in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number F32HD100054 for the third author. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding organizations.

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• 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

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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.

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Acknowledgements

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

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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.

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Additional file 1..

Principal factor analysis description.

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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

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Understanding alternative bullying perspectives through research engagement with young people.

• 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.

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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.

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.

(c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Publication types

• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
• Adolescent Behavior / psychology
• Child Behavior / psychology
• Crime Victims / psychology*
• Students / psychology*

Bullying Research Paper

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Introduction

Bullying defined.

• National Variation
• The Importance of Age

Stability of Bullying Roles

• Gender Differences

The Bully-Victim

The peer group, parenting and home environment, sibling relationships, school factors, internalizing problems, academic performance, delinquency and criminality, impact beyond victims.

• Interventions

Future Directions and Conclusion

• Bibliography

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• Bullying Prevention Research Paper
• Bullying and Crime Research Paper
• Bullying in School Research Paper

Bullying has received worldwide attention in the last 30 years as a form of aggressive behavior that can have a significant negative impact on the physical, emotional, and academic development of victims. The first major contribution to the academic study of bullying was made by Dan Olweus, who wrote the first scholarly book in English to deal with bullying. The book was written in response to the suicide of three bullied boys in Norway and reported a high prevalence of school bullying (20 % of Norwegian children reported having some involvement) as well as discussed the success of the world’s first bullying prevention program (Olweus 1993). Olweus’ work opened the way for an explosion of research on bullying, which expanded from an initial interest in schools to include broader contexts such as the workplace, prisons, and sibling relationships. While much of this work is of interest, showing that bullying has the potential to affect a significant proportion of the population, this review focuses on school bullying, as this is the area that has attracted the most research interest to date.

The international literature is repleted with definitions of school bullying, most of which seem to accept that bullying is any type of negative action intended to cause distress or harm that is repeated and targeted against individuals who cannot defend themselves. When research on bullying started in the 1980s, bullying was perceived to comprise only episodes of physical or verbal aggression where the victim was physically attacked or called names. In recent years, the definition of bullying has broadened to include other forms of aggression that are relational in nature and aim to damage the victim’s peer relationships and their social status such as spreading of malicious gossip and social exclusion. Fighting between people of approximately equal strength, a one-time attack, or a good-natured teasing and play fighting are not counted as bullying.

The advent and widespread use of electronic means of communication such as mobile phones and the Internet has made it easier to bully anonymously, through the use of pseudonyms and temporary accounts, at any time and in any place involving a wide audience. This development has meant that the definition of bullying has had to be expanded to account for what the literature refers to as “cyber-bullying” or “electronic bullying.” A nationally representative survey of 7,508 adolescents in the United States in 2005 found that 8.3 % had bullied others and 9.8 % had been bullied electronically at least once in the last 2 months (Wang et al. 2009). In the same year in England and Wales, a survey of pupils aged 11–16 found that 22 % had been cyber-bullied at least once or twice in the last couple months (Smith et al. 2008). The most common form of cyber-bullying internationally is sending threatening and/or nasty text messages.

Bullying Prevalence and Continuity

National variation in bullying.

There are large variations across countries in the prevalence of bullying perpetration and victimization. In an international survey of health-related symptoms among school-aged children, the percentage of students who reported being frequently bullied during the current term ranged from a low of 5 % to 10 % in some countries to a high of 40 % in others (Due et al. 2005). The prevalence of bullies in primary school ranges, in most countries, between 7 % and 12 % and remains at those levels in secondary school (around 10 %). It is unclear whether these differences in prevalence reflect genuinely different levels of engagement in bullying among countries or, at least partly, result from different meanings of the term “bullying” in different countries and differences in methodologies and samples used.

An example of why valid comparisons between countries are not possible is Portugal where the bullying rate is high compared to other countries. Berger (2007) in her analysis found that one detail of educational policy in Portugal may account, among other things, for this higher rate of bullying. In Portuguese schools, children are asked to repeat sixth grade unless they pass a rigorous test. This practice results in at least 10 % of all sixth graders (more often boys) to be held back 2 years or more, and these older, bigger children are almost twice as likely to bully compared to the class average. This suggests that the difference in prevalence rates between countries may be, at least partly, accounted for by external factors including national differences in school policies and environments but also differences in the methodologies used (self-reports vs. peer and/or teacher reports), students’ differing levels of cognitive ability, cultural differences in reporting, and different meanings of the term “bullying” in different countries.

The Importance of Age in Bullying

Despite variations in prevalence, it is a universal finding that bullying victimization is more frequent among younger children and steadily declines with age. A range of explanations have been put forward to explain these age differences (Smith et al. 1999a, b). Compared to older children, younger children are less likely to have developed the appropriate skills and coping strategies to deal effectively with bullies and avert further victimization. Younger children are also less likely to refrain from bullying others due to socialization pressure. Finally, there is evidence that younger students adopt a more inclusive definition of bullying when responding to prevalence surveys, and this may, at least partly, account for the higher reported frequency of bullying victimization in primary school. For example, younger pupils might find it more difficult to distinguish between bullying and fighting, broadening the use of the term bullying to include aggressive behaviors that involve no imbalance of power. Within the general trend of decreasing bullying victimization over time, researchers have observed an abrupt increase in bullying during the transition from primary to secondary school which may reflect some students’ attempts to establish dominance hierarchies in the new school environment. Relational forms of bullying take precedence over physical modes of attack as children grow older and their social skills improve.

There is some controversy in the literature as to the stability of bullying victimization in primary school. Some studies have reported that bullying victimization is relatively stable over a period of up to 4 years in primary school and often continues in secondary school. Other studies have found that only a relatively small proportion of children (around 4–5 %) are victimized repeatedly over time in primary school.

In secondary school, the stability of both bully and victim roles is considerably higher than in primary school according to teacher, peer, and self-reports. It is estimated that two out of three male bullies remain in their role over a 1-year period. Despite the moderate to high stability of the victim and bully roles in secondary school, prevalence rates are lower than in primary school. This suggests that a small number of victims are targeted consistently and systematically in secondary school.

Stability in bullying victimization has been explained in two ways. Firstly, it has been observed that victims select social environments that reinforce the risk of victimization, for example, they are more likely to have friends who are less accepted by the peer group and often victimized themselves. Secondly, victims often lack the social skills to break through in new environments, and this increases the risk that they are labeled as victims and locked in that role over a long period of time. It is important, therefore, to acknowledge that although for some children bullying victimization will be situational, for others it will develop into a trait.

Gender Differences in Bullying

The view that males are more likely to bully and be bullied than females has been dismissed in recent years following a better understanding about the different forms aggressive behavior such as bullying can take. Although males are more likely to engage in physical forms of bullying such as pushing and hitting, females are, according to some studies, more adept at employing relational forms of aggression (e.g., social exclusion, spreading of nasty rumors) against their victims especially during adolescence. No consistent gender differences have been identified in the use of verbal bullying (e.g., calling names, nasty teasing). This suggests that overall gender differences are not as pronounced as originally thought and that bullying is not a male problem.

Characteristics of Children and Adolescents Involved in Bullying

There is some controversy in the literature about the profile of bullies. Initially, studies described children who bullied others as insecure, anxious individuals who have low self-esteem, are unpopular among their classmates, and use aggressive strategies to resolve conflicts. This stereotype was later disputed by research that suggested bullies are socially competent and have superior theory of mind skills (i.e., awareness of others’ mental functions and states) and good levels of social intelligence, knowing how to attain goals without damaging their reputation. Linked to this, there is also debate concerning whether bullies lack empathic skills. Some research suggests that bullies understand the emotions of others but do not share them. The inconsistencies across studies may be, at least partly, due to different definitions of bully status and different methodologies employed. Studies which have distinguished between “pure” bullies and bully/victims have revealed that “pure” bullies have few conduct problems, perform well at school, are popular among their classmates, and do not suffer from physical and psychosomatic health problems.

