A Global Perspective of Young Adolescents’ Peer Aggression and Well-being

Beyond Bullying

Grace Skrzypiec, Mirella Wyra, Eleni Didaskalou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429762048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Reporting on the findings from a study of young people across 11 different world locations (Australia, Mainland China, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Korea, The Philippines, Poland, Spain, and Taiwan), A Global Perspective of Young Adolescents' Peer Aggression and Well-being looks beyond bullying to assess the harm to mental health and well-being of young people experiencing peer aggression in all its forms.

The first book in a global movement that recommends a new dialogue on peer aggression, this book delves into the poorly understood nexus of peer aggression and bullying through the use of statistical data from questionnaires, as well as the students' own words and illustrations. By considering data from multiple countries, it addresses critical questions about cultural variation in aggression and associated well-being.

Addressing the issue that there is a growing focus on other forms of aggression other than bullying, A Global Perspective of Young Adolescents' Peer Aggression and Well-being will offer invaluable insight for practicing teachers and school counsellors, as well as any researchers with an interest in the health and well-being of young adolescents.

Section 1

The study

1 Peer aggression and bullying

Grace Skrzypiec, Mirella Wyra, and Eleni Didaskalou

This chapter introduces the issue of peer aggression in schools and provides theory underlying the research on peer aggression and bullying. The purpose of the Peer Aggression and Well-being (PAWB) study was to look beyond bullying and assess the harm to mental health and well-being of young people experiencing peer aggression in all its forms. In this chapter a new conceptual lens on peer aggression is provided by considering the underlying theoretical dimensions of aggression. The criteria of intentional harm, repetition, and power differential between victim and aggressor, while important aspects of bullying, are not without controversy particularly in how they are measured (or not measured) in current studies of bullying. This chapter discusses these issues and the direction most recently being advocated by researchers for an overhaul of bullying research practices and outlines how this study seeks to begin this process. The aim is to better address the needs of young people feeling unsafe and subject to aggression by peers at school both within as well as outside the bullying realm.

Introduction

It is fair to say that the term bullying is very well known and widely recognised by people across the world. Bullying is acknowledged by the World Health Organisation as “a worldwide health problem among children and adolescents; a subject which has demanded much attention due to its detrimental and enduring consequences” (Chester et al., 2015). Moreover, May 4th has been declared the official “Anti-bullying Day” by the United Nations; a day that signifies standing up against bullying.

While bullying is a well-known phenomenon, it only became a topic of research in the 1970s. In fact, the behaviour was well recognised and written about long before it drew the attention of researchers. Charles Dickens wrote incidents that describe bullying in his book Oliver Twist as early as 1839, while in the book Tom Brown's School Days¹, first published in 1857 by Thomas Hughes, reference is made to the character Tom being a fag² for other students. It is apparent that during those times, what we now recognise as bullying, was behaviour commonly tolerated, accepted and possibly expected, between people of different social ranking (Koo, 2007).

However, it was not until a Swedish physician, Peter-Paul Heinemann, drew attention to bullying behaviour in 1972 (Smith et al., 2002) that this phenomenon came to the forefront. Heinemann (1972) had used the term “mobbning” [sic] to describe the behaviour, but it was Dan Olweus, who termed the behaviour “bullying”. He wrote, “I decided to use the term bully/victim (or whipping boy) problems (instead of, or in addition to, mobbing) in my early writings in English” (Olweus, 2013, p. 755). The word bullying was used to identify behaviour “in which an individual student is exposed to aggression systematically and over long periods of time—whether from another individual, a small group, or a whole class” (Olweus, 2013, p. 754). Bullying is now recognised as harmful and unacceptable behaviour that violates the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, as one of the fundamental rights of children is not to be bullied (Olweus, 1993).

Definition of bullying

Bullying is a subset of peer aggression, although the definition of bullying is narrower than that of peer aggression. In this study we use the definition of aggression that is generally employed in the literature, and that Bergeron and Schneider (2005) used in their meta-analysis to explain cross-national differences in peer-directed aggression. They described aggression as “acts that are intended to cause physical or psychological harm to an individual” (p. 122). It is important to emphasize that while not all aggression is bullying, “bullying is always aggression” (Stassen Berger, 2007, p. 94).

That bullying was a particular type of peer aggression was recognised soon after the term “bullying” was coined. Björkqvist, Ekman, and Lagerspetz (1982) distinguished bullying from other forms of aggression describing it as “a special case of aggression, which is social to its nature. It appears only in relatively small social groups (such as school classes or army units), the members of which see each other regularly, usually daily. Thus, the victim has no possibility to avoid his tormentors” (p. 23). In their study they found that the feature in which bullies and victims differed most was in terms of dominance, where bullies of both sexes considered themselves to be more dominant than others, not just victims.

