School Psychology Quarterly 2014, Vol. 29, No. 3, 233–237
© 2014 American Psychological Association 1045-3830/14/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/spq0000090
Understanding School Climate, Aggression, Peer Victimization, and Bully Perpetration: Contemporary Science, Practice, and Policy Dorothy L. Espelage
Sabina K. Low
University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign
Arizona State University
Shane R. Jimerson This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
University of California–Santa Barbara Existing scholarship suggests that classroom practices, teacher attitudes, and the broader school environment play a critical role in understanding the rates of student reports of aggression, bullying, and victimization as well as correlated behaviors. A more accurate understanding of the nature, origins, maintenance, and prevalence of bullying and other aggressive behavior requires consideration of the broader social ecology of the school community. However, studies to date have predominantly been cross-sectional in nature, or have failed to reflect the social-ecological framework in their measurement or analytic approach. Thus, there have been limited efforts to parse out the relative contribution of student, classroom, and organizational-level factors. This special topic section emphasizes a departure from a focus on student attitudes and behaviors, to a social-contextual approach that appreciates how much features of the school environment can mitigate or perpetuate aggression. This collection of articles reflects innovative and rigorous approaches to further our understanding of climate, and has implications for theory, measurement, prevention, and practice. These studies highlight the influence of school climate on mental health, academic achievement, and problem behavior, and will hopefully stimulate interest in and further scholarship on this important topic. Keywords: school climate, peer victimization, bullying, assessment, aggression, school-based intervention
Research findings from largely cross-sectional investigations has suggested that classroom practices, teacher attitudes, and the broader school environment play a critical role in understanding the nature and prevalence of aggression, bullying, and victimization. Although there are many different definitions of school climate, it is consistently described as the character and quality of the school culture or the overall ethos (i.e., milieu) of the environ-
Dorothy L. Espelage, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign; Sabina K. Low, T Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University; Shane R. Jimerson, Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology, University of California–Santa Barbara. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dorothy L. Espelage, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820-6925. E-mail: [email protected]
ment (Cohen, McCabe, Michelli, & Pickeral, 2009). This culture is created through the values, goals, norms, expectations, teaching practices, leadership styles, and bureaucratic structure of a school (National School Climate Council, 2007), and as such, is best conceived as a multidimensional construct, with psychosocial, organizational, and academic components (Roeser, Eccles, & Sameroff, 2000). Cohen et al., (2009) conceptualized school climate as having different dimensions; safety (i.e., clarity and consistency with rules), teaching/instruction, relationships, and physical environment/ resources. Positive school climate can minimize problematic behaviors by promoting safe environments and supportive/positive relationships for youth. A positive social school climate includes norms that support safety and respect for all members of the school and includes teacher and staff that model prosocial behaviors for their students (Cohen, 2014). In addition, if
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students have a positive perception of the school climate, they are less likely to engage in externalizing or aggressive behaviors (Espelage et al., 2000; Goldweber et al., 2013; Totura et al., 2009). On the other hand, a “culture of bullying” or aggression in a school can both encourage aggressive behavior and discourage reporting of aggression by bystanders (Bandyopadhyay, Cornell, & Konold, 2009; Espelage et al., 2000; Goldweber et al., 2013). Common cited indicators of school climate include both student and staff reports of their respective willingness to intervene in aggressive situations and administrative support in efforts to prevent aggression in the school (Bandyopadhyay et al., 2009; Goldweber et al., 2013; Harel-Fisch et al., 2011; Richard, Schneider, & Mallet, 2012; Totura et al., 2009; Waasdorp, Pas, O’Brennan, & Bradshaw, 2011). Although a few school climate studies have used student self-report and aggregated student data at the school level, a multiple informant approach that considers both student and staff perceptions of perpetration and victimization is less common in the extant literature. These dual perspectives are important, as student and staff perceptions can differ in significant and telling ways, and in combination, offer a more reliable and comprehensive snapshot of a schools’ overall health. Another related indicator of school climate can be discrepancies among students and staff, with regard to awareness of problematic peer behavior and teacher/staff willingness to intervene. At a basic level, teachers and staff often have discrepant perspectives on bullying rates in comparison to their students. Many teachers are unaware of how serious and extensive the bullying is within their schools, and are often ineffective in being able to identify bullying incidents (Bradshaw, Sawyer, & O’Brennan, 2007; Kochenderfer-Ladd & Pelletier, 2008). Divergence between staff and student estimates of the rates of bullying are seen in elementary, middle, and high school, with staff consistently underestimating the frequency of these events (Bradshaw et al., 2007). Although this discrepancy is not surprising (given staff and students are exposed to different behavioral contexts and nuances), passive or dismissive attitudes toward bullying or a lack of immediate intervention only serve to reinforce bullying behaviors because the perpetrator receives no negative con-
