Middle School Students Participant Roles In Bullying Situations, And Peer Status

Bullying is now widely defined as intentional aggressive behavior that is repeated against a victim who cannot defend himself or herself, and it can be seen as a subset of aggressive behavior characterized by repetition and an imbalance of power. The struggle to reduce the incidence of bullying and its harmful consequences has been a humanitarian objective that has driven much of the research since 1980s. But studies on bullying have typically concentrated only on the individual characteristic of bullies or victims rather than the peer group context where bullying unfolds. In fact, researchers in this field often emphasized the social character of bullying, however, the view of bullying as a group process is seldom converted into empirical research. The present study investigated bullying as a group process using participant role approach. Different participant roles taken by individual students in the bullying process were examined and related to self-estimated behavior in bullying situations and peer status. About 617 Chinese secondary school students in grade two were investigated, using participant role questionnaire, peer nomination and the questionnaire about the bullying incidents experienced or watched by the participants. The major findings are as follows: 1,Bullying may be regarded as a group phenomenon in which most children of a school class have a definable participant role. The most common participant roles were the defender and outsider. 2,There was a statistically higher significant gender difference in the distribution of the participant roles. There were more defenders among the girls, while among the boys, the participant roles of bully, reinforcer, assistant and victim were more frequent. The frequency of the outsiders was about the same for both boys and girls. 3,The self-estimated scores on the bully, reinforcer, assistant, defender, outsider...