It appears that in later developments in this field the notion of “dominance” was surpassed by the concept of a power differential. As such, Olweus (1997) defined bullying as

A student is being bullied or victimised when he or she is exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more other students. It is a negative action when someone intentionally inflicts, or attempts to inflict, injury or discomfort upon another. In order to use the term bullying, there should also be an imbalance in strength (an asymmetric power relationship). The student who is exposed to the negative actions has difficulty in defending himself or herself and is somewhat helpless against the student or students who harass. (p. 496)

The delineation of bullying from other types of aggression is that it involves repeated and intended to harm, negative acts against a person who is less powerful than the aggressor. Accordingly, negative acts that are repeatedly intended to harm another person who is of equal mental or physical strength are not considered bullying.

During the last two decades, there has been a proliferation of bullying research as “scholars have shifted from indifference to fascination regarding bullies” (Stassen Berger, 2007, p. 91). The phenomenon of bullying has also drawn attention from the general media (Healy, 2015) as well as social media and charitable organisations, with websites and Facebook pages devoted to the topic (e.g., see Facebook's bullying prevention hub: https:/​/​www.facebook.com/​help/​420576171311103/​).

One of the drawbacks of identifying, labelling, and recognising that bullying behaviour is harmful and unacceptable is that stakeholders in education: including parents, students, teachers, administrators and policy makers; have been keen for solutions that put an end to bullying. Pressure of this kind has diverted bullying studies away from the normal pathway of empirically rigorous research needed to establish an evidence base for effective interventions. As Fishbein (2008) eloquently pointed out, “Just as one cannot ‘throw together’ a vaccine, one cannot ‘throw together’ an intervention” (p. 842). We must have a very good understanding of the phenomenon in question (in this case bullying) if we are to design interventions that will be effective. However, bullying research appears to have jumped from confirming that bullying exists in schools to interventions to prevent it, without stopping to sort out some of the issues associated not just with its measurement, but also in the constructs that comprise its definition.

Concept of bullying

Bullying is said to occur when “typically, a physically stronger or socially more prominent person (ab)uses his/her power to threaten, demean, or belittle another” (Juvonen & Graham, 2014, p. 161). Most of us have witnessed or experienced bullying during our schooling in some form or another. Irrespective of what we may know about the academic research associated with bullying, we all have some concept in our minds of what bullying entails. Most people are not familiar with the criteria that define bullying, so it is not conceived in the same way as academics.

Vaillancourt and her colleagues (2008) were among the first researchers to notice disparity in the way that academics and young people conceptualise bullying. Very few references to the constructs defining bullying (intended harm, repetition, and power imbalance) were provided by Canadian students aged 8-18 in their study, when participants were asked to provide their own definition of bullying. While almost all students recognised bullying as negative behaviour (92%) few included that it was intentional (1.7%) and repeated (6%), although just over one-quarter (26%) indicated that it involved a power imbalance between victim and bully. A similar study, conducted in Spain by Cuadrado-Gordillo (2012), found that Spanish teenagers did not consider that all bullying constructs needed to occur simultaneously, while a study investigating adolescents' understanding of bullying in India by Skrzypiec, Slee, and Sandhu (2015) found that only 4 out of 33 photostories sent to the researchers described bullying using all of the criteria characterising it.

It is apparent, as Finkelhor, Turner, and Hamby (2012) have noted, that in colloquial terms the technical definition of bullying is not well understood and bullying is not being thought of in terms of the criteria of intentional harm, repeated action, and power imbalance between victim and bully.

Assessment of bullying

The disparity between researchers and study participants in terms of their understanding of what is meant by bullying can be overcome however, by providing a definition, a priori, of bullying before asking questions about it. This has been the preferred method used by researchers in many studies of bullying. It has been reasoned that respondents would come to understand that to label an action as bullying it must comprise all the criteria provided and that they would therefore answer questions about bullying accordingly. As such, it becomes unnecessary to measure intended harm and power imbalance. In this approach, the questions generally ask respondents to indicate how often they have experienced bullying or bullying behaviour during a specified time period.

This method has been utilised in the wide-spread Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) survey undertaken in North America and Europe (currently 48 countries and regions) (e.g., Chester et al., 2015; Due et al., 2005; Srabstein, McCarter, Shao, & Huang, 2006). The HBSC survey of young people includes two mandatory (global) questions about bullying that all countries must include in their questionnaires (Currie et al., 2010). Specifically, the questions ask young people attending school, aged 11, 13, and 15, to anonymously report “How often have you been bullied at school in the past couple of months?” and “How often h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of abbreviations
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• SECTION 1 The study
• SECTION 2 The global findings
• SECTION 3 School violence in the South-East Asian Pacific region
• SECTION 4 School violence in Asia
• SECTION 5 School violence in Europe
• SECTION 6 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Index