Bullying Behavior
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Bullying Behavior

Current Issues, Research, and Interventions

Corinna Young, Marti T Loring

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eBook - ePub

Bullying Behavior

Current Issues, Research, and Interventions

Corinna Young, Marti T Loring

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About This Book

These timely intervention strategies make your school safer for everyone! Bullying Behavior: Current Issues, Research, and Interventions provides the most up-to-date reports on the dynamics of bullying, including who bullies and why, who the victims are, and how depression and anxiety are correlated with bullying. It also presents detailed case studies of successful anti-bullying strategies for both local schools and national campaigns. Drawing on national and international clinical research, this book is indispensable for teachers and school administrators, therapists and child psychologists, social workers, child advocates and counselors, court personnel, probation officers, and education policymakers. Bullying Behavior addresses all the issues of bullying, including:

  • preventing sexual harassment
  • models of bully and victim behavior
  • the roles of dominance and bullying in the development of early heterosexual relationships
  • psychosocial correlates in bullying and victimization
  • peer influences during early adolescence
  • students who are passive observers to the victimization of others

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781317994497
Edition
1
Dynamics of Bullying Behavior: Clinical Research

The Interrelationships of Behavioral Indices of Bully and Victim Behavior

Neil F. Gottheil
Eric F. Dubow
Neil F. Gottheil, PhD, is Clinical Psychologist, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario and an associate in a private practice. Eric F. Dubow, PhD, is Professor, Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State University.
Address correspondence to: Neil F. Gottheil, PhD, 2249 Carling Avenue, Suite 314, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K2B 7E9 (E-mail: [email protected]).
SUMMARY. The interrelations of three behavioral indices of bully and victim behavior were examined. Each measure is assumed to represent a different reporting perspective of the bully and victim experience: a peer derived point of view, a self-referential report, and a newly developed self-report measure of one's perceptions of how he/she is perceived by his/her peers, specifically with regard to buliy and victim behavior. As a part of a larger study, 120 children from grades 5 and 6 completed all three behavioral indices of bully and victim behavior. The interrelations among the victim behavior indices supported the notion that victimized children tended to both recognize how they were perceived by others and agree with the perceptions of their peer group. The interrelations among the bully behavior indices suggested that bullies were somewhat aware of how they were perceived by their peer group and yet disagreed with or disregarded this characterization. The additional descriptive information, provided by including a measure of children's perceived peer perspective, and the clinical implications of using all three behavioral indices in concert are discussed. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <getinfo@haworthpressinc,com> Website: <http://wwwJiawoi1hPress.com> © 2001 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]
KEYWORDS. Bullying, peer victimization, aggression, behavioral measures, self-report, peer perspective, peer nomination, scale development, identification
Bullying and the chronic victimization of children in today's schools remain a significant problem with longstanding clinical implications. Recent media coverage of retaliatory violence, reportedly by children who have been victimized by their peers, has contributed to a new found awareness of, and sense of urgency about, a problem that has been as common in our schools as the 3 r's. In a United States based study, Perry, Kusel, and Perry (1988) found that 10% of their sample (N = 165) of 3rd through 6th graders were classified as "extremely victimized" (p. 807). Using retrospective data from adolescent students, Hoover, Oliver, and Hazier (1992) found that 76.8% of respondents reported having experienced some form of bullying during their school careers, with 14% reporting that they had been severely victimized. In a Canadian based survey of children aged 4 to 14 years, Charach, Pepler, and Ziegler (1995) found that 8% of children reported being bullied on at least a weekly basis and 15% of students admitted to frequently bullying others.
Research has indicated that a variety of immediate and future consequences exist for bullies and victims. Children who are victimized are more likely to be depressed, develop low self-esteem (Austin & Joseph, 1996; Home, Glaser, & Sayger, 1994; Olweus, 1992; 1993), experience a continuing loss of confidence, peer rejection, school absenteeism (Hazier, Carney, Green, Powell, & Jolly, 1997; Smith, Bowers, Binney, & Cowie, 1993), and anxiety (Besag, 1989). In severe cases of victimization, children have been known to attempt suicide (Olweus, 1991; Smith et al., 1993), and child victims tend to be at a greater risk for developing depressive symptomatology as adults (Olweus, 1992). Based on a survey of 631 5th through 7th graders, Slee (1993) found that 65% of bullied subjects reported feeling worse about themselves after being bullied, and 15% of the sample reported feeling unsafe at school.
The research indicates that child bullies are more likely than the general population to have a criminal record by the time they are young adults, and to abuse alcohol and engage in domestic violence (Olweus, 1993; Zarzour, 1994). In a 22-year longitudinal study by Huesmann, Eron, Lefkowitz, and Walder (1984), aggressive children appeared to carry their aggression with them into adulthood. Subjects initially rated as highly aggressive were significantly more likely than less aggressive peers to have committed a criminal act, been convicted of a criminal act, been caught driving while intoxicated, and have more traffic violations by age 30. Eron's (cited in Roberts, 1988) research has indicated that 8-year-old bullies have a 1 in 4 chance of having a criminal record by the age of 30, as compared to a 1 in 20 chance for non-bullies.
Bully and victim social roles tend to be relatively stable irrespective of changes in schools, teachers, classmates, and efforts by others to abolish bully and victim behaviors (Olweus, 1984). According to Olweus (1984), children rated as bullies and victims in grade 6 retained these roles at a 3-year follow-up. In a study by Boulton and Underwood (1992), it was found that by early middle school, children (11-12 years of age) who reported being bullied were the most likely to be bullied in the following terms, even though changes in classroom teachers had occurred. Boulton and Smith (1990, as cited in Boulton & Underwood, 1992) found that based on peer nominations, both victim and bully statuses remained stable throughout the school year and into the next. In a study by Craig and Pepler (1993), 6 to 12 year old children involved in bullying during the winter school term were found to continue to engage in this behavior during the spring term.
The enduring quality, social ramifications, and future consequences of being a bully or victim, highlight the need to discover the mechanisms responsible for the maintenance of these social positions. Such information can help in the design of more effective prevention/intervention programs that might contribute to a reduction in the likelihood of children adopting or remaining in these social roles.
In the current study, three different social information perspectives were examined through the use of behavioral indices of bully and victim behavior. One such perspective is that of the peer group. Peer-nomination inventories involve having a number of children rate an individual child on a set of characteristics. The scores obtained are a composite of multiple rater judgments and therefore offer greater reliability and validity than single-rater inventories (Achenbach, McConaughy, & Howell, 1987; Kane & Lawler, 1978). Given the social nature of bully-victim encounters, the peer group has often been used as the informant of choice in identifying bullies and victims.
The individual is another source that has been used to classify children as bullies or victims. A problem with self-referential data is that self-serving biases and selective recall might be operating, and can result in inaccurate reporting (Ledingham, Younger, Schwartzman, & Bergeron, 1982; Wayment & Zetlin, 1989). In a study by Hymel, Bowker, and Woody (1993), peer-identified aggressive children tended to overestimate their competencies on self-report measures. Ledingham and associates (1982) found that children's self-reports were lowest when asked to identify aggressive and withdrawal behaviors, and highest on likability. These findings support the notion that self-referential data might be vulnerable to some form of image management, particularly when individuals are asked to self-report on controversial areas, such as bully and victim behavior.
Another important consideration with respect to self-referential reports is whether a single individual can offer useful information about an inherently social phenomenon. A consistent finding in the literature is that self-ratings do not tend to correlate well with other measures, and therefore should not be used alone when evaluating social phenomena (Ledingham & Younger, 1985; Ledingham et al„ 1982). Nonetheless, self-report data offer insight into the cognitions, feelings, and goals of the individual that cannot be easily obtained from other sources (Hymel & Franke, 1985). How one perceives him/herself in the social world will likely influence future interpersonal behavior, and therefore needs to be accounted for in order to understand the individual within a social context.
In addition to peer nomination and self-referential report inventories, the current study also includes a newly developed self-report measure of children's awareness, regarding how they are viewed by their peers. The Perceived Peer Perspective (PPP) Inventory is a self-report measure in which children are presented with statements about bully and victim behaviors and are asked to take the perspective of their classmates in rating themselves.
Therefore, in the current study three behavioral indices of bully and victim behavior were administered in order to gather information about: (1) how one is seen by others (peer nominations); (2) how one sees him/herself (self-referential, self-report data); and (3) how one thinks he/she is perceived by others (perceived peer perspective data). With this information, discrepancies between peer and self-derived behavioral descriptions can provide information about one's ability to accept and/or recognize his/her social persona.

