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Swedish and English secondary school pupils' attitudes towards, and conceptions of, bullying: Concurrent links with bully/victim involvement
Author(s) -
Boulton Michael J.,
Bucci Eva,
Hawker David D. S.
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9450.404127
Subject(s) - psychology , psychological intervention , developmental psychology , peer group , set (abstract data type) , suicide prevention , human factors and ergonomics , social psychology , injury prevention , poison control , medicine , psychiatry , environmental health , computer science , programming language
Thirteen and fifteen year old Swedish and English secondary school pupils ( n =210) completed a questionnaire designed to measure attitudes towards, and conceptions of, bullying. The older participants also provided peer nominations of classmates thought to be bullies and victims. Significant differences between pupils from the two countries, between younger and older pupils, and between girls and boys emerged on a number of these variables. For example, a significantly larger percentage of English pupils than Swedish pupils indicated that name calling is bullying, whereas the reverse was true for leaving somebody out. These results suggest that findings concerning incidence of, and beliefs about, bullying may not generalise from one group of pupils to another. Overall, participants tended to express anti‐bullying attitudes. The present results also add to the small but growing set of findings which suggest that pupils’ attitudes concerning bullying and their actual involvement in bullying are associated concurrently. Attitudes were found to significantly predict involvement in bullying even after the variance shared with participants' sex had been controlled. Specifically, those pupils that expressed the weakest anti‐bullying attitudes were found to be most often nominated by peers as a bully. The implications of these results for anti‐bullying interventions were discussed.