Older Teenagers' Explanations of Bullying

Abstract

Background: In accordance with the social information processing model, how adolescents attribute cause to a particular social situation (e. g., bullying) they witness or participate in, influences their online social information processing, and hence, how they will act in the situation. Objective: The aim of the present study was to explore how older teenagers explain why bullying takes place at school, and whether there were any differences in explaining bullying due to gender. Methods: Two hundred and fifteen Swedish students in upper secondary school responded to a questionnaire. Mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative methods) were used to analyze data. Results: The qualitative analysis resulted in three main categories and nine subcategories regarding accounts of bullying causes. According to the findings, the youth explained bullying much more often with individualistic explanations (bully attributing and victim attributing) than non-individualistic explanations (social context attributing). Furthermore, girls tended to provide a greater number of bullying explanations and were more likely to attribute bullying causes to the bully and the victim, as compared to boys. Conclusions: The findings provide insights into older teenagers' understanding of why bullying occurs in school. The study also identified some gender differences but also some mixed findings regarding gender differences in comparison with previous research with younger participants. The authors concluded that more research has to be done to investigate age and gender differences. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.