A qualitative investigation of bullying - The perspectives of fifth, sixth and seventh graders in a USA parochial school

Quantitative analyses of survey or observational data underlie much of the current knowledge about bullying. Rarely have investigators qualitatively tapped the complex and sophisticated knowledge base of children. The present investigation was conducted in order to plumb the working knowledge of intermediate and middle school students about potential strategies for alleviating bullying. Fifth, sixth and seventh-graders (three males and three females) discussed the prevalence of bullying in their school, methods for dealing with bullying employed in the past and future coping strategies. Two of three female interviewees but none of the males reported experiencing bullying at the time of the interviews. While respondents struggled to articulate strategies for coping with bullying, most participants clearly expressed their desire to rationally work through problems with aggressors. When asked to rank order suggested strategies, participants selected violent or aggressive retaliation as the least effective and least desirable coping strategy. Additional themes emerging from the data include gender based experiential and interpretive differences, including the tendency for males to classify most potential conflicts as harmless horseplay. Interviewees portrayed chronic victims as passive and ineffectual when it came to dealing with aggression.