sequences (Yoon & Kerber, 2003) and it reduces trust between students and staff. However, studies of the impact of teacher attitudes or behaviors and students’ experiences with aggression and victimization are limited and do not generally employ longitudinal or multilevel designs, which are necessary to account for shared variance and nested data. The articles in this special topic section emphasize a departure from a focus on student attitudes and behaviors, to a social-contextual approach that appreciates how features or subsystems within the school environment can mitigate or perpetuate aggression. This special issue is predicated on the notion that school-based aggression is a reflection of the complex, nested ecologies that constitute a “schools’ culture” and thus, is best understood through an ecological framework. Despite this, current scholarship on this topic has too often been characterized by studies that capture only one dimension of climate or a singular perspective, which fail to account for the dependencies among subsystems within a school, leaving many questions for the field. Given that school climate is a multidimensional construct, reflecting different social contexts, it is important to unpack the most salient aspects of a school culture that are associated with peer aggression and victimization. This requires the use of measures that yield reliable and valid indexes of school climate and multilevel statistical approaches that model the nested nature of students in classrooms and schools. Only then can we parse out those aspects that are to be targeted in professional development training and school-wide prevention efforts. Also, in light of the plethora of prevention programming around bullying and violence, it is important to understand how the school environment can modify or shape the efficacy of prevention efforts. Articles Featured in This Issue Each of the articles in this special topic section include measures of school environment and school climate that range from brief measures (Konold et al., 2014) to surveys that assess a single dimension of climate (e.g., Wang et al., 2014) to a wide range of characteristics of the environment (Espelage, Bosworth, & Simon, 2014; Low & VanRyzin, 2014). It is important to have both brief and comprehensive measures
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
SCHOOL CLIMATE, PEER VICTIMIZATION, AND BULLYING
available to the field because of both practical (i.e., the push back of using instructional time for student and teacher surveys) and theoretical reasons. Two articles in this special issue focus on the construct validity of a brief measure. First, Konold and colleagues (2014) evaluate the psychometric properties of the Authoritative School Climate Survey, a scale that consists of items that assesses two key characteristics of school climate: disciplinary structure and student support. These two constructs were empirically linked to two additional constructs on this measure, including student engagement and prevalence of teasing and bullying in school. They evaluate the validity of this measure both at the individual student level and school level, which is the first study in the literature to do so. Second, White, Salle, Ashby, and Meyers (2014) evaluate the Georgia Brief School Climate, a nine-item measure of student perceptions of school climate. In their study, this scale demonstrates strong construct validity and reliability among a large sample of sixth and eighth graders. Despite the overlap among the academic and social environment in a school, very few scholars have examined the relation between school psychosocial climate, academic achievement, and victimization. In this issue, Wang and colleagues (2014) examine school-level climate in relation to student reported victimization and teacher-rated grade-point average (GPA) among fifth graders (n ⫽ 50 schools) in Canada. In their article, multilevel analyses reveal that both peer victimization and school climate were independently related to GPA, but school climate did not moderate the relation between victimization and GPA. Espelage and colleagues (2014) also employ a multi-informant approach by surveying teachers and staff through a comprehensive school environment scale in 36 middle schools. Students then report on their experiences with bullying, victimization, and their willingness to intervene in bullying situations. Through multilevel modeling, data suggest a school commitment to prevent bullying was associated with less bullying, fighting, and peer victimization. Student reports of bully perpetration and peer victimization were largely explained by staff/ teacher commitment to bully prevention, whereas fighting and willingness to intervene
235
