Journal Exercise #1

“The Link Between Parents’ Perceptions of the School and their Responses to School Bullying: Variation by Child Characteristics and the Forms of Victimization” by Tracy Evian Waasdorp, Catherine P. Bradshaw, and Jeffrey Duong.

Bullying and its effects on children’s behavior, mental health, academic performance, and the climate of school need to be prevented and intervened on time. It is important that families work with schools to better support the bullied students. In this study, the authors researched the relationship between parents’ perception of the school climate and their response to their child’s victimization. The authors’ research question tested the accuracy of the hypothesis, “The more positively parents perceived the school’s climate, the more likely a parent would be to contact the school when their child is victimized.” The authors also examined other demographic factors that might affect both their perception of the school and their response, such as gender, race, grade level. The results of their research stated that the hypothesis was incorrect and the reality was the inverse.

To answer their research question, the authors needed to gather data about how parents responded to their child’s victimization as well as their perception of the school. These are reports of behavior and shallow opinions, therefore the authors utilized surveys. They asked a sample of 773 parents questions about their demographic information, their responses to bullying, how they view the schools, and the form of their child’s victimization. This sample had the odds ratio of 1.12 and 95% confidence level. After the parents reported their demographic info, the first question was, “What did you do when your child told you about being bullied?” There were six possible answers of the different methods the parents chose to deal with their child’s victimization. The next question asked the parents to assess the school, giving them 9 options to check. Each option gave either a 0 or 1 rating, in which 9 options added up together to give the school a score–the higher the score represented a more positive view of the school’s climate. The last question gave parents options to check all the forms of bullying their child had experienced. The authors then analyzed these data with the Mplus 6.1 statistical software.

The result showed that their hypothesis was wrong. The more favorable parents viewed the school’s climate, the less likely they were to respond to their children’s victimization. However, there was a negative correlation between the level of victimization that child feels with the parental perception. Because of this, the authors extrapolated that the more their children were bullied, the less the parents trusted the school to handle their children’s safety and had to take matters into their own hand; whereas when they view the climate to be good because their children were not bullied as badly, they trust the school to sufficiently help their kids. Even though the result did not turn out as expected, it brought clarity to the question of when parents decide to be involved in their child victimization. It also opened up further questions about this topic. To expand on this research project in the future, one could conduct in-depth interviews with the parents to hear them explain why they have certain views of the school and why they react a certain way to bullying. Though this study was not perfect, the author fully explained all the limitations and why certain data did not work, (not enough data on minorities, the web survey being unable to reach certain demographics, etc.) This article would be a great place to start if one were interested in this topic because the data were well-collected and well-analyzed and the limitations were clearly explained with great tips on how to improve them.

Waasdorp, Tracy Evian, Catherine P. Bradshaw, Jeffrey Duong. 2011 “The Link Between Parents’ Perceptions of the School and their Responses to School Bullying: Variation by Child Characteristics and the Forms of Victimization.” Journal of Educational Psychology 103 (2): 324-335. doi: 10.1037/a0022748.