There is more consensus on the profile of “pure” victims. Research has identified that “pure” victims exhibit elevated levels of depression and anxiety, low self-esteem, and poor social skills. Hawker and Boulton’s (2000) meta-analysis found that peer victimization is more strongly concurrently associated with depression than with anxiety, loneliness, or self-esteem. Another meta-analysis by Card (2003) found that the strongest correlates of the victimization experience are low self-concept, low physical strength, low school enjoyment, poor social skills, and high internalizing and externalizing problems. It was unclear from these reviews of cross-sectional studies, however, whether internalizing problems lead to victimization or vice versa.

The recent body of longitudinal research on bullying and peer victimization more widely suggests that the relationship between internalizing problems such as depression, anxiety and loneliness, and victimization is more likely to be reciprocal, that is, internalizing problems contribute to victimization and vice versa. A metaanalysis of 18 longitudinal studies examining associations between peer victimization and internalizing problems in children and adolescents concluded that internalizing problems both precede and follow peer victimization experiences (Reijntjes et al. 2011). It is worth noting, however, that the path from psychological maladjustment to victimization has not been replicated in all studies. For instance, Bond et al. (2001) found no support for the hypothesis that emotional maladjustment invites victimization.

Recent work suggests that bullying might arise out of early cognitive deficits, including language problems, imperfect causal understanding, and poor inhibitory control that lead to decreased competence with peers, which over time develops into bullying. Research does not support the assertion that physical appearance (e.g., wearing glasses) is a risk factor for being bullied at school. The only physical characteristic that has been associated with an increased risk of victimization is low physical size and strength. There is less evidence on how equality characteristics influence victimization. There is no consistently robust evidence to suggest that ethnic minority children are more at risk of being bullied at school. Sexual orientation has rarely been investigated in longitudinal studies as a possible risk factor of bullying victimization, but there is some, mainly qualitative, evidence of sexual minorities being targeted in secondary schools. There is stronger evidence that children with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to victimization in mainstream settings, although it might be other characteristics of disabled children that make them more vulnerable to victimization such as lack of friends rather than the disability per se.

Olweus (1993) was the first researcher to identify a small proportion of victims of bullying that he called “provocative victims” or “bully-victims,” who bully other children as well as being bullied by them. Research has identified that bully-victims are the most troubled group among children and adolescents involved in bullying incidents. This group displays the highest levels of internalizing problems, including depression, anxiety, low selfesteem, and loneliness. At the same time, they score high on externalizing problems such as aggression, impulsivity, hyperactivity, and conduct problems. Other research has shown that bully-victims display higher levels of neuroticism and psychoticism than either bullies or victims. Bully-victims use aggressive strategies to cope with stressors at school that increase the risk of further victimization and rejection from peers.

Besides the traditional roles of bully, victim, and bully-victim, research has identified that all students take on a role when bullying episodes emerge. Salmivalli et al. (1996) distinguished between six different roles children can take in bullying situations: the bully (leader), the reinforcer (encourages and provides audience), the assistant (follower/helper, e.g., holds the child down), the defender (helps the victim and/or tells bullies to stop), the outsider (stays away from bullying situations), and the victim. Subsequent research established that the three roles of bully, reinforcer, and assistant are closely correlated with each other and, therefore, cannot usefully discriminate between children. In kindergarten, the three most commonly held roles are those of the bully, the victim, and the defender. Fewer students are defenders by middle school, and the majority becomes witnesses or bystanders when bullying takes place. Such passive behavior, although not directly encouraging of bullying, provides a permissive context for bullies that allows them to continue harassing their victims.

Environmental Influences on Bullying

There is clear evidence that parenting styles are related to bullying behavior. Studies indicate that bullies are more likely to have parents who are authoritarian and punitive, disagree more often, and are less supportive. The parents of bullies are more likely to have been bullies themselves when they were young. Victims, on the other hand, are more likely to have been reared in an overprotective family environment. Bully-victims tend to come from family backgrounds that are exposed to abuse and violence and favor the use of harsh, punitive, and restrictive discipline practices. This group reports little positive warmth in their families and more difficulties in communicating with parents.

Family characteristics are related to bullying victimization in different ways for boys and girls. Boys are more prone to victimization when the father is highly critical or absent in his relationship with his son, thus failing to provide a satisfactory role model. Victimization in boys is also associated with maternal overprotectiveness which may hinder boys’ search for autonomy and independence, whereas victimization in girls is more strongly related to maternal hostility which may lead to anxiety and decreased sense of connectedness in relationships.

Very little research has examined longitudinal associations between early home environment and subsequent bullying behavior. The few studies that exist suggest a link between low emotional support and subsequent bullying behavior at school. Parents who are disagreeable, hostile, cold, or rejecting tend to have children who are at risk of becoming aggressive in the future. In a small longitudinal study, Schwartz et al. (1997) found that bully-victims at 10 years were significantly more likely than the other groups to have had experiences with harsh, disorganized, and potentially abusive home environments 5 years earlier. Mother-child interactions at 5 years were characterized by hostile, restrictive, or overly punitive parenting. They were significantly exposed to higher levels of marital conflicts and more likely to come from marginally lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Bullies were found to be exposed to adult aggression and conflicts, but not victimization by adults, and were from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. These findings need to be replicated in larger samples before any safe conclusions can be drawn.

More recently, there has been interest in how sibling relationships affect the development of bullying behavior. There is international evidence that children who are victimized at school are more likely, compared to other groups, to be victimized by their siblings at home. Wolke and Samara (2004) found that more than half of victims of bullying by siblings (50.7 %) were also involved in bullying behavior at school compared to only 12.4 % of those not victimized by siblings, indicating a strong link between intrafamilial and extrafamilial peer relationships. Those who were both victimized at home and at school had the highest behavior problems and were the least prosocial. Similar evidence exists in relation to bullying perpetration, suggesting that those who bully at school tend to exhibit similar behaviors towards their siblings at home.

A number of school factors have also been implicated as correlates of bullying behavior. One of the most consistent findings in the international literature is that the number and quality of friends at school is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, protective factor against bullying victimization. Having friends is not sufficient in itself to protect against victimization. For instance, when at-risk children have friends with internalizing problems, who are physically weak or who themselves are victimized, the relation of children’s behavioral risk to victimization is exacerbated.

More recent work on the role of class structure and climate on bullying has shown that variations in peer structure and dominance hierarchies influence the stability of bullying victimization. For example, victims in primary school classes with a more pronounced hierarchical structure are less likely to escape their victim role compared to those in classes with less clearly marked hierarchies (Sch€afer et al. 2005).

Consequences of Bullying

There has been a growing interest in recent years to investigate the long-term effects of bullying involvement on children’s and adolescents’ social, emotional, behavioral, and academic development using longitudinal samples. The results of these studies suggest that victims and bully-victims manifest more adjustment problems than bullies. Victims and, especially, bully-victims are more likely to show elevated levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness; perform less well academically; and display conduct problems. The only negative long-term outcome that has consistently been reported in the literature for bullies is their involvement in later offending. There is also some initial evidence that bullying perpetration is a significant risk factor of poor academic performance.

Several cross-sectional studies have demonstrated negative associations between peer victimization and a range of internalizing problems, including loneliness and low self-esteem. A meta-analysis of 23 cross-sectional studies of the association between peer victimization and psychological maladjustment found that peer victimization was more strongly concurrently associated with depression than with anxiety, loneliness, or self-esteem (Hawker and Boulton 2000).

