Bullying: Bullies, victims, and witnesses

This study examines bullying by focusing on bullies, victims, and witnesses. In an effort to examine long-term correlates of bullying, we asked university students about their experiences with bullying in middle school. We administered a 65 question survey to 191 college students from several university campuses. The survey was made up of the Handling Bullying Questionnaire (Bauman, Rigby & Hoppa, 2008), the Bullying Prevalence Questionnaire (Rigby & Slee, 2003), the Revised Pro-Victim Scale (Rigby, 1997), and 13 researcher created questions which dealt with the participants\u27 experiences with bullying. We hypothesized that rates of bullying would be high and that the long-term correlates of witnessing bullying would be the same as those for being a victim of bullying. Most of the participants reported witnessing acts of bullying and being victims of bullying in middle school. Very few participants reported bullying others. We found non-violent forms of bullying to be the most common. Bullies and witnesses, but not victims, were more likely to say they would intervene to stop a case of bullying. Otherwise, witnesses and victims responded similarly