PROVINCIA DE SORIA

The prevalence of bullying indicates an important question for the purposes ofseeking to address bullying in secondary schools: how valid are the measurement tools used to collect data on the prevalence of bullying in school? Bullying measurement tools can be categorised based on the following types of groups:

1. Targets – self-reporting of being bullied, including types and frequencies 2. Perpetrators – self-reporting or reporting by peers

3. Pupil populations – Olweus’ Bullying Victim Survey, Tellus4 Survey

4. Teachers – teacher nominations of perpetrators and targets and teacher observations 5. Parents – reporting child as target

6. Whole school proxy indicators – school climate, health and well-being, school ethos, school culture.

These groupings of stakeholders (excluding 6) give insight into how a school could measure the prevalence of bullying from various stakeholder perspectives. This then presents the challenge of how bullying is categorised in terms of type, severity, intensity and duration. The rates of occurrence of harmful incidents would be simple to measure if the perpetrators conducted the same forms of behaviour at the same time each day. Bovaird suggests that:

Just as there is a degree of variability in the operational definition of bullying, there is variability in the measurement modality, where the result of the measurement process may vary as a function of who is doing the measuring.

(Bovaird, 2010:277-278) This is important as researchers, educational professionals, policy makers and charities will have different agendas for identifying increases or decreases in bullying in schools. Thus, they may select measurement tools that reflect a desired outcome they are seeking to prove. Bovaird’s concerns are not only with ensuring robustness in the selection of measurement tools but also with the reliability of the respondents. Relying on autobiographical memory as

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measurement ‘though considered to be quite accurate…is still subject to distortions’ (ibid:280). Bovaird recognises the range of distortions that may affect children and young people, e.g., blocking, suggestibility and misattribution, with the consequence that:

Individuals do not always remember exactly what has happened to them. Rather, people tend to remember their construction or reconstruction of what has happened in the past…reports are based on a combination of direct personal involvement as the bully, victim, bystander, etc. or through second-hand reports and even gossip.

(ibid:280) Recollection now includes bullying in the online space, further adding to such distortions in terms of both actual experiences of incidents and what peers discuss. These distortions affect surveys seeking to measure prevalence when asking children and young people to recall traumatic events with accuracy. Surveys de-contextualise behaviours, timings and locations as well as the emotional and psychological impacts which the experience of bullying has on targets. Additionally, children and young people who may have perpetrated bullying might not have perceived an incident as serious or traumatic, and, like targets, some perpetrators may not have an accurate recollection of bullying events. Also, with indirect forms of bullying the type and severity of the behaviour may change autobiographical memory as indirect bullying makes it more difficult for targets to accurately identify the perpetrators. Furthermore, the issue of time, or more accurately the quantification of time, in

questionnaires may be flawed for two important reasons. Firstly, it could create memory distortions, e.g., ‘have you been bullied in the last 30 days?’, ‘Have you been bullied this term?’, ‘Have you ever been bullied?’. The ability to recollect with accuracy the frequency of harmful offences may be very difficult for young people, as well as quantifying the different types of bullying they may have experienced at different time intervals. This impacts on their ability to contextualise bullying within a timeframe set out within a

questionnaire. There is also an issue that the experience of a single, harmful event begins a pattern of intimidation. This is where an imbalance of power is maintained over time: each subsequent experience, from the perspective of the target, has an on-going feeling of dread, even though there may be no harmful action occurring in the initial encounter with the

perpetrator(s). This makes the issue of frequency of bullying encounters difficult for children and young people to distinguish in a linear chain of events.

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2.9.1 The Validity and Reliability of Surveying Young People with Regard to Bullying. There are issues around self-reporting: distortion and cognitive biases. These two issues raise the question of validity and reliability in many bullying questionnaires.

The Olweus Bullying Questionnaire13 is widely used in terms of students’ understanding of bullying, yet survey questions which seek to quantify behaviours rely on memories of events recollected by children and young people. Children and young people may have difficulty identifying their memories for questionnaires because those memories ‘may be unpleasant to recall’ (Cornell and Bandyopadhyayl, 2010:267). Furthermore, Cornell and Bandyopadhyayl recognise that ‘bullying must be distinguished from ordinary conflict between peers of equal status. All peer conflict is not bullying…’ (Ibid:265). Thus, bullying is a complex social construct and, as such, it can be difficult for children and young people to distinguish between different forms of peer aggression when using surveys. Therefore, it is fair to conclude that attempts to quantify the prevalence of bullying through questionnaires remain problematic. This is due to the validity and reliability of accounts by children and young people of the experiences being captured in surveys. Cornell and Bandyopadhyayl conclude that ‘ultimately, self- and peer reporting must be confirmed by interviewing the participants and witnesses to determine if bullying has actually occurred’ (ibid:274).