Over the last decade, research on bullying is increasingly reliant on longitudinal methodologies to disentangle whether victimization contributes to internalizing problems or vice versa. It has been argued, for example, that children who display internalizing behaviors (e.g., anxiety or shyness) are more at risk of being targeted by peers due to their inability to cope effectively with provocation. The majority of longitudinal studies investigating associations between peer victimization and psychological maladjustment have found evidence for both directions.

There is some longitudinal evidence that bullying involvement has a negative impact on academic performance, although more studies are needed to reach a definitive conclusion. A US longitudinal study that began in 2002 with a sample of about 1,700 adolescents found that being a bully had a stronger negative effect on self-perceived academic competence over time than being a victim after controlling for demographic background variables and baseline academic competence (Ma et al. 2009). Furthermore, only bully status predicted lower self-reported grades.

Despite showing fewer adjustment problems than victims and bully-victims, bullies are at an increased risk of later delinquency and criminal offending. A recent meta-analysis of studies measuring school bullying and later offending found that school bullies were 2.5 times more likely than noninvolved students to engage in offending over an 11-year follow-up period (Ttofi et al. 2011). The risk was lower when major childhood risk factors were controlled for, but remained statistically significant. The effect of bullying on later offending was especially pronounced when bullying was assessed in older children. The longitudinal association between bullying perpetration and later offending has been replicated in many countries, including Australia, Canada, and Europe.

Finally, there is evidence that bullying and victimization have a negative impact not only on the individual children involved but also on bystanders. Children who witness bullying incidents report increased anxiety, less satisfaction with school, and lower academic achievement. There is also evidence that in school classes where a lot of victimization is taking place, school satisfaction among students is low.

Bullying Interventions

Following the development of the first anti-bullying program by Dan Olweus in Norway in the 1980s, a considerable number of anti-bullying interventions have flourished around the world to reduce bullying behaviors and protect victims. These fall under four broad categories: curriculum interventions generally designed to promote an anti-bullying attitude within the classroom; whole-school programs that intervene on the school, class, and individual level and address bullying as a systemic problem; social and behavioral skills training; and peer support programs including befriending and peer mediation. A systematic review conducted in 2004 evaluated the strength of scientific evidence in support of anti-bullying programs (Vreeman and Carroll 2007). The review concluded that only a small number of anti-bullying programs have been evaluated rigorously enough to permit strong conclusions about their effectiveness.

Whole-school interventions were found to be more effective in reducing victimization and bullying than interventions that focused only on curriculum changes or social and behavioral skills training. Targeting the whole school involves actions to improve the supervision of the playground, having regular meetings between parents and teachers, setting clear guidelines for dealing with bullying, and using role-playing and other techniques to teach students about bullying. The success of whole-school interventions, relative to other stand-alone approaches, supports the view that bullying is a systemic, sociocultural phenomenon derived from factors operating at the individual, class, school, family, and community level. Hence, interventions that target only one level are unlikely to have a significant impact.

A more recent systematic review of school-based anti-bullying programs found that, overall, these programs are effective in reducing bullying perpetration and victimization by an average of 20–23 % and 17–20 %, respectively (Farrington and Ttofi 2009). The interventions that were found to be most effective were those that incorporated parent training/meetings, disciplinary methods, and videos; targeted older children; and were delivered intensively and for longer. There is less robust evidence on the effectiveness of peer support programs that include activities such as befriending, peer counseling, conflict resolution, or mediation, and a systematic review suggested their use may lead to increases in bullying victimization.

More recently, there has been a growing interest in the use of virtual learning environments to reduce bullying at schools. The basic feature of these programs is a computer-based environment that creates a highly believable learning experience for children who find themselves “present” in the situation that causes emotional distress and, as a result, learn experientially how to deal with school problems. An example of such a program is “FearNot,” an intervention that was developed to help victims of bullying explore the success or otherwise of different coping strategies to dealing with bullying victimization through interactions with “virtual” victims of school bullying. The evaluation of this intervention found that the victims that received the intervention were more likely to escape victimization in the short term than victims in control schools who did not interact with the software (Sapouna et al. 2010). These results suggest that the use of virtual environments might be an engaging and useful component of whole-school anti-bullying policies that merits further testing. A key finding that emerged from this research is that interventions are more likely to be successful if they have the support of teachers and other school personnel and there is a strong commitment to reduce bullying in the school community. This is considered to be one of the reasons behind the huge success of the Olweus’ prevention program that has not been replicated to date.

Although an abundance of knowledge has emerged in recent years regarding the correlates of bullying behavior, there is still relatively little known about the causal processes and mechanisms associated with the bully and victim status. Longitudinal studies, which track bullies and victims over time, offer one of the best chances of disentangling the antecedents of bullying perpetration and victimization from its consequences, and these should form a key part of future research in this field. Another approach which shows much promise is the cutting-edge attempt to unravel the causes of bullying behavior made by researchers investigating biological and environmental influences and the way these influences interact.

One of these studies, involving 1,116 families with 10-year-old twins, found that the tendency for children to be bullied was largely explained by genetics (73 % of variance) and less so by environmental factors that were unique to each child (Ball et al. 2008). Another study of 506 six-year-old twins found that variance in victimization was accounted for only by shared and non-shared environmental influences (29 % and 71 %, respectively) and was not related to the child’s genetic predisposition (Brendgen et al. 2008). These discrepancies might be explained by differences in methodologies used, as studies drew on different informants to assess bullying victimization (mothers and peers, respectively). Although results to date have been contradictory, future breakthroughs in this area have the potential to transform radically the study of bullying.

To understand more fully how bullying behaviors develop, future research will also need to investigate in more depth how individual and classroom level factors interact to cause involvement in bullying. It is not currently understood whether the relationship between risk factors and bullying is the same across different school and class environments or the extent to which consequences of bullying and victimization are dependent on class-and school-level factors.

Finally, another area that would benefit from more attention is the investigation of resilience to bullying. Some initial evidence suggests that maternal warmth has an environmental effect in protecting children from negative outcomes associated with victimization (Bowes et al. 2010). However, we still know relatively little about the factors that promote resilience to bullying and victimization among at-risk children, and also what role bullying has to play in increasing resilience. We also know little about the factors that help victims cope better with the effects of victimization.

To conclude, what the recent flurry of research activity has highlighted is how complex the bullying phenomenon is and that, although much has been learned to date, there is clearly a great need to understand how variables describing the family, school, class, and community environment interact with individual characteristics to determine who gets bullied and who bullies others. Research should neither be blind to nor discouraged by these complexities.

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• Farrington DP, Ttofi MM (2009) School-based programs to reduce bullying and victimization. Campbell Syst Rev 2009:6
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• Juvonen J, Graham S (2001) Peer harassment in school: the plight of the vulnerable and victimized. Guilford Press, New York
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154 Bullying Topics & Bullying Essay Examples

Looking for an exciting research topic about bullying? This problem is very controversial, sensitive, and definitely worth studying

🏆 Top 10 Bullying Topics for Research Papers

📃 bullying essay: writing tips, 🏆 best bullying topics to write about, ⚡ most shocking bullying topics to write about, ✅ simple & easy shocking bullying essay titles, ✍️ bullying essay topics for college, ❓ research questions about bullying.

Examples of bullying can be found everywhere: in schools, workplaces, and even on the Internet (in the form of cyberbullying).

In this article, we’ve collected top bullying research paper topics and questions, as well as bullying essay samples and writing tips. Get inspired with us!

