Allison Seals & Arlene Josy-Allen
Springfield College SHS Houston
HUSB 305 H1
Professor Drayden
08/01/2014
Literature Review: Understanding and Preventing Bullying
Bullying is a wide-spread problem in our schools and communities that has long-term academic, physical, and emotional consequences for the victim, as well as the bystanders, and bully. To combat this issue many programs were created and implemented in schools throughout America. Their goal was to improve peer relations, and to create a safer, and more positive school environment for students to develop and grow. With the incidences of middle-school bullying showing minimal decline, the effectiveness of …show more content…
Though Ttofi and Farrington’s review (2009) is not a new idea, theirs stands out because of the obvious time, patience, and attention to detail they have put into it. Ttofi and Farrington explain their methods and search strategy: “In the present report, we go beyond previous reviews by: doing much more extensive searches for evaluations such as hand-searching all volumes of 35 journals from 1983 up to the end of May 2009; searching for international evaluations in 18 electronic databases and in languages other than English; and focusing only on programs that are specifically designed to reduce bullying and not aggressive behavior (i.e. the outcome variables specifically measure bullying). Leading researchers in the area of school bullying were also contacted via -mail.” …show more content…
In fact, the lack of credible published program evaluations was their biggest hurdle (as mentioned above), so they performed extensive literature searches from a 26 year period (1983-2009). The first large-scale anti-bullying program was implemented nationally in Norway in 1983. A more intensive version of the national program was evaluated in Bergen by Olweus (1991). The evaluation by Olweus (1991) showed a dramatic decrease in victimization (being bullied) of about half after the program. Since then at least 15 other large-scale anti-bullying programs, some inspired by Olweus and some based on other principles, have been implemented and evaluated in at least 10 other countries. Baldry and Farrington (2007) reviewed sixteen major evaluations in eleven different countries, of which five involved an uncontrolled methodological design. They concluded that eight of them produced desirable results, two produced mixed results, four produced small or negligible effects, and two produced undesirable results. American research is generally targeted on school violence or peer victimization rather than bullying. There are a number of existing reviews of school violence programs and school-based interventions for aggressive behavior (e.g. Howard, Flora, & Griffin, 1999; Mytton, DiGuiseppi, Gough, Taylor, & Logan, 2006; Wilson, Lipsey &