Waasdorp, Tracy Evian, and Catherine P. Bradshaw. 2011 “Examining Student Responses to Frequent Bullying: A Latent Class Approach” Journal of Educational Psychology 103 (2): 336-352. doi: 10.1037/a0022747.

Research on bullying is necessary to answer questions about how to prevent and deal with this major issue that is happening to our children. Because I did my first journal exercise on this same topic, I was able to find another interesting and relevant article from browsing the table of contents of the same Journal of Education Psychology issue for this exercise. The previous one I talked about deals with how parents respond to their children’s victimization. This one deals with the students’ response instead. This study is from two out three of the authors of the last article. Both of these articles were found in the Armacost Library Bound Periodicals section (LB 1051 .A2 J6).

Here the authors set out to find a pattern in the ways children respond to victimization.This study has three research questions in the form of three hypothesis. The primary one asked whether or not “discrete patterns” of responses would emerge. The patterns they were looking for were seeking of social support, aggressive, and passive response. From the previously published literature on this topic, they expect to see a difference in responses by gender and school level. The second research question inquired if the way children respond are affected by forms or frequency of bullying and if the victims were also bullies. The third question asked if the aggressive or passive was more dangerous.

To collect the reports of acts and behavior, the data gathering method that the author chose was to use an anonymous online survey in a Maryland public school district. Although many students completed the survey, the author wound up with a subsample of 4,312 bullied students after excluding those who were not victimized. The students answered questions about their demographic information, about how they responded to being bullied, about whether they externalized or internalized their problems, how they were bullied and how often they were bullied, and whether they have bullied others. The authors analyzed the data using both descriptive analysis and the Latent Class Approach with the Mplus 5.21 statistical program.

The result of their research found four patterns of responses, as opposed to the hypothesized three. Most students ignore the bully. The smaller group of aggressive responders differed in each gender groups–boys preferred to be more physically aggressive whereas girls were more verbal. The last two types of options were actively problem-solving by telling the bully to stop and support seeking from authority figures or friends; however, there was no pattern of one group that primarily chose this approach. There was another small group, called the undifferentiated/high class that endorsed most or all of the possible responses. This group showed the most internalizing and externalizing symptoms. The author theorized that ignoring/walking away is the more effective strategy for diffusing bullying and lessening social-emotional problems.

However, the limits this study had was that the authors could not confirm the causal relationship between some response strategies and social-emotional problems. They suggest longitudinal data for future research that wants to explore that relationship. Aside from the limit, this research reports clear findings on how different groups of students respond to bullying and how we can help them.

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