• Direct and indirect bullying: compare & contrast
• The causes of bullying
• Classroom bullying and its effects
• Social isolation as a form of bullying
• Bullying and academic performance
• Passive and active victims of bullying: compare and contrast
• The role of social agencies in bullying prevention
• Public policy for bullying and aggression
• Bullying behavior and psychological health
• Aggressive children and their family background

A bullying essay is a popular assignment in various subjects, including psychology, sociology, and education. Writing an excellent paper on the matter requires more than just in-depth research and planning. Don’t worry; there are some tips that will make writing an essay on bullying much easier:

• Choose a topic that allows analyzing and interpreting the problem. Instead of merely describing what bullying is, try to dig deeper into its causes, consequences, and solutions. If your professor didn’t suggest any topics, you may research bullying essay topics online and select one that would be exciting for you to explore.
• Read sample articles and papers online to see how other students approached the subject. Notice the bits that work and don’t work, and write them out to make the process of creating your essay easier. If you’re struggling with finding enough examples online, you may want to expand your search to discrimination essay topics and materials.
• Research what scholars say about bullying. Articles in scholarly journals are an excellent source of information because they are usually trustworthy. If you’re still in school, your ability to navigate the library or online databases will also impress your tutor. As you start researching, you will find that there is a great variety of studies, and it’s challenging to find the relevant ones. Narrowing down your search would help you to do that. For instance, if you are writing a cyber bullying essay, try searching for social media bullying or online anti-bullying services.
• Include real-life experiences where relevant. Unfortunately, bullying is a common problem in many institutions, and if you haven’t experienced it, your friends or family members probably have. If your tutor allows personal input, explore real-life experiences with bullying. Note the effects, preventive measures that worked or didn’t work, and what a person used to cope with bullying. If personal input is not allowed, you could ask your friends or relatives for ideas and then find high-quality sources that discuss similar problems.
• If you can, be creative about it! A powerful bullying essay example draws from a variety of sources to present material in a creative way and engage readers. Hence, this might be an excellent opportunity for you to include images or graphs in your paper. For example, anti-bullying posters could complement the sections of your work that talks about solutions to the problem. Quotes about bullying coming from famous persons would also be influential, especially if you include them at the beginning of your piece. If you like drawing or painting, you could try to put some of your ideas in graphic form – this will definitely earn you some extra marks! Just make sure to check with your tutor to see whether or not creative input is allowed.
• Structure your paper well to avoid gaps or inconsistencies. It would be beneficial to create a detailed bullying essay outline before you start working. A typical essay should include an introduction, two to three main paragraphs, and a conclusion. The first paragraph of your work should consist of some background information, whereas the last one should restate the points and close up the paper. A good bullying essay introduction should also feature a thesis statement that shows what the piece is about.

These tips will help you to write top-notch essays on bullying, as well as on related subjects. Don’t forget to browse our blog some more to find other helpful materials, including essay titles!

