Teacher and student survey reveals disparity in estimates of school bullying
Teachers have underestimated school bullying in the past – but malicious acts are now so widely reported that the students and their teachers have a different picture of what really goes on.
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Students and parents often despair that schools do not seem to be aware of the prevalence of bullying – but a UniSA study shows teachers actually over-estimate it.
Professor Ken Rigby surveyed 1700 students and dozens of teachers about a broad range of bullying types.
For more than half of those types, teachers’ estimates were higher than those by students.
Teachers thought physical violence happened three times as often as students did.
They estimated hurtful teasing happened at twice the rate students said it did.
And for the spreading of malicious stories, being purposefully ignored, or made afraid, teachers’ estimates were 1.5 times higher. But they were in-line with students’ gauging of levels of harassing text messages, online cruelty, and harassment based on race and on gender.
In 13 of 16 schools from which comparative data was available, teachers’ overall assessments of the prevalence of bullying was higher than those by students.
Previous studies have found that teachers underestimate bullying compared to students.
But those studies have tended to compare students’ personal experiences of bullying with teachers’ perceptions of how often each student was bullied.
The new study shows that teachers may not be aware of individual cases of bullying but they are aware of the scale of the issue at the whole school level.
“The results from this study show that teachers are generally aware of how serious a problem school bullying is,” Prof Rigby said.
That was important because the effectiveness of anti-bullying strategies relied on schools having a realistic view of the scale of the problem.
“In order to have trust in these strategies it is important not to assume that teachers underplay bullying. Generally, they do not,” he said.
Prof Rigby found the media or internet was the primary source of information about bullying for 38 per cent of teachers. Prof Rigby’s previous studies have found that parents want schools to punish bullies more severely instead of focusing on making victims more resilient.
He has also found teachers have a low success rate in stopping bullying and their attempts to help sometimes make the problem worse.
Under new laws, the State Government can now force serial bullies to switch schools.
The study, “Do teachers really underestimate the prevalence of bullying in schools?”, has been published in the journal Social Psychology of Education: