Preventing bullying and promoting inclusion

Within this issue of Educational Psychology, four diverse papers focus on bullying, two of them in the context of cyberbullying. Two more papers address teachers’ attitudes towards students with special educational needs/inclusive education. Geographically, the issue includes data from several countries: Sweden (included in two studies), Cyprus, Macao and Taiwan, United Kingdom as well as Ghana.

While in the past the main task of schools was to achieve the best outcomes in students’ academic achievements, nowadays also students’ social and emotional development is strongly in the focus. For this reason, educational research – especially in the context of schools – has changed and a shift in focus can be observed. This shift becomes especially obvious not only in practice, but also in research, in particular when it comes to inclusive education (Schwab, 2020). The understanding of inclusion (in a broad sense) focuses on equitable, quality education and addresses all learners in their academic and social development (UNESCO, 2017; see also Ainscow, 2016; Watkins & Meijer, 2016). Students’ social participation is seen as both, a requirement and an outcome variable of high quality inclusion. In line with this, bullying in schools has been intensively studied as a growing phenomenon – even around 40 years after Dan Olweus’ first publications on this topic (Olweus, 1973, 1978). The subject has been investigated intensively because of the serious negative physical and psychological outcomes of bullying (Moore et al., 2017; Reijntjes et al., 2010). In recent times, also due to the COVID-19 pandemic, social life of students has shifted even more to the digital world. Students are more and more using technological tools in everyday life and therefore also the phenomenon of bullying partly was transferred in the online world: cyberbullying. Within Educational Psychology a significant contribution has been made to bullying research. In total, 26 papers have been published in the journal since the last 15 years which include bullying in the keywords and 41 publications which include ‘bullying’ in the title.

To understand the impact of moral disengagement in peer victimisation better, Sjögren et al. (2021) investigated the relation between students’ bystander behaviour and individual and classroom collective moral disengagement. Thus, the authors fill a gap in the literature by including possible classroom composition effects which is still rather rarely done in research. The authors categorised the different types of bystanders, those showing pro-aggressive behaviour, outsider behaviour and defender behaviour. In total, data from 1577 Swedish 5th grade students (from 105 classrooms) were analysed using multilevel analyses. Results of the study underpin the important role of both, individual as well as classroom collective moral disengagement.

The study of Charalampous et al. (2021) examined how cyberbullying develops and is maintained including individual and environmental factors. The theoretical basis for the study was a social-ecological diathesis-stress model for cyberbullying, including psychopathic traits, moral disengagement, school climate and gender as important variables. Four hundred seven high school students from Cyprus were divided into three groups: students with high, medium and low psychopathy scores. Results from structural equation modelling demonstrated differentiated effects for the three groups and gender.

Within an comparison study Sit et al. (2021) focussed on risk and protective factors of bullying in the subgroup of low-achieving students. Moreover, several individual students’ characteristics are taken into account: gender, immigration status and socio-economic status. As bullying was also addressed within the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 Well-being Study (see OECD, 2017), the authors compared the PISA data from Macao and Taiwan. Results confirmed the hypothesis that students’ perception of teachers behaving unfairly is a risk factor for bullying while students’ sense of school belonging and disciplinary climate are protective factors. Moreover, within the paper, the authors discuss what a high prevalence country (Macao) can learn from a low prevalence country (Taiwan) by taking into account empirical results.

Johansson and Englund (2021) stress the fact that the way in which bullying is measured is linked to study results. The authors examined the link between cyberbullying and traditional (physical, verbal, as well as relational) bullying. The question if cyberbullying can be conceptualised as a distinct phenomenon is answered by analysing association patterns with covariates (students’ gender, level of anxiety, number of friends). A structural equation modelling approach was used to investigate data from 355 Swedish students from grades 4 to 6. Results showed a rather high relation between cyberbullying and traditional bullying as well as similar relations with covariates.

The other two papers within this issue focus on teacher behaviour. In inclusive education, teachers are somewhat considered as the most important factor for successful inclusive education (Moen, 2008). As teachers’ attitudes towards inclusive education are seen as a key factor for inclusion, this topic has been addressed in a plenty of studies (de Vroey et al., 2016; van Mieghem et al., 2020).

The study by Woodcock and Moore (2021) expands this topic by examining stigma and teacher attributions towards students with specific learning difficulties (SpLD). Effects on teachers’ feedback, frustration level, sympathy as well as expectations on students’ future were analysed using case vignettes of students with and without SpLD. The study included 154 primary school teachers from the United Kingdom and the results pointed out that teachers responded differently to students with SpLD and indicated that teachers responses follow stereotypes.

Opoku et al. (2021) explored pre-service teachers’ attitudes towards inclusive education and investigated the effects of several demographic variables (contact experiences, knowledge, gender, age). A sample of 855 participants studying teacher training at either a public university or a college of education in Ghana participated in the paper–pencil survey. Against the body of previous literature in the field of teachers’ attitudes demonstrating that females have more positive attitudes compared to males (Schwab, 2018), the authors found slightly more positive attitudes for male pre-service teachers. Further effects were found, for example, for teachers’ previous interaction with students with disabilities and familiarity with inclusive education policy.

Summarising the impact of the selected articles, it can be stated that some of them made a significant contribution to the field by including variables which are still under-explored (such as those at class level) by investigating more in-depth the operationalisation of constructs or by finding controverse results. From all six studies, implications of the findings for research but also for practice (especially for future intervention) and policy can be drawn.

I would like to thank all reviewers for ensuring the high quality of the six papers included in the present issue.