were largely explained by student characteristics. Two articles assess changes in school climate longitudinally. First, Gage, Prykanowski, and Larson (2014) extend the cross-sectional work of previous papers in this issue by examining the association between school climate factors and bullying victimization across three school years in a large, diverse urban school district using latent class growth modeling. They examine these associations across the transition from elementary to middle school. Respect for diversity among students and racial diversity within the student population predict decreases in bullying victimization. Further, perceptions of teacher support associate with reductions in bully victimization among high-risk elementary youth, while peer support is predictive of reductions in bully victimization among high-risk secondary youth. In the second longitudinal study, Turner, Reynolds, Lee, Subasic, and Bromhead (2014) employ latent growth modeling to examine anxiety, depression, and school climate as predictors of changes in physical and verbal bullying perpetration and victimization among Australian youth in Grades 7 through 10. Similar to findings that Gage et al. present, academic and peer group support are strong predictors of decreases in bullying and victimization, and positive changes in identification with school also associate with decreases in bullying over time. Turner and colleagues also find that increases in depression and anxiety associate with increases in both bullying perpetration and victimization over time. These findings highlight the importance of examining individual psychological predictors of bully perpetration and victimization alongside school-level variables. Cortes and Kochenderfer-Ladd (2014) point to the important role of elementary classroom climate, and teacher-student relationships in reducing victimization. They assessed climate at the classroom level and found that elementary school classrooms where children perceive greater willingness to report bullying to their teachers consisted of less victimization. Further, in classrooms where the children indicated that teachers would directly address bullying, there was greater willingness among the children to intervene. This validates previous literature, suggesting positive, supportive relationships
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
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with teachers is associated with less victimization (Corrigan, Klein, & Isaacs, 2010). The final two papers in this issue on school climate involve intervention studies. Nese, Horner, Dickey, Stille, and Tomlanovich (2014) evaluate the Expect Respect 3-hr intervention to promote respectful behavior in three middle schools who were implementing a school-wide positive behavior support intervention. They find that verbal and physical aggression was significantly reduced in these schools, which was assessed via direct observation. However, no significant changes were reported in pre/ postratings of school climate, suggesting that although aggression was reduced in this short period of time, perceptions of the school climate were not changed. Low and VanRyzin (2014) also focus on the relation between school climate and stand-alone interventions, by examining baseline school climate as a moderator of impacts of the Steps to Respect (STR; Committee for Children, 2001) over a 1-year period. In this large scale randomized clinical trial, multilevel analyses reveal that positive school climate was strongly related to reductions in bullying related attitudes and behaviors in intervention and control schools. After controlling for school climate, intervention status yielded only one significant main effect. In addition, STR schools with positive school climate at baseline had less victimization at posttest. It is interesting that reductions in bully perpetration were found for those intervention and control schools in which the administration had clear policies about bullying and had a clear commitment to bully prevention. This study is important in suggesting that bullying prevention is a process, and that positive climate may be a foundational component of bullying reduction that also serves to enhance skills covered in stand-alone bullying prevention programs. Conclusions Taken together, this collection of articles validates previous scholarship on school climate (albeit with more advanced analytic methods), presents new measurement approaches to school climate, and furthers our understanding of how climate works in orchestration with programs that specifically target peer aggression/ violence in schools. These articles spawn several areas that warrant further inquiry. These
include, but are not limited to (1) understanding the temporal nature of school climate, and the transactional linkages between climate and peer aggression; (2) understanding how the different dimensions of climate operate to affect levels of problematic behavior; and (3) understanding how adopted prevention programs work in concert with school climate. This special issue originated out of the acknowledgment that all children deserve to learn in safe and supportive environments, and validates that central role of relationships (or psychosocial climate) on student achievement, motivation, mental health, and behavior. A healthy school community is not hospitable to bullying behavior and other forms of aggression/violence, but building and maintaining such communities is an evolving, complex process. It is our hope that future scholarship and resources be dedicated to understanding this important topic. References Bandyopadhyay, S., Cornell, D. G., & Konold, T. R. (2009). Validity of three school climate scales to assess bullying, aggressive attitudes, and help seeking. School Psychology Review, 38, 338 –355. Bradshaw, C. P., Sawyer, A. L., & O’Brennan, L. M. (2007). Bullying