• The Problem of Bullying and Possible Solutions In general, bullying is a critical and complex issue prevailing among children; thus, it is essential to adopt different solutions to tackle it.
• Cyber Bullying Issue Therefore, the goal of this paper is to analyse who the victims of cyber bullying are and the influence it has on them.
• Bullying and Child Development Bullying is one of the common vices in schools that influences a lot of growth and development of children. Bullying also affects the ability of children to concentrate in school because they are always on […]
• Bullying and Its Effects in Society Secondary research is critical in the development of a background to the research, which helps in determining the validity of the problem and suggested research methodologies.
• Social Influence on Bullying in Schools The theory helps us to understand why the stronger members of the school population are likely to “rule” over the weaker members of the school as described in the social hierarchy concept in the theory.
• School Bullying and Moral Development The middle childhood is marked by the development of basic literacy skills and understanding of other people’s behavior that would be crucial in creating effective later social cognitions. Therefore, addressing bullying in schools requires strategies […]
• Verbal Bullying at School: How It Should Be Stopped This paper highlights some of the best practices that can be used by teachers in order to address this problem. So, this information can be of great benefit to them.
• The Impact of Workplace Bullying The negative impacts of bullying in the workplace develop as a result of ignorance among employees regarding the vice, unreported cases, as well as the negligence of organizational leaders.
• Cyber Bullying and Positivist Theory of Crime Learning theory approaches to the explanation of criminal behavior have been associated with one of the major sociological theories of crime, the differential association theory.
• Is Cyber Bullying Against Teenagers More Detrimental Than Face-To-Face Bullying? Social networking has also contributed greatly to the issue of cyber bullying especially in making it more harmful as compared to face-to-face bullying.
• School Bullying: Causes and Police Prevention It is for this reason that there has been need for the intervention of the community and the government to address the issue of bullying schools lest the school environment becomes the worst place to […]
• Bullying on Social Media Platforms It is consistent and repeating, taking advantage of the Internet’s anonymity with the main goal to anger, scare, or shame a victim.
• Nature of Bullying In this paper, central focus is going to be on the nature of bullying of children in my hometown, Orlando Florida, how it can be solved, and most importantly; establishing the importance of having knowledge […]
• Cyber-Bullying Is a Crime: Discussion It is easy to see the effects of cyber-bullying but it is hard to find out who is the bully making it hard for authorities to pin the blame on the perpetrator of a crime […]
• Cyber Bullying Prevention in Learning Institutions: Systematic Approach To start with, the students are provided with ways of reporting their concern to the educational institution, and when the staff members of the institution receive the report, they evaluate the information together with the […]
• School Bullying: Methods for Managing the Problem The investigation of relevant studies on the methods for stopping school bullying reveals that the most effective ways of eliminating this type of behavior include providing training for teachers, encouraging students to participate in the […]
• The Issue of Bullying in the Schools It gives me joy to know that the issue of bullying is now a pubic affair since bullying stories were unheard of when I was growing up.
• Problem of Childhood Bullying in Modern Society To begin with, the family which is the basic and the most important unit in the society as well as the primary socializing agent plays a major role in shaping behavior of children include bullying.
• Social Psychological Concepts of Bullying and Its Types Some of the factors that contribute to bullying include poor parenting, economic challenges, lack of mentorship, and jealousy among others. One of the main concepts used to explain bullying is that of parenting roles and […]
• Behaviour Management: Bullying The typical behaviors which I saw in the child who got bullied are: The victim of this bullying is physically weak and a soft-natured one.
• Moral Development and Bullying in Children The understanding of moral development following the theories of Kohlberg and Gilligan can provide useful solutions to eliminating bullying in American schools.
• Bullying Through Social Media: Research Proposal The hypothesis of the study is as follows: the role of adolescents in a cyberbullying situation is interconnected with their psychological characteristics.
• Workplace Bullying and Its Impact on Performance Workplace bullying refers to a deliberate, repeated, and continuous mistreatment of a worker or a group of workers by one or more colleagues in the workplace.
• The Effects of Cyber-Bullying and Cyber-Stalking on the Society In particular, one should focus on such issues as the disrespect for a person’s autonomy, the growing intensity of domestic violence and deteriorating mental health in the country.
• The ABC Model of Crisis: Bullying at School The next step is the identification of the nature of the crisis, and thus questions are as follows: Who is bullying you?
• Fights and Bullying Among Middle School Learners Alongside the positivist philosophy, the research adopted the survey strategy that involved the use of self-administered questionnaires to collect from the participants.
• Bullying as a Relational Aggression This resistance has been one of the obstacles to eliminating the cyber bullying in the schools. Schools and districts have been involved in the Challenge Day activities where children are advised on how to handle […]
• Cyber Bullying as a Virtual Menace The use of information and communication technologies to support a deliberate and most of the time repeated hostile behavior by an individual or groups of people with the sole intention of harming others, one is […]
• Bullying in School Face-to-face bullying is an interesting area of study because it clearly demonstrates bullying in school. Students consider bullying as a school culture even though it is contrary to the school rules and regulations of schools.
• The Essence of Bullying: Healthy Societal Relations The aggressor frequently abuses the victim’s lower social standing to gain control of the situation and cause harm, which is another characteristic of the phenomenon.
• Bullying: Violence in Children and Adolescents Bullying is one of the most common manifestations of peer violence in children and adolescents. Prevention of bullying, cyberbullying included, has to occur in accordance with the IBSE Standards of social and emotional learning.
• Bullying and Cyberbullying in Modern Society Cyberbullying among adolescents and teenagers is defined as the purposeful and repetitive harm done by one or more peers in cyberspace as a result of using digital devices and social media platforms.
• Bullying, Its Forms, and Counteractions In addition, it is necessary to support those at the center of this bullying, as this can protect them from harmful effects and consequences.
• Incivility, Violence, and Bullying in the Healthcare Workplace The following step is to gather the team and communicate the necessity of change, assigning some individuals for the positions related to the change, in other terms, a support team.
• Effective Ways to Deal With Bullying in US Schools Teachers should ensure the bully is aware of the improper behavior, why it is improper, and the repercussions of the behavior.
• The Gay Teen Suicide & Bullying The article explains that the ones who survive may have access to extensive facilities, support, and status beyond their world of bullies, which sounds reasonable for me.
• Bullying in Nursing: Preventive Measures The prevention of bullying within the workplace is the responsibility of the leaders and managers. One of the significant principles which the leaders can implement is the behavioral code for the employees.
• Network Bullying: School Policy Framework The first step is to have a careful conversation with the student and an assessment by the school psychologist to ensure that there is a fright.
• How to Reduce Bullying in Senior Facilities One of the main reasons an individual may commit suicide due to bullying is because it may make an individual develop a negative self-image after the bullying incident. Some of the major bullying incidences that […]
• Active Shooter and Nursing Bullying Nurses should lock all doors and use tables and other objects to reinforce them to prevent any possibility of the active shooter getting to the patients’ room.
• Racist Bullying Among Black Students in US Universities This research focuses on the impact of bullying and racism among African American students in the country. What are the impacts of bullying and racism among Black students in U.S.universities?
• Bullying and Autism Spectrum Disorder In fact, bullying as a social phenomenon can be characterized as a social and interaction issue; therefore, it is possible to analyze the connection between autism and acts of bullying and inappropriate behavior.
• Eliminating the Problem of Online Bullying Eliminating the problem of online bullying is vital for improving the mental health of adolescents and young adults and allowing them to build their lives free of adverse external influences. It is possible to see […]
• Sexual Bullying in Schools and Its Influence The author states the difference in the mental and physical maturation of girls and boys as one of the core roots of the issue.
• Bullying and Harassment in the Healthcare Workplace This paper is written to explore the origins of discrimination and harassment in the healthcare workplace. Bullying begins early in medical college and residencies; it has been referred to as an element of the learning […]
• Bullying in Healthcare and Its Consequences Nancy was big and the manager used that to tease her every opportunity she got. It was important to confront the bully and support the victim.
• Queer (LGBT) Teenage Bullying at School The importance of this source to the research is associated with the significant role that youth organizations have to play towards minimizing bullying among LGBT students.
• Bullying of Children: Misconceptions and Preventive Measures As a result, the density of shows and articles devoted to bullying creates an illusion that this event appears more often than it does in reality.
• Bullying Behavior and Impact of Hegemonic Masculinity Rosen and Nofziger applied a quantitative research design to explore the relationships between students’ bullying experiences and race, age, and socioeconomic status and identify the frequency of bullying.
• Bullying and Incivility in Clinical Setting The problem of bullying and incivility in a clinical setting can negatively affect the quality of care provided, so it needs to be managed.
• Bullying and Its Influences on a Person It is common for victims of bullying to develop mental health issues, as they were placed in stressful situations and had a constant fear along with depression in some cases. Making friends is one of […]
• Overview of the Problem of Bullying Undoubtedly, there is no way each person would be able to share and divide their opinion with everyone else because people are not identical, and they tend to have various perspectives.
• “Bullying in Schools”: The Aspects of Bullying In their article, Menesini and Salmivalli examine the current state of knowledge on the topic and thoroughly discuss all of the aspects of bullying.
• Analysis of Bullying and Parenting Style Since the given topic usually refers to children and adolescents, it is evident that their parents hold a portion of responsibility because the adults affect the growth and development of young individuals.
• Hate Crimes – Bullying More than two-thirds of children and adolescents experience bullying and more than one-fourth of them report extreme forms of coercion.
• Bullying Management: Mass Awareness Program Bulletin.”Teachers, trained to help to rebuild trust, confidence, growth, and commitment through mass awareness to arrest bullying in high schools”. The proposed mass action program is meant to promote awareness on the need to stop […]
• An Anti-Bullying Program Integrated With PRAISE by Ackerman I chose to describe bullying because of the importance of the topic and due to my personal interest in it. Education will eliminate most of the reasons for bullying and provide students with the E […]
• Bullying Through Social Media: Methods An Informed Consent Document will be provided to participants prior to the research, explaining the purpose of the study and promising to protect their identity.
• Bullying Through Social Media In particular, inequality in the position of the persecutor and the victim is evident – the aggressor can be anonymous, and there can be many of them.
• Bullying of Nurses During the COVID-19 Pandemic Then, the principles of adult learning will be used to develop and implement an information product to improve the nursing workforce’s bullying awareness and the knowledge of healthy conflict resolution in the workplace.
• Bullying in Healthcare Organizations: Impact on Nursing Practice Bullying in business entities is a common phenomenon, but the extent of its influence on the “production process” in healthcare and medicine institutions is only beginning to be recognized.
• Workplace Bullying Among Nurses in the Acute Setting Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the frequency of conflicts between nurses and their colleagues and managers has increased significantly in my workplace.
• Bullying Perpetration Among School-Aged Children Mucherah et al.examined how the school climate and teachers’ sanctions against bullying relate to the risk of becoming a victim or perpetrator of bullying.
• Programming for a Year 5 Class on Bullying As a result, in Lesson 6, they will offer their project addressing bullying behaviour and present it to their class, which is the main aim of the Unit Plan.
• Injury and Violence Prevention: – Bullying The aim of preventing injury and violence from bullying is to enable the student to have a healthy social and physical life that will enable them to perform well in their studies and live healthily.
• Cyber-Bullying vs. Traditional Bullying: Its Psychological Effects The researchers presented the recent statistics in order to illustrate the negative social and psychological effects of cyber-bullying in contrast to the traditional bullying in schools.
• Bullying in the Workplace Old Nurse to New Nurse This unvoiced scourge in nursing is characteristically encouraged by the need of bullies to have a total control of a person. Resignation of nurses due to bullying can lead to shortage of nurses in hospitals.
• Bullying and Peer Abuse Especially at work, targets fear coming to work and this will have an adverse result in the efficiency of the staff in the hospital.
