RIVERSIDE, Calif. — As students' age they are verbally and physically bullied less but cyberbullied more, non-native English speakers are not bullied more often than native English speakers and bullying increases as students' transition from elementary to middle school.
Those are among the findings of a wide-ranging paper, "Examination of the Change in Latent Statuses in Bullying Behaviors Across Time," recently published in the journal School Psychology Quarterly .
Authors of the paper are: Cixin Wang, an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside's Graduate School of Education; Ji Hoon Ryoo, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia; and Susan M. Swearer, an associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The paper is based on data about bullying victimization and perpetration obtained from 1,180 fifth- through eighth- grade students over three semesters at schools in a mid-western city in the United States.
The paper is unique in that it captures data about bullies and bully victims over time using latent transition analysis, a person-centered approach that classifies different subgroups and traces the changes in membership over time. Previous approaches have assumed bully and bully victim subgroups remain constant over time.
The subgroups created by the researchers focus on the amount students bully or are bullied and the type of bullying. The researchers also studied variables such as gender, grade and whether students were native English speakers.
Their findings include:
The researchers also recommend a series of school-based interventions to address bullying:
School will only be free from bullying when interventions are gender and culturally sensitive and address all types of bullying, Wang said.
"School-based interventions need to address the differences in perpetrator and victim experiences," she said. "The key is to use individualized specific interventions for bullying, not a one-size-fits-all approach."
Wang's currently research focused on working with local schools to improve school climate and decrease bullying.
School Psychology Quarterly