A Different Way to Detect Bullying in a Middle School

From the Marshall Memo #436

In this thoughtful article in Professional School Counseling, University of Virginia Curry School doctoral student Victoria Phillips and professor Dewey Cornell note that bullying victims are often reluctant to seek help, and staff members seldom observe bullying. And when a school conducts a survey in which students can anonymously report that they have been bullied, staff get a sense of how much bullying is happening but don’t get the names of actual victims. 

Phillips and Cornell studied a different approach. Over a period of years, they worked with a Virginia middle school implementing the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program that conducted surveys in which students, after answering other questions about bullying, were able to nominate peers whom they thought had been bullied in the previous month. The survey clarified its terms:

Bullying is defined as the use of one’s strength or popularity to injure, threaten, or embarrass another person. Bullying can be physical, verbal, or social. It is not bullying when two students of about the same strength argue or fight.

The survey also included a list of all students in the school to make it easier for students to remember the names of students they thought were victims.

Counselors interviewed students who received multiple nominations, carefully watching for signs that a student was denying bullying out of embarrassment or fear of retaliation. They grouped unconfirmed reports in three categories: (a) students who were involved in a peer conflict, which school administrators followed up on; (b) students who were past victims of bullying but not in the last 30 days; and (c) students who were clearly non-victims. Here were the findings on confirmed bullying by number of nominations:

• Two or more – 182 nominations – 78 confirmed victims – Predictive value .429
• Three or more – 117 nominations – 66 confirmed victims – Predictive value .564
• Four or more – 61 nominations – 43 confirmed victims – Predictive value .730
• Five or more – 37 nominations – 27 confirmed victims – Predictive value .760
• Six or more – 25 nominations – 19 confirmed victims – Predictive value .760
• Seven or more – 17 nominations – 14 confirmed victims – Predictive value .824
• Nine or more – 10 nominations – 9 confirmed victims – Predictive value .900

Clearly the number of nominations was strongly correlated with bullying that actually occurred. Phillips and Cornell recommend this approach, as long as counselors are well-trained and use a clear definition of bullying.

“Identifying Victims of Bullying: Use of Counselor Interviews to Confirm Peer Nominations” by Victoria Phillips and Dewey Cornell in Professional School Counseling, February 2012 (Vol. 15, #3, p. 123-131), http://bit.ly/JBnO4l; Phillips is at vp5rq@virginia.edu.