• Bullying in the Nursing Workplace Bullying in the nursing workplace, in this case, causes the one bullied to have a feeling of defenselessness and takes away the nurses’ right to dignity at his or her workplace.
• Cyberbullying and Bullying: Similarities While deciding on fitting and balanced sanctions, it is vital to reflect on the ways in which cyberbullying events differ in effect in comparison to other forms of bullying.
• Protection From Bullying: Methods That Work Because of this, it is vital that parents, teachers, and guardians educate themselves on the nature of bullying and work together to develop effective methods and strategies that would help to overcome the problem.
• Psychology: Social Media and Bullying The purpose of this paper is to discuss the issue of social media and bullying and express the author’s opinion on the matter.
• Bullying of LGBTQ Students in American Schools The chosen article focuses on the issue of bullying of LGBTQ students in American schools and its legal repercussions. The author shows that students who are openly gay or bi, as well as those who […]
• Workplace Bullying and Its Impact on People and Society The paper follows a traditional structure with the introduction and body paragraphs that provide essential information devoted to the problem, and improve the understanding of the concept of bullying.
• “Bullying Behavior Among Radiation Therapists” by Johnson and Trad The literature review encompassed a considerable number of sources pertinent to the study and recent enough to be relevant; all the publications were dated within the last fifteen years.
• Human Rights Issues in Australia: Bullying Among School-Going Age and Young People The focus of the topic of the day is on bullying. It is used to prevent or avoid the occurrence of a bullying experience.
• Bullying and Worker’s Harassment in Western Australia In most of the armed services in Australia, new recruits and women are commonly the victims of bullying and harassment despite the fact that it is unacceptable.
• Aggression and Bullying in the Workplace Investigation Aggression, the effects of which are often equated with the death wish, is an instinct like any other and in natural conditions, it helps just as much as any other to ensure the survival of […]
• Bullying: History and Mechanisms for Prevention Students are encouraged to not participate in bullying and to help prevent bullying of others through positive social reactions to incidences of bullying” and Sharing of Scenarios: “Each group will give feedback and share other […]
• Conflict Resolution Tactics and Bullying This study is interesting to the extent that it shows how the social environment impacts the development of a child and how it shapes his or her conflict resolution techniques.
• School Bullying: Case Analysis Even today there is no generally accepted definition of bullying but it is thought that when an individual is for a long period of time is exposed to repeat negative actions and behavior by one […]
• Bullying in the Workplace as a Psychological Harassment Another form of bullying in the workplace is physical assault in the sense that if the workers are not at ease with each other and when the rules and regulations are not at all observed, […]
• “Adolescents’ Perception of Bullying” by Frisen et al. The second and the third aims of the study were “to describe how adolescents perceive bullies” and “to describe what adolescents believe to be important in order to stop bullying”, respectively.
• The Long Term Effects of Bullying in Elementary School Wolke and Lereya argue that the problem is that the majority of studies on bullying are cross-sectional and only use follow-ups after a short period of time.
• Anti-Bullying and Work Quality Improvement Initiative Given the specifics of the work of nurses, conflicts of this kind negatively affect both the whole process of work and the health of patients in particular.
• Workplace Bullying, Salivary Cortisol and Long-Term Sickness Absence The purpose of this cohort-based study was to investigate the extent to which cortisol levels were associated with sickness absence and the relationships between workplace bullying and sickness absence through the prism of cortisol use.
• Workplace Bullying in Australia It is possible to offer several recommendations that can reduce the risk of bullying in organisations. In this case, more attention should be paid to the absence of mechanisms that can protect the victims of […]
• Domestic Violence and Bullying in Schools It also states the major variables related to bullying in schools. They will confirm that social-economic status, gender, and race can contribute to bullying in schools.
• Staff Training as a Solution to Workplace Bullying Furthermore, it has an appeal to logos as the writer has facts about the prevalence of workplace bullying in the USA.
• The “Bully-Free” Initiative: Bullying in Education The students need to have a clear idea that bullying goes against the rules of the school and which actions may be considered bullying.
• Free Speech vs. Bullying Laws One of the topical aspects of modern democracy is the freedom of speech expressed in an ability to come up with personal ideas and the lack of restrictions on the right of expression through publicity.
• Gender and Bullying Issues in Nursing A lack of tolerance for workplace harassment and bullying is likely to lead to the deterioration of the situation and further misunderstanding and tension in an organization.
• Bullying and Cyberbullying Among Peers They are facing the dilemma of how to react, whether they have to fight a superior force of the enemy or to complain to teachers and parents, undermining their reputation.
• Bullying in Schools and Its Major Reasons As of now, the most important goal in research studies covering the topic of bullying in schools is to understand the mechanisms behind bullying promotion and prevention.
• Bullying in Schools: Worldwide Study and Survey The parents were asked to rate the frequency of the bullying that their children experience and to describe the experience of bullying that their children went through.
• Bullying Prevention Programs Some teachers and professors claim that their students cannot show their potential in their hobbies due to the limitations they experience because of bullies around them. As it is mentioned above, educators do not control […]
• Bullying and Its Impact Thus, the current paper is dedicated to the issue of bullying and its effects as well as anti-bullying practices as related to peer victimization.
• Dealing With Workplace Bullying According to the report presented by the University of Louisville, workplace bullying is a repeated action of one employee or a group of employees towards another individual or group. Dealing with bullying in the workplace […]
• Bullying Policies in Walton School District and Georgia University The sample bullying policy language in Walton School District is very similar to the language in the policy of the University of Georgia.
• Amanda Todd’s Bullying and Suicide Story She was fifteen years old, and her story created a major uproar in the press, as it showed the true nature of bullying and the effects it has on the person.
• Bullying in America: Causes and Prevention That is why it is important to pay attention to the reasons why bullying occurs and ways in which it can be reduced.
• Bullying, Facts and Countermeasures Whether it is the bully or the bullied, the parents will need to do a lot to see to it that their children are brought up in the best of the behaviors.
• Bullying as Social and Criminal Deviance The most important step in the student’s guide to research that I would need to analyze bullying is defining the topic.
• Bullying and Legislation in Australian Workplace According to the authors of the article, workplace bullying can be characterized as internal violence. According to the authors of the article, bullying is a widespread phenomenon and is a common attribute of many organizations.
• Bullying at Australian School: Causes and Solution The technological breakthrough that was witnessed in the late 90s and the early 2000s also contributed to the development of the phenomenon, sparking the concepts such as cyberbullying and online bullying.
• Workplace Bullying in The Playground Never Ends The primary reason for becoming a bully is primarily seen in fear to lose authority or formal positions in an organization and have more institutional power than that of the targets.
• Bullying and Suicide in High Schools The main limitation of this research is that the scholars surveyed the victims more often. The victims of cyberbullying also had a tendency to be depressed and contemplate suicide.
• School-Aged Children’ Bullying Behaviors It is due to this that the work of Janssen et al.sought to show just how potentially damaging this behavior could be and the potential psychological repercussions it could have on young children due to […]
• College Students: Suicide and Bullying-Methods The analysts used this tool to report the mood of the participants by posting quizzes, which the students answered while filling the questionnaire.
• Childhood Bullying and Adulthood Suicide Connection In this regard, the seriousness of the issue is depicted in research results that indicate that at least 50% of children and youth in the US have experienced bullying situations as either bullies or victims […]
• Girl-To-Girl Bullying and Mean Stinks Program The positive results can be achieved by the implementation of the multiple educational programs, the increase in public awareness, and promotion of the values of the healthy relationships.”Mean Stinks” is exactly the program with the […]
• Association of Parenting Factors With Bullying The lack of the parental support is the main cause of students’ deviant behaviors at school, including the cases of bullying, and those parents who pay much attention to developing their career cannot provide the […]
• The Problem of Workplace Bullying In particular, this paper will include the discussion of the research articles, reports and case studies that describe the causes of workplace bullying and the strategies used by companies in an effort to overcome it.
• College Students: Suicide and Bullying The misconception that bullying is a minor issue among college students has contributed to the high number of students who suffer because of bullying.
• Homosexual Students and Bullying Specifically, the section addresses the prevalence of bullying in schools and the level of bullying in bisexuals, gay males, and lesbians.
• Social Psychology of Violence and Bullying in Schools Bullying is a common phenomenon in schools and it is reported that it results in violence in learning institutions in the end.
• Bullying and Suicide: The Correlation Between Bullying and Suicide Nonetheless, the extensive research shows that the correlation exists and bullying is one of the risk factors for development of suicidal ideas in adolescents.
• Cyber Bullying Reduction Program Table of Activities Activity Significance Assembling parents/guardians, students and teachers to announce and explain the program in the institution To enlighten parents/guardians, students and teachers about the rules and regulation enacted due to the threat […]
• Discouraging and Eliminating Cyber Bullying Resources Role of the resource/input Statement forms To facilitate information transfer to the staff Counseling Personnel To arm students against the problem Bullying report system To create efficient internet enhance report system Regulation implementation documents […]
• High School Bullying Effective Responses Emphasis will also be made on the kind of audience to read this article because the contents of this study need to be at par with other similar articles in the journal to be selected.
• Bullying and Suicide Among Teenagers Specific objectives Analyze the causes of bullying among teenagers in the country Analyze the effects of bullying among victims, perpetrators and by-standers Analyze the relationship between bullying in school and suicide among teenagers in the […]
• Bullying in the Workplace Organizational leaders have an ethical obligation to ensure that they deal with cases of bullying within the workplace in a professional manner that demonstrates equality, honesty, and high sensitivity to the needs of others.
• Social Bullying in Jeff Cohen’s “Monster Culture” It is clear that his part of character is mostly dominant in the childhood stages, as children are not able to develop a sense of morality and predict the consequences of their actions.
• Cyber Bullying and Its Forms The difference between the conventional way of bullying and cyber bullying is that in conventional bullying, there is contact between the bully and the victim.
• Problem of Workplace Bullying Authority intervention should occur when the employees fail to respond to awareness intervention, and thus decide to continue with their behaviors.
• Problem of the Managing Bullying and Harassment in the Workplace Employees in an organization have a specific role that they are supposed to play and this means that there might be shortcomings which should not lead to bullying.
• Does Bullying Cause Emotional Problems? However, the current study was relevant because of this design, for the scope of the study covered as well as the results were accurate, and the conclusions drawn were correct.
• Ban High School Bullying A number of stakeholders contribute to the high prevalence of bullying in American schools. Schools that ignore bullying are a big part of the problem and they need to be held accountable.
• The Problem of Bullying While most states in the United States of America have laws to protect people from bullying, the federal government is yet to enact an anti-bullying law.
• Ethical Case: Facebook Gossip or Cyberbullying? The best option to Paige is to apologize publicly and withdraw her comments. The final stage is to act and reflect the outcome of the choice made.
• Bullying on the Rise: Should Federal Government Enact Federal-Bullying Laws? This paper will thus use both primary and secondary data to discuss the prevalence of bullying in schools and whether the federal govern should enact federal laws to curb the social vice at school.
• Character Traits of Bullying Despite the fact that such characteristics may differ from child to child, it is the common feature of difference that makes the target children get noticed by the bullies.
• Bullying in the Schools Furthermore, the law states that training should be done to the teachers as well as the other members of staff on how to deal with bullying and the law also needs the schools to report […]
• Troubled Adolescent due to Bullying His lowered self-esteem would make him to observe the common behaviours of the older boys quietly and accept the situation as a cultural practice.
• Workplace bullying: does it exist?
• What are the three key elements of bullying?
• How does bullying affect those who observe it?
• Direct and indirect bullying: what is the difference?
• What families do bullies typically come from?
• Aggressive children: what is their future?
• How to prevent bullying in schools?
• School bullying and domestic violence: is there a connection?
• Cyberbullying: how to prevent it?
• What can parents do to prevent their children from bullying?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Qualitative Methods in School Bullying and Cyberbullying Research: An Introduction to the Special Issue

