Bullying

School is the center of adolescent life. The adolescent learns more than

reading, writing, and arithmetic in the school environment. He or she also

learns socialization skills that shape their view of themselves as well as

relationships with others. Teen's face problems in school today that

previous generations had not been forced to deal with One such problem is

school violence. Our nation has seen extreme examples of school violence in

Littleton, Colorado; West paducah, Kentucky; Johesboro, Arkansas; Pearl,

Mississippi; and Springfield, Colorado. However, school violence, also

called "bullying" is not always so extreme and/or obvious. In the

educational system today it is necessary, if not vital, to understand the

pervasiveness of bullying. In the article by Laura M Crothers and Edward M

Levinson entitled, "Assesment of bullying, a review of methods and

instruments, the authors discuss the issue of bullying as well as means and

methods to assess bullying.

Bullying can range from subtle behaviors such as social isolation of an

inividual, manipulation of friends or emotional pain, on up to the more

overt behaviors such as name-calling, verbal assault and physical assault.

Basically, bullying is described by the authors of the article as "the

process of establishing and maintaining social dominance through overt

aggression an doing so in ways that victims are unable to deflect because of

their lack of skills, their inability to effectively integrate with peers,

or their inability to debelop subgroups of peers.(______)

Bullying affects its victims immediately by means of psychological as

well as physical distress, difficulty concentration, and school phobia.

Long term effects include an inability to form and maintain interpersonal

relationships, as well as increased levels of depression and a damaged self

concept. Damaging effects of bullying are not limited to just the victim.

Children who bully develop the desire to overpower and dominate over

others. This leads to possible problems later in life as they perpetuate

the problems with future relationships. They may also develop social skills

that are predictors of poor adilt adjustment and will then pas these

maladaptive social skills on to the next generation. CHildren who practice

aggression with peers are much more likely to develop behaviors such as

domestic violence, criminal behavior and substance abuse (_).

According to the authors, there are various ways of collecting data on

bullying. These methods include observations, interviews, sociometric

measures, surveys, questionaires, teacher rating scales, and self-report

methods. Each of these methods has strengths and weaknesses. Observation

can be either structured or unstructured. Structured observation would be

utilized if a person wanted to gather information with regard to bullying on

a playground or within a particular setting. Unstructured observation would

be used if one wants to gather information in different contexts, i.e. the

locker room, buses, restrooms, etc. Observational methods are inexpensive,

fairly objective and typically are easy to conduct. However, observational

assessment may not correlate well over time, this can be overcome by

sampling behavior in multiple settings over long periods of time.

Interviewing is another method of assesment. It has been suggested that if

this method of assessment is used, the person conducting the interview

should be someone from outside the school. Students may be less