School bullying and fitting into the peer landscape: a grounded theory field study

Research on school bullying has its roots in the field of developmental and educational psychology, and appeals to the need for a theoretical and methodological widening in order to grasp its ambiguity and complexity. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in which 144 pupils and seven teachers participated from seven school classes in three Swedish public primary schools. A constructivist grounded theory guided data gathering and analysis. This article offers an interpretative portrayal of school bullying. It paints a picture of the core process of misfitting and how this process involves the selective use of normativities from the macro, meso and micro levels. When bullying is conceptualized as simply caused by individual characteristics, teachers and others become blind to gender norms, heteronormativity, racism and a range of other oppressions taking place in bullying, and this will fail to offer an appropriate knowledge base on how to counteract and reduce bullying.