and peer victimization at school: Perceptual differences between students and school staff. School Psychology Review, 36, 361– 382. Cohen, J. (2014). Effective bully prevention efforts and school climate reform. In M. Masiello & D. Schroeder (Eds.), A public health approach to bullying prevention (pp. 23–56). Washington, DC: American Public Health Association. doi:10.2105/ 9780875530413ch02 Cohen, J., McCabe, E. M., Michelli, N. M., & Pickeral, T. (2009). School climate: Research, policy, teacher education and practice. Teachers College Record, 111, 180 –213. Retrieved from http://www .tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentId⫽15220 Committee for Children. (2001). Steps to Respect: A Bullying Prevention Program. Seattle, WA: Author. Corrigan, M. W., Klein, T. J., & Isaacs, T. (2010). Trust us: Documenting the relationship of students’ trust in teachers to cognition, character, and climate. Journal of Research in Character Education, 8(2), 61–73. Cortes, K. I., & Kochenderfer-Ladd, B. (2014). To tell or not to tell: What influences children’s decisions to report bullying to their teachers? School Psychology Quarterly, 29, 336 –348. doi:10.1037/ spq0000078
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SCHOOL CLIMATE, PEER VICTIMIZATION, AND BULLYING
Espelage, D. L., Bosworth, K., & Simon, T. R. (2000). Examining the social context of bullying behaviors in early adolescence. Journal of Counseling & Development, 78, 326 –333. doi:10.1002/ j.1556-6676.2000.tb01914.x Espelage, D. L., Polanin, J. R., & Low, S. K. (2014). Teacher and staff perceptions of school environment as predictors of student aggression, victimization, and willingness to intervene in bullying situations. School Psychology Quarterly, 29, 287– 305. doi:10.1037/spq0000072 Gage, N. A., Prykanowski, D., & Larson, A. (2014). School climate and bullying victimization: A latent class growth model analysis. School Psychology Quarterly, 29, 256 –271. doi:10.1037/spq0000064 Goldweber, A., Waasdorp, T. E., & Bradshaw, C. P. (2013). Examining the link between bullying behaviors and perceptions of safety and belonging among secondary school students. Journal of School Psychology, 51, 469 – 485. doi:10.1016/j .jsp.2013.04.004 Harel-Fisch, Y., Walsh, S. D., Fogel-Grinvald, H., Amitai, G., Pickett, W., Molcho, M., . . . Craig, W. (2011). Negative school perceptions and involvement in school bullying: A universal relationship across 40 countries. Journal of Adolescence, 34, 639 – 652. doi:10.1016/j.adolescence.2010.09.008 Kochenderfer-Ladd, B., & Pelletier, M. E. (2008). Teachers’ views and beliefs about bullying: Influences on classroom management strategies and students’ coping with peer victimization. Journal of School Psychology, 46, 431– 453. doi:10.1016/ j.jsp.2007.07.005 Konold, T., Cornell, D., Huang, F., Meyer, P., Lacey, A., Nekvasil, E., . . . Shukla, K. (2014). Multilevel multi-informant structure of the Authoritative School Climate survey. School Psychology Quarterly, 29, 238 –255. doi:10.1037/spq0000062 Low, S., & Van Ryzin, M. (2014). The moderating effects of school climate on bullying prevention efforts. School Psychology Quarterly, 29, 306 – 319. doi:10.1037/spq0000073 National School Climate Council. (2007). The school climate challenge: Narrowing the gap between school climate research and school climate policy, practice guidelines and teacher education policy. Retrieved from http://www.ecs.org/school-climate Nese, R. N. T., Horner, R. H., Dickey, C. R., Stille, B., & Tomlanovich, A. (2014). Decreasing bully-
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ing behaviors in middle school: Expect respect. School Psychology Quarterly, 29, 272–286. doi: 10.1037/spq0000070 Richard, J., Schneider, B. H., & Mallet, P. (2012). Revisiting the whole-school approach to bullying: Really looking at the whole school. School Psychology International, 33, 263–284. doi:10.1177/ 0143034311415906 Roeser, R., Eccles, J., & Sameroff, A. (2000). School as a context of early adolescents’ academic and social-emotional development: A summary of research findings. The Elementary School Journal, 100, 443– 471. doi:10.1086/499650 Totura, C. M. W., MacKinnon-Lewis, C., Gesten, E. L., Gadd, R., Divine, K. P., Dunham, S., & Kamboukos, D. (2009). Bullying and victimization among boys and girls in middle school: The influence of perceived family and schools contexts. Journal of Early Adolescence, 29, 571– 609. doi: 10.1177/0272431608324190 Turner, I., Reynolds, K. J., Lee, E., Subasic, E., & Bromhead, D. (2014). Well-being, school climate and the social identity process: A latent growth model study of bullying perpetration and peer victimization. School Psychology Quarterly, 29, 320 – 335. doi:10.1037/spq0000074 Waasdorp, T. E., Pas, E. T., O’Brennan, L. M., & Bradshaw, C. P. (2011). A multilevel perspective on the climate of bullying; Discrepancies among students, school staff, and parents. Journal of School Violence, 10, 115–132. doi:10.1080/ 15388220.2010.539164 Wang, W., Vaillancourt, T., Brittian, H. L., McDougall, P., Krygsman, A., Smith, D., . . . Hymel, S. (2014). School climate, peer victimization, and academic achievement: Results from a multiinformant study. School Psychology Quarterly, 29, 360 –377. doi:10.1037/spq0000084 White, N., La Salle, T., Ashby, J. S., & Meyers, J. (2014). A brief measure of adolescent perceptions of school climate. School Psychology Quarterly, 29, 349 –359. doi:10.1037/spq0000075 Yoon, J. S., & Kerber, K. (2003). Bullying: Elementary teachers’ attitudes and intervention strategie. Research in Education, 69, 27–35. doi:10.7227/ RIE.69.3 Received August 4, 2014 Accepted August 4, 2014 䡲
