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The impact of methodological moderators on prevalence rates of workplace bullying. A meta‐analysis
Author(s) -
Nielsen Morten Birkeland,
Matthiesen Stig Berge,
Einarsen Ståle
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
journal of occupational and organizational psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.257
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 2044-8325
pISSN - 0963-1798
DOI - 10.1348/096317909x481256
Subject(s) - moderation , psychology , meta analysis , workplace bullying , variation (astronomy) , social psychology , clinical psychology , statistics , medicine , mathematics , physics , astrophysics
The aim of this study was to investigate how different measurement methods and sampling techniques contribute to the observed variation in prevalence rates of workplace bullying. A total of 102 prevalence estimates of bullying from 86 independent samples ( N =130,973) were accumulated and compared by means of meta‐analysis. At an average, the statistically independents samples provided an estimate of 14.6%. Yet, the findings show that methodological moderators influence the estimated rates. As for measurement method, a rate of 11.3% was found for studies investigating self‐labelled victimization from bullying based on a given definition of the concept, whereas a rate of 14.8% was found for behavioural measure studies, and 18.1% for self‐labelling studies without a given definition. A difference of 8.7% points was found between randomly sampled and non‐randomly sampled studies. When controlling for geographical differences, the findings show that geographical factors also influence findings on bullying. Hence, findings from different studies on workplace bullying cannot be compared without taking moderator variables into account.