• Published: 12 August 2022
• Volume 4 , pages 175–179, ( 2022 )

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• Paul Horton 1 &
• Selma Therese Lyng 2  

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Introduction

School bullying research has a long history, stretching all the way back to a questionnaire study undertaken in the USA in the late 1800s (Burk, 1897 ). However, systematic school bullying research began in earnest in Scandinavia in the early 1970s with the work of Heinemann ( 1972 ) and Olweus ( 1978 ). Highlighting the extent to which research on bullying has grown exponentially since then, Smith et al. ( 2021 ) found that there were only 83 articles with the term “bully” in the title or abstract published in the Web of Science database prior to 1989. The numbers of articles found in the following decades were 458 (1990–1999), 1,996 (2000–2009), and 9,333 (2010–2019). Considering cyberbullying more specifically, Smith and Berkkun ( 2017 , cited in Smith et al., 2021 ) conducted a search of Web of Science with the terms “cyber* and bully*; cyber and victim*; electronic bullying; Internet bullying; and online harassment” until the year 2015 and found that while there were no articles published prior to 2000, 538 articles were published between 2000 and 2015, with the number of articles increasing every year (p. 49).

Numerous authors have pointed out that research into school bullying and cyberbullying has predominantly been conducted using quantitative methods, with much less use of qualitative or mixed methods (Hong & Espelage, 2012 ; Hutson, 2018 ; Maran & Begotti, 2021 ; Smith et al., 2021 ). In their recent analysis of articles published between 1976 and 2019 (in WoS, with the search terms “bully*; victim*; cyberbullying; electronic bullying; internet bullying; and online harassment”), Smith et al. ( 2021 , pp. 50–51) found that of the empirical articles selected, more than three-quarters (76.3%) were based on quantitative data, 15.4% were based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative data, and less than one-tenth (8.4%) were based on qualitative data alone. What is more, they found that the proportion of articles based on qualitative or mixed methods has been decreasing over the past 15 years (Smith et al., 2021 ). While the search criteria excluded certain types of qualitative studies (e.g., those published in books, doctoral theses, and non-English languages), this nonetheless highlights the extent to which qualitative research findings risk being overlooked in the vast sea of quantitative research.

School bullying and cyberbullying are complex phenomena, and a range of methodological approaches is thus needed to understand their complexity (Pellegrini & Bartini, 2000 ; Thornberg, 2011 ). Indeed, over-relying on quantitative methods limits understanding of the contexts and experiences of bullying (Hong & Espelage, 2012 ; Patton et al., 2017 ). Qualitative methods are particularly useful for better understanding the social contexts, processes, interactions, experiences, motivations, and perspectives of those involved (Hutson, 2018 ; Patton et al., 2017 ; Thornberg, 2011 ; Torrance, 2000 ).

Smith et al. ( 2021 ) suggest that the “continued emphasis on quantitative studies may be due to increasingly sophisticated methods such as structural equation modeling … network analysis … time trend analyses … latent profile analyses … and multi-polygenic score approaches” (p. 56). However, the authors make no mention of the range or sophistication of methods used in qualitative studies. Although there are still proportionately few qualitative studies of school bullying and cyberbullying in relation to quantitative studies, and this gap appears to be increasing, qualitative studies have utilized a range of qualitative data collection methods. These methods have included but are not limited to ethnographic fieldwork and participant observations (e.g., Eriksen & Lyng, 2018 ; Gumpel et al., 2014 ; Horton, 2019 ), digital ethnography (e.g., Rachoene & Oyedemi, 2015 ; Sylwander, 2019 ), meta-ethnography (e.g., Dennehy et al., 2020 ; Moretti & Herkovits, 2021 ), focus group interviews (e.g., Odenbring, 2022 ; Oliver & Candappa, 2007 ; Ybarra et al., 2019 ), semi-structured group and individual interviews (e.g., Forsberg & Thornberg, 2016 ; Lyng, 2018 ; Mishna et al., 2005 ; Varjas et al., 2013 ), vignettes (e.g., Jennifer & Cowie, 2012 ; Khanolainen & Semenova, 2020 ; Strindberg et al., 2020 ), memory work (e.g., Johnson et al., 2014 ; Malaby, 2009 ), literature studies (e.g., Lopez-Ropero, 2012 ; Wiseman et al., 2019 ), photo elicitation (e.g., Ganbaatar et al., 2021 ; Newman et al., 2006 ; Walton & Niblett, 2013 ), photostory method (e.g., Skrzypiec et al., 2015 ), and other visual works produced by children and young people (e.g., Bosacki et al., 2006 ; Gillies-Rezo & Bosacki, 2003 ).