© 2014 American Psychological Association 1045-3830/14/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/spq0000090
Understanding School Climate, Aggression, Peer Victimization, and Bully Perpetration: Contemporary Science, Practice, and Policy Dorothy L. Espelage
Sabina K. Low
University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign
Arizona State University
Shane R. Jimerson This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
University of California–Santa Barbara Existing scholarship suggests that classroom practices, teacher attitudes, and the broader school environment play a critical role in understanding the rates of student reports of aggression, bullying, and victimization as well as correlated behaviors. A more accurate understanding of the nature, origins, maintenance, and prevalence of bullying and other aggressive behavior requires consideration of the broader social ecology of the school community. However, studies to date have predominantly been cross-sectional in nature, or have failed to reflect the social-ecological framework in their measurement or analytic approach. Thus, there have been limited efforts to parse out the relative contribution of student, classroom, and organizational-level factors. This special topic section emphasizes a departure from a focus on student attitudes and behaviors, to a social-contextual approach that appreciates how much features of the school environment can mitigate or perpetuate aggression. This collection of articles reflects innovative and rigorous approaches to further our understanding of climate, and has implications for theory, measurement, prevention, and practice. These studies highlight the influence of school climate on mental health, academic achievement, and problem behavior, and will hopefully stimulate interest in and further scholarship on this important topic. Keywords: school climate, peer victimization, bullying, assessment, aggression, school-based intervention
Research findings from largely cross-sectional investigations has suggested that classroom practices, teacher attitudes, and the broader school environment play a critical role in understanding the nature and prevalence of aggression, bullying, and victimization. Although there are many different definitions of school climate, it is consistently described as the character and quality of the school culture or the overall ethos (i.e., milieu) of the environ-
Dorothy L. Espelage, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign; Sabina K. Low, T Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University; Shane R. Jimerson, Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology, University of California–Santa Barbara. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dorothy L. Espelage, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820-6925. E-mail: [email protected]
ment (Cohen, McCabe, Michelli, & Pickeral, 2009). This culture is created through the values, goals, norms, expectations, teaching practices, leadership styles, and bureaucratic structure of a school (National School Climate Council, 2007), and as such, is best conceived as a multidimensional construct, with psychosocial, organizational, and academic components (Roeser, Eccles, & Sameroff, 2000). Cohen et al., (2009) conceptualized school climate as having different dimensions; safety (i.e., clarity and consistency with rules), teaching/instruction, relationships, and physical environment/ resources. Positive school climate can minimize problematic behaviors by promoting safe environments and supportive/positive relationships for youth. A positive social school climate includes norms that support safety and respect for all members of the school and includes teacher and staff that model prosocial behaviors for their students (Cohen, 2014). In addition, if
233
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
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students have a positive perception of the school climate, they are less likely to engage in externalizing or aggressive behaviors (Espelage et al., 2000; Goldweber et al., 2013; Totura et al., 2009). On the other hand, a “culture of bullying” or aggression in a school can both encourage aggressive behavior and discourage reporting of aggression by bystanders (Bandyopadhyay, Cornell, & Konold, 2009; Espelage et al., 2000; Goldweber et al., 2013). Common cited indicators of school climate include both student and staff reports of their respective willingness to intervene in aggressive situations and administrative support in efforts to prevent aggression in the school (Bandyopadhyay et al., 2009; Goldweber et al., 2013; Harel-Fisch et al., 2011; Richard, Schneider, & Mallet, 2012; Totura et al., 2009; Waasdorp, Pas, O’Brennan, & Bradshaw, 2011). Although a few school climate studies have used student self-report and aggregated student data at the school level, a multiple informant approach that considers both student and staff perceptions of perpetration and victimization is less common in the extant literature. These dual perspectives are important, as student and staff perceptions can differ in significant and telling ways, and in combination, offer a more reliable and comprehensive snapshot of a schools’ overall health. Another related indicator of school climate can be discrepancies among students and staff, with regard to awareness of problematic peer behavior and teacher/staff willingness to intervene. At a basic level, teachers and staff often have discrepant perspectives on bullying rates in comparison to their students. Many teachers are unaware of how serious and extensive the bullying is within their schools, and are often ineffective in being able to identify bullying incidents (Bradshaw, Sawyer, & O’Brennan, 2007; Kochenderfer-Ladd & Pelletier, 2008). Divergence between staff and student estimates of the rates of bullying are seen in elementary, middle, and high school, with staff consistently underestimating the frequency of these events (Bradshaw et al., 2007). Although this discrepancy is not surprising (given staff and students are exposed to different behavioral contexts and nuances), passive or dismissive attitudes toward bullying or a lack of immediate intervention only serve to reinforce bullying behaviors because the perpetrator receives no negative con-
