Bullying is a school and social epidemic. Research in this topic has focused on targets, or victims, of bullying, during middle school years, as this is when behavior often peaks. Little research has focused on bullies, and fewer still have focused on bystanders. This researcher sought to add knowledge to the understanding of the difficulties perpetrators and bystanders have and incorporate data surrounding elementary school-aged children experiences in bullying situations.
Participants in this study were 507 4th-8th grade students at three charter schools in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, who completed a modified version of the Me & My School questionnaire, which measures emotional and behavioral difficulties for children 8 years old and older, and a Traditional Bullying Measure, which has an offender (perpetrator) and victimization (target) subscale. This researcher created a Bystander subscale based on the items in the Traditional Bullying Measure subscales. Skip logic was used to separate participants into perpetrators, targets, or bystanders.
The researcher used Multiple Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) to compare the mean differences of emotional and behavioral difficulties (dependent variables) on status in a bullying situation (independent variable), with three categories (perpetrator, target, and bystander). Results indicated that emotional and behavioral difficulties are statistically significant from one another for both bystanders and targets. Emotional and behavioral difficulties were not significantly different from perpetrators.
