Elsevier

Children and Youth Services Review

Volume 69, October 2016, Pages 143-150
Children and Youth Services Review

Understanding weaknesses in bullying research: How school personnel can help strengthen bullying research and practice

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2016.08.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • School personnel would benefit from a stronger understanding of bullying research.

  • There are various methodological weaknesses in bullying research.

  • Researchers lack a common definition of bullying, weakening bullying research.

  • Bullying measures are often one item and fail to assess all forms of bullying.

  • Bullying measures fail to define or include the word bullying.

Abstract

School personnel (teachers, administrators, counselors, staff, and social workers) would greatly benefit from a stronger understanding of bullying dynamics. In order to heighten their understanding, we must strengthen bullying research. Despite more than 40 years of bullying research, a number of methodological weaknesses continue to plague the field of bullying. First, there is a lack of a common definition of bullying, making it difficult to compare results across studies. Second, some researchers use one-item measures of bullying, a practice that lacks content validity and fails to assess the entire scope of the bullying dynamic. Third, many measures fail to assess all forms of bullying. Fourth, researchers often fail to provide a definition of bullying or to even include the word “bullying” in their measures, thus conflating the measurement of bullying and aggression. Finally, most scales measure the prevalence of bullying and fail to assess the motivations for bullying or reasons why youth are bullied or bully others. The current article provides an overview of these five weaknesses present in bullying research, presents possible solutions, and discusses implications for school personnel.

Section snippets

Introduction: Why school personnel need to understand bullying research

School bullying is one of the most pressing issues affecting children and adolescents and is therefore of central concern for school personnel including teachers, administrators, staff, counselors, and social workers. More than one fourth (27.8%) of U.S. students in Grades 6 through 10 were victims of bullying (School Crime Supplement; Robers, Kemp, & Truman, 2013), however rates of specific forms of bullying victimization are higher. For example, 41.0% of students reported relational bullying

The need for a standardized definition of bullying

A central weakness of bullying research is the absence of a standardized, consistent definition of bullying. The definition of bullying established by Olweus (1993), which includes intent to harm, repetition, and power imbalance, is widely accepted by the bullying research community (Gladden et al., 2014, Ybarra et al., 2012). Indeed, the Olweus Bullying/Victimization Questionnaire, which presents this definition (Olweus, 1996), has been used worldwide by schools and researchers and appears in

The downsides of using one-item bullying measures

One-item measures of bullying are inadequate given the complexity of bullying behavior and the multiple dimensions bullying measures must assess. However, researchers often attempt to assess bullying and victimization with one-item measures. The most typical one-item measure is adapted from the Olweus Victim/Bully Questionnaire (i.e., “How often have you been bullied/bullied others at school in the past couple of months?”; Solberg & Olweus, 2003). Single item measures are inadequate because

The need to assess all forms of bullying behavior

In line with guidelines put forth by the CDC (Gladden et al., 2014), measuring the five forms of bullying behavior (i.e., physical, verbal, relational, property damage, and electronic) is important. First, school personnel cannot rigorously test the effects of interventions if the intervention's impact on each form of bullying is not assessed. Second, if only limited data are collected, it is impossible to gain a comprehensive understanding of prevalence rates of each form of bullying or to

The importance of distinguishing between bullying and aggression

Bullying is a form of aggression, but it is crucial to distinguish between the two constructs. Repetition and power imbalance differentiate bullying from routine aggression, and research has suggested these two elements make bullying victimization more harmful than victimization by aggressive means (Hunter et al., 2007, Solberg and Olweus, 2003). For example, youth who were bullied (e.g., perceived that the aggressor had more power) reported higher rates of depressive symptoms and perceived

Expanding bullying measures to include reasons for being bullied

Another limitation in bullying research is the lack of assessment of what motivates youth to bully others and why victims perceive that they are targeted by bullies. This information is particularly salient for counselors, school social workers, and other school personnel so that they may provide support for youth who feel that they are bullied due to personal characteristics (e.g., sexual orientation, race, religion). Despite the high prevalence rates of bullying, research on harassment among

Implications for school personnel

A central job of school social workers in particular, and school personnel in general, is ensuring that students are safe and well adjusted. Bullying has the potential to erode the social cohesion of a school and disrupt students' feelings of safety, thus school personnel are often called upon to intervene in individual episodes of bullying and also to administer school wide anti-bullying initiatives. A vital first step to decreasing bullying in schools is gaining an accurate and comprehensive

Conclusion

In summary, the measures used to assess bullying should follow the guidelines established by the CDC. Standardizing bullying measurements by providing a common definition of bullying would help distinguish measurements of aggression from measurements of bullying. Further, establishing best practices for measuring bullying would ensure use of multi-item measures that provide a comprehensive evaluation of the bullying dynamic such as assessing all forms of bullying and evaluating reasons youth

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    Funding for this research was provided through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (5 U01 CE001948-05) and from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ-2014-3878).

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