sequences (Yoon & Kerber, 2003) and it reduces trust between students and staff. However, studies of the impact of teacher attitudes or behaviors and students’ experiences with aggression and victimization are limited and do not generally employ longitudinal or multilevel designs, which are necessary to account for shared variance and nested data. The articles in this special topic section emphasize a departure from a focus on student attitudes and behaviors, to a social-contextual approach that appreciates how features or subsystems within the school environment can mitigate or perpetuate aggression. This special issue is predicated on the notion that school-based aggression is a reflection of the complex, nested ecologies that constitute a “schools’ culture” and thus, is best understood through an ecological framework. Despite this, current scholarship on this topic has too often been characterized by studies that capture only one dimension of climate or a singular perspective, which fail to account for the dependencies among subsystems within a school, leaving many questions for the field. Given that school climate is a multidimensional construct, reflecting different social contexts, it is important to unpack the most salient aspects of a school culture that are associated with peer aggression and victimization. This requires the use of measures that yield reliable and valid indexes of school climate and multilevel statistical approaches that model the nested nature of students in classrooms and schools. Only then can we parse out those aspects that are to be targeted in professional development training and school-wide prevention efforts. Also, in light of the plethora of prevention programming around bullying and violence, it is important to understand how the school environment can modify or shape the efficacy of prevention efforts. Articles Featured in This Issue Each of the articles in this special topic section include measures of school environment and school climate that range from brief measures (Konold et al., 2014) to surveys that assess a single dimension of climate (e.g., Wang et al., 2014) to a wide range of characteristics of the environment (Espelage, Bosworth, & Simon, 2014; Low & VanRyzin, 2014). It is important to have both brief and comprehensive measures
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
SCHOOL CLIMATE, PEER VICTIMIZATION, AND BULLYING
available to the field because of both practical (i.e., the push back of using instructional time for student and teacher surveys) and theoretical reasons. Two articles in this special issue focus on the construct validity of a brief measure. First, Konold and colleagues (2014) evaluate the psychometric properties of the Authoritative School Climate Survey, a scale that consists of items that assesses two key characteristics of school climate: disciplinary structure and student support. These two constructs were empirically linked to two additional constructs on this measure, including student engagement and prevalence of teasing and bullying in school. They evaluate the validity of this measure both at the individual student level and school level, which is the first study in the literature to do so. Second, White, Salle, Ashby, and Meyers (2014) evaluate the Georgia Brief School Climate, a nine-item measure of student perceptions of school climate. In their study, this scale demonstrates strong construct validity and reliability among a large sample of sixth and eighth graders. Despite the overlap among the academic and social environment in a school, very few scholars have examined the relation between school psychosocial climate, academic achievement, and victimization. In this issue, Wang and colleagues (2014) examine school-level climate in relation to student reported victimization and teacher-rated grade-point average (GPA) among fifth graders (n ⫽ 50 schools) in Canada. In their article, multilevel analyses reveal that both peer victimization and school climate were independently related to GPA, but school climate did not moderate the relation between victimization and GPA. Espelage and colleagues (2014) also employ a multi-informant approach by surveying teachers and staff through a comprehensive school environment scale in 36 middle schools. Students then report on their experiences with bullying, victimization, and their willingness to intervene in bullying situations. Through multilevel modeling, data suggest a school commitment to prevent bullying was associated with less bullying, fighting, and peer victimization. Student reports of bully perpetration and peer victimization were largely explained by staff/ teacher commitment to bully prevention, whereas fighting and willingness to intervene
235