Method

Subjects and Procedures
Data were collected on 180 elementary and middle school children in grades 5 and 6, comprising a 42% parent consent rate. Three children were dropped from further analyses because they obtained high scores on peer-nominated indices of both bully and victim behavior. Of the remaining 177 children, 57 did not complete all study measures and were only used for select analyses. The major reason for incomplete data was because 41 of the 57 children were not able to be assigned a peer nomination score because fewer than fifty percent of their classmates participated and the remaining 16 children did not complete all the necessary measures. One hundred and twenty children from grades 5 and 6 (55 boys and 65 girls) completed self-referential and perceived peer perspective measures of bully and victim behavior and received peer nomination bully and victim behavior scores. Seventeen classes from four different schools participated. All schools were located in areas whose residents were predominantly Caucasian and of low to moderate socioeconomic status.
Groups of children were administered two survey packages as a part of a larger study, on two separate days, each lasting approximately 45 minutes. Data for the current project were collected on the first administration day and included: (1) a basic demographics page; (2) a peer-nomination form; (3) a self-report measure of bully and victim behavior; and (4) a self-report measure of perceived peer perception of bully and victim behavior.
Measures
Introducing My Classmates (IMC). The IMC is a peer nomination form in which subjects are read a series of stories about fictitious child characters and are asked to nominate all the classmates, on provided lists, that they feel are like the child in the story (i.e., "This girl Loraine is picked on, made fun of, called names, and is hit and pushed by other kids. Kids do mean things to her and try to hurt her feelings. Write the code numbers for all the girls on your list that you feel are like Loraine"; "This boy, Johnny, makes fun of people, says he can beat everyone up, hits and pushes others around, tries to pick fights, and if a someone gets in his way he is likely to shove that person out of the way. Write the code numbers for all the boys on your list that you feel are like Johnny"). Children are read four stories about different boys and four stories about different giris. The two versions of stories are identical except for the described child's name, which is gender specific. Of the four stories, one describes a child exhibiting victim-like characteristics, one describes a child exhibiting bully-like characteristics and two are filler items. Bully and victim items were adapted from a previously developed peer nomination inventory (PNI-R; Gottheil, 1994). Based on principal axis factor analyses and tests of internal consistency, derived bully and victim subscale items were separately combined into single story formats.
IMC nominations on any given child were made by both boys and girls, regardless of the nominee's gender. This allowed for more raters, therefore reducing the effects of any individually biased ratings. The decision to have both gen...

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