School Bullying: Development and Some Important Challenges

After sketching how my own interest and research into bullying problems began, I address a number of potentially controversial issues related to the definition and measurement of such problems. The importance of maintaining the distinctions between bullying victimization and general victimization and between bullying perpetration and general aggression is strongly emphasized. There are particular problems with the common method of peer nominations for purposes of prevalence estimation, comparisons of such estimates and mean levels across groups and time, and measurement of change. Two large-scale projects with time series data show that several recent claims about cyber bullying made in the media and by some…