were largely explained by student characteristics. Two articles assess changes in school climate longitudinally. First, Gage, Prykanowski, and Larson (2014) extend the cross-sectional work of previous papers in this issue by examining the association between school climate factors and bullying victimization across three school years in a large, diverse urban school district using latent class growth modeling. They examine these associations across the transition from elementary to middle school. Respect for diversity among students and racial diversity within the student population predict decreases in bullying victimization. Further, perceptions of teacher support associate with reductions in bully victimization among high-risk elementary youth, while peer support is predictive of reductions in bully victimization among high-risk secondary youth. In the second longitudinal study, Turner, Reynolds, Lee, Subasic, and Bromhead (2014) employ latent growth modeling to examine anxiety, depression, and school climate as predictors of changes in physical and verbal bullying perpetration and victimization among Australian youth in Grades 7 through 10. Similar to findings that Gage et al. present, academic and peer group support are strong predictors of decreases in bullying and victimization, and positive changes in identification with school also associate with decreases in bullying over time. Turner and colleagues also find that increases in depression and anxiety associate with increases in both bullying perpetration and victimization over time. These findings highlight the importance of examining individual psychological predictors of bully perpetration and victimization alongside school-level variables. Cortes and Kochenderfer-Ladd (2014) point to the important role of elementary classroom climate, and teacher-student relationships in reducing victimization. They assessed climate at the classroom level and found that elementary school classrooms where children perceive greater willingness to report bullying to their teachers consisted of less victimization. Further, in classrooms where the children indicated that teachers would directly address bullying, there was greater willingness among the children to intervene. This validates previous literature, suggesting positive, supportive relationships
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
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with teachers is associated with less victimization (Corrigan, Klein, & Isaacs, 2010). The final two papers in this issue on school climate involve intervention studies. Nese, Horner, Dickey, Stille, and Tomlanovich (2014) evaluate the Expect Respect 3-hr intervention to promote respectful behavior in three middle schools who were implementing a school-wide positive behavior support intervention. They find that verbal and physical aggression was significantly reduced in these schools, which was assessed via direct observation. However, no significant changes were reported in pre/ postratings of school climate, suggesting that although aggression was reduced in this short period of time, perceptions of the school climate were not changed. Low and VanRyzin (2014) also focus on the relation between school climate and stand-alone interventions, by examining baseline school climate as a moderator of impacts of the Steps to Respect (STR; Committee for Children, 2001) over a 1-year period. In this large scale randomized clinical trial, multilevel analyses reveal that positive school climate was strongly related to reductions in bullying related attitudes and behaviors in intervention and control schools. After controlling for school climate, intervention status yielded only one significant main effect. In addition, STR schools with positive school climate at baseline had less victimization at posttest. It is interesting that reductions in bully perpetration were found for those intervention and control schools in which the administration had clear policies about bullying and had a clear commitment to bully prevention. This study is important in suggesting that bullying prevention is a process, and that positive climate may be a foundational component of bullying reduction that also serves to enhance skills covered in stand-alone bullying prevention programs. Conclusions Taken together, this collection of articles validates previous scholarship on school climate (albeit with more advanced analytic methods), presents new measurement approaches to school climate, and furthers our understanding of how climate works in orchestration with programs that specifically target peer aggression/ violence in schools. These articles spawn several areas that warrant further inquiry. These
include, but are not limited to (1) understanding the temporal nature of school climate, and the transactional linkages between climate and peer aggression; (2) understanding how the different dimensions of climate operate to affect levels of problematic behavior; and (3) understanding how adopted prevention programs work in concert with school climate. This special issue originated out of the acknowledgment that all children deserve to learn in safe and supportive environments, and validates that central role of relationships (or psychosocial climate) on student achievement, motivation, mental health, and behavior. A healthy school community is not hospitable to bullying behavior and other forms of aggression/violence, but building and maintaining such communities is an evolving, complex process. It is our hope that future scholarship and resources be dedicated to understanding this important topic. References Bandyopadhyay, S., Cornell, D. G., & Konold, T. R. (2009). Validity of three school climate scales to assess bullying, aggressive attitudes, and help seeking. School Psychology Review, 38, 338 –355. Bradshaw, C. P., Sawyer, A. L., & O’Brennan, L. M. (2007). Bullying