This body of research has also included a variety of qualitative data analysis methods, such as grounded theory (e.g., Allen, 2015 ; Bjereld, 2018 ; Thornberg, 2018 ), thematic analysis (e.g., Cunningham et al., 2016 ; Forsberg & Horton, 2022 ), content analysis (e.g., Temko, 2019 ; Wiseman & Jones, 2018 ), conversation analysis (e.g., Evaldsson & Svahn, 2012 ; Tholander, 2019 ), narrative analysis (e.g., Haines-Saah et al., 2018 ), interpretative phenomenological analysis (e.g., Hutchinson, 2012 ; Tholander et al., 2020 ), various forms of discourse analysis (e.g., Ellwood & Davies, 2010 ; Hepburn, 1997 ; Ringrose & Renold, 2010 ), including discursive psychological analysis (e.g., Clarke et al., 2004 ), and critical discourse analysis (e.g., Barrett & Bound, 2015 ; Bethune & Gonick, 2017 ; Horton, 2021 ), as well as theoretically informed analyses from an array of research traditions (e.g., Davies, 2011 ; Jacobson, 2010 ; Søndergaard, 2012 ; Walton, 2005 ).

In light of the growing volume and variety of qualitative studies during the past two decades, we invited researchers to discuss and explore methodological issues related to their qualitative school bullying and cyberbullying research. The articles included in this special issue of the International Journal of Bullying Prevention discuss different qualitative methods, reflect on strengths and limitations — possibilities and challenges, and suggest implications for future qualitative and mixed-methods research.

Included Articles

Qualitative studies — focusing on social, relational, contextual, processual, structural, and/or societal factors and mechanisms — have formed the basis for several contributions during the last two decades that have sought to expand approaches to understanding and theorizing the causes of cyber/bullying. Some have also argued the need for expanding the commonly used definition of bullying, based on Olweus ( 1993 ) (e.g., Allen, 2015 ; Ellwood & Davies, 2010 Goldsmid & Howie, 2014 ; Ringrose & Rawlings,  2015 ; Søndergaard, 2012 ; Walton, 2011 ). In the first article of the special issue, Using qualitative methods to measure and understand key features of adolescent bullying: A call to action , Natalie Spadafora, Anthony Volk, and Andrew Dane instead discuss the usefulness of qualitative methods for improving measures and bettering our understanding of three specific key definitional features of bullying. Focusing on the definition put forward by Volk et al. ( 2014 ), they discuss the definitional features of power imbalance , goal directedness (replacing “intent to harm” in order not to assume conscious awareness, and to include a wide spectrum of goals that are intentionally and strategically pursued by bullies), and harmful impact (replacing “negative actions” in order to focus on the consequences for the victim, as well as circumventing difficult issues related to “repetition” in the traditional definition).

Acknowledging that these three features are challenging to capture using quantitative methods, Spadafora, Volk, and Dane point to existing qualitative studies that shed light on the features of power imbalance, goal directedness and harmful impact in bullying interactions — and put forward suggestions for future qualitative studies. More specifically, the authors argue that qualitative methods, such as focus groups, can be used to investigate the complexity of power relations at not only individual, but also social levels. They also highlight how qualitative methods, such as diaries and autoethnography, may help researchers gain a better understanding of the motives behind bullying behavior; from the perspectives of those engaging in it. Finally, the authors demonstrate how qualitative methods, such as ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews, can provide important insights into the harmful impact of bullying and how, for example, perceived harmfulness may be connected to perceived intention.

In the second article, Understanding bullying and cyberbullying through an ecological systems framework: The value of qualitative interviewing in a mixed methods approach , Faye Mishna, Arija Birze, and Andrea Greenblatt discuss the ways in which utilizing qualitative interviewing in mixed method approaches can facilitate greater understanding of bullying and cyberbullying. Based on a longitudinal and multi-perspective mixed methods study of cyberbullying, the authors demonstrate not only how qualitative interviewing can augment quantitative findings by examining process, context and meaning for those involved, but also how qualitative interviewing can lead to new insights and new areas of research. They also show how qualitative interviewing can help to capture nuances and complexity by allowing young people to express their perspectives and elaborate on their answers to questions. In line with this, the authors also raise the importance of qualitative interviewing for providing young people with space for self-reflection and learning.

In the third article, Q methodology as an innovative addition to bullying researchers’ methodological repertoire , Adrian Lundberg and Lisa Hellström focus on Q methodology as an inherently mixed methods approach, producing quantitative data from subjective viewpoints, and thus supplementing more mainstream quantitative and qualitative approaches. The authors outline and exemplify Q methodology as a research technique, focusing on the central feature of Q sorting. The authors further discuss the contribution of Q methodology to bullying research, highlighting the potential of Q methodology to address challenges related to gaining the perspectives of hard-to-reach populations who may either be unwilling or unable to share their personal experiences of bullying. As the authors point out, the use of card sorting activities allows participants to put forward their subjective perspectives, in less-intrusive settings for data collection and without disclosing their own personal experiences. The authors also illustrate how the flexibility of Q sorting can facilitate the participation of participants with limited verbal literacy and/or cognitive function through the use of images, objects or symbols. In the final part of the paper, Lundberg and Hellström discuss implications for practice and suggest future directions for using Q methodology in bullying and cyberbullying research, particularly with hard-to-reach populations.

In the fourth article, The importance of being attentive to social processes in school bullying research: Adopting a constructivist grounded theory approach , Camilla Forsberg discusses the use of constructivist grounded theory (CGT) in her research, focusing on social structures, norms, and processes. Forsberg first outlines CGT as a theory-methods package that is well suited to meet the call for more qualitative research on participants’ experiences and the social processes involved in school bullying. Forsberg emphasizes three key focal aspects of CGT, namely focus on participants’ main concerns; focus on meaning, actions, and processes; and focus on symbolic interactionism. She then provides examples and reflections from her own ethnographic and interview-based research, from different stages of the research process. In the last part of the article, Forsberg argues that prioritizing the perspectives of participants is an ethical stance, but one which comes with a number of ethical challenges, and points to ways in which CGT is helpful in dealing with these challenges.

In the fifth article, A qualitative meta-study of youth voice and co-participatory research practices: Informing cyber/bullying research methodologies , Deborah Green, Carmel Taddeo, Deborah Price, Foteini Pasenidou, and Barbara Spears discuss how qualitative meta-studies can be used to inform research methodologies for studying school bullying and cyberbullying. Drawing on the findings of five previous qualitative studies, and with a transdisciplinary and transformative approach, the authors illustrate and exemplify how previous qualitative research can be analyzed to gain a better understanding of the studies’ collective strengths and thus consider the findings and methods beyond the original settings where the research was conducted. In doing so, the authors highlight the progression of youth voice and co-participatory research practices, the centrality of children and young people to the research process and the enabling effect of technology — and discuss challenges related to ethical issues, resource and time demands, the role of gatekeepers, and common limitations of qualitative studies on youth voice and co-participatory research practices.

Taken together, the five articles illustrate the diversity of qualitative methods used to study school bullying and cyberbullying and highlight the need for further qualitative research. We hope that readers will find the collection of articles engaging and that the special issue not only gives impetus to increased qualitative focus on the complex phenomena of school bullying and cyberbullying but also to further discussions on both methodological and analytical approaches.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the authors for sharing their work; Angela Mazzone, James O’Higgins Norman, and Sameer Hinduja for their editorial assistance; and Dorte Marie Søndergaard on the editorial board for suggesting a special issue on qualitative research in the journal.

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Horton, P., Lyng, S.T. Qualitative Methods in School Bullying and Cyberbullying Research: An Introduction to the Special Issue. Int Journal of Bullying Prevention 4 , 175–179 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42380-022-00139-5

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Published : 12 August 2022

Issue Date : September 2022

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s42380-022-00139-5

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