“Harden Up and Face Reality:” Exploring Underlying Bullying Beliefs in New Zealand

ABSTRACT

A growing body of research illustrating the detrimental consequences of bullying has led to many antibullying interventions being developed. Despite good intentions, evidence suggests that such programs vary considerably in their efficacy. The current study examines the social discourse around bullying in the New Zealand environment in order to see whether underlying beliefs may undermine or influence approaches to mitigate bullying. The study employed an exploratory, qualitative approach of social discourses in the media. Using 31 online media articles, and 501 related online comments, methods of applied thematic analysis revealed three main themes which captured the beliefs that (a) victims of bullying are weak, (b) perpetrators of bullying are evil, and (c) bullying is a normal and, in some ways, acceptable behavior. Such findings illustrate the role that societal beliefs play in shaping the environment in which bullying occurs, and have important implications for future bullying research and interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Bullying
• New Zealand
• social attitudes
• victimization

Funding

This article was funded by the Early Start Marsden grant awarded to Dr. Jaimee Stuart by the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Notes

1. Cyberbullying was excluded due to a law change at the time of data collection, which did not concern the major aims of this study and would have skewed the data substantially.

2. This method saves information from a selected html website as a codeable (text selectable) PDF and automatically uploads it as a source into NVivo.

3. Each quote is identified by the article it was sourced (the letter A), and, when relevant, the associated comment number (the letter C). Note that, as some quotes were drawn from articles alone, they do not have an associated comment reference number.

4. Comments were posted using alias accounts and as such there were no personal identifiers. Nevertheless, in some cases it was evident that the same individual was commenting more than one time and therefore there are instances where multiple comments from the same individual were coded into the analyses (though this did not exceed three repeated comments).

Additional information

Funding

This article was funded by the Early Start Marsden grant awarded to Dr. Jaimee Stuart by the Royal Society of New Zealand.