and peer victimization at school: Perceptual differences between students and school staff. School Psychology Review, 36, 361– 382. Cohen, J. (2014). Effective bully prevention efforts and school climate reform. In M. Masiello & D. Schroeder (Eds.), A public health approach to bullying prevention (pp. 23–56). Washington, DC: American Public Health Association. doi:10.2105/ 9780875530413ch02 Cohen, J., McCabe, E. M., Michelli, N. M., & Pickeral, T. (2009). School climate: Research, policy, teacher education and practice. Teachers College Record, 111, 180 –213. Retrieved from http://www .tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentId⫽15220 Committee for Children. (2001). Steps to Respect: A Bullying Prevention Program. Seattle, WA: Author. Corrigan, M. W., Klein, T. J., & Isaacs, T. (2010). Trust us: Documenting the relationship of students’ trust in teachers to cognition, character, and climate. Journal of Research in Character Education, 8(2), 61–73. Cortes, K. I., & Kochenderfer-Ladd, B. (2014). To tell or not to tell: What influences children’s decisions to report bullying to their teachers? School Psychology Quarterly, 29, 336 –348. doi:10.1037/ spq0000078
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SCHOOL CLIMATE, PEER VICTIMIZATION, AND BULLYING
Espelage, D. L., Bosworth, K., & Simon, T. R. (2000). Examining the social context of bullying behaviors in early adolescence. Journal of Counseling & Development, 78, 326 –333. doi:10.1002/ j.1556-6676.2000.tb01914.x Espelage, D. L., Polanin, J. R., & Low, S. K. (2014). Teacher and staff perceptions of school environment as predictors of student aggression, victimization, and willingness to intervene in bullying situations. School Psychology Quarterly, 29, 287– 305. doi:10.1037/spq0000072 Gage, N. A., Prykanowski, D., & Larson, A. (2014). School climate and bullying victimization: A latent class growth model analysis. School Psychology Quarterly, 29, 256 –271. doi:10.1037/spq0000064 Goldweber, A., Waasdorp, T. E., & Bradshaw, C. P. (2013). Examining the link between bullying behaviors and perceptions of safety and belonging among secondary school students. Journal of School Psychology, 51, 469 – 485. doi:10.1016/j .jsp.2013.04.004 Harel-Fisch, Y., Walsh, S. D., Fogel-Grinvald, H., Amitai, G., Pickett, W., Molcho, M., . . . Craig, W. (2011). Negative school perceptions and involvement in school bullying: A universal relationship across 40 countries. Journal of Adolescence, 34, 639 – 652. doi:10.1016/j.adolescence.2010.09.008 Kochenderfer-Ladd, B., & Pelletier, M. E. (2008). Teachers’ views and beliefs about bullying: Influences on classroom management strategies and students’ coping with peer victimization. Journal of School Psychology, 46, 431– 453. doi:10.1016/ j.jsp.2007.07.005 Konold, T., Cornell, D., Huang, F., Meyer, P., Lacey, A., Nekvasil, E., . . . Shukla, K. (2014). Multilevel multi-informant structure of the Authoritative School Climate survey. School Psychology Quarterly, 29, 238 –255. doi:10.1037/spq0000062 Low, S., & Van Ryzin, M. (2014). The moderating effects of school climate on bullying prevention efforts. School Psychology Quarterly, 29, 306 – 319. doi:10.1037/spq0000073 National School Climate Council. (2007). The school climate challenge: Narrowing the gap between school climate research and school climate policy, practice guidelines and teacher education policy. Retrieved from http://www.ecs.org/school-climate Nese, R. N. T., Horner, R. H., Dickey, C. R., Stille, B., & Tomlanovich, A. (2014). Decreasing bully-
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ing behaviors in middle school: Expect respect. School Psychology Quarterly, 29, 272–286. doi: 10.1037/spq0000070 Richard, J., Schneider, B. H., & Mallet, P. (2012). Revisiting the whole-school approach to bullying: Really looking at the whole school. School Psychology International, 33, 263–284. doi:10.1177/ 0143034311415906 Roeser, R., Eccles, J., & Sameroff, A. (2000). School as a context of early adolescents’ academic and social-emotional development: A summary of research findings. The Elementary School Journal, 100, 443– 471. doi:10.1086/499650 Totura, C. M. W., MacKinnon-Lewis, C., Gesten, E. L., Gadd, R., Divine, K. P., Dunham, S., & Kamboukos, D. (2009). Bullying and victimization among boys and girls in middle school: The influence of perceived family and schools contexts. Journal of Early Adolescence, 29, 571– 609. doi: 10.1177/0272431608324190 Turner, I., Reynolds, K. J., Lee, E., Subasic, E., & Bromhead, D. (2014). Well-being, school climate and the social identity process: A latent growth model study of bullying perpetration and peer victimization. School Psychology Quarterly, 29, 320 – 335. doi:10.1037/spq0000074 Waasdorp, T. E., Pas, E. T., O’Brennan, L. M., & Bradshaw, C. P. (2011). A multilevel perspective on the climate of bullying; Discrepancies among students, school staff, and parents. Journal of School Violence, 10, 115–132. doi:10.1080/ 15388220.2010.539164 Wang, W., Vaillancourt, T., Brittian, H. L., McDougall, P., Krygsman, A., Smith, D., . . . Hymel, S. (2014). School climate, peer victimization, and academic achievement: Results from a multiinformant study. School Psychology Quarterly, 29, 360 –377. doi:10.1037/spq0000084 White, N., La Salle, T., Ashby, J. S., & Meyers, J. (2014). A brief measure of adolescent perceptions of school climate. School Psychology Quarterly, 29, 349 –359. doi:10.1037/spq0000075 Yoon, J. S., & Kerber, K. (2003). Bullying: Elementary teachers’ attitudes and intervention strategie. Research in Education, 69, 27–35. doi:10.7227/ RIE.69.3 Received August 4, 2014 Accepted August 4, 2014 䡲
