Citation

Horton P, Lyng ST. Int. J. Bullying Prev. 2022; 4(3): 175-179.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s42380-022-00139-5

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

School bullying research has a long history, stretching all the way back to a questionnaire study undertaken in the USA in the late 1800s (Burk, 1897). However, systematic school bullying research began in earnest in Scandinavia in the early 1970s with the work of Heinemann (1972) and Olweus (1978). Highlighting the extent to which research on bullying has grown exponentially since then, Smith et al. (2021) found that there were only 83 articles with the term "bully" in the title or abstract published in the Web of Science database prior to 1989. The numbers of articles found in the following decades were 458 (1990-1999), 1,996 (2000-2009), and 9,333 (2010-2019). Considering cyberbullying more specifically, Smith and Berkkun (2017, cited in Smith et al., 2021) conducted a search of Web of Science with the terms "cyber* and bully*; cyber and victim*; electronic bullying; Internet bullying; and online harassment" until the year 2015 and found that while there were no articles published prior to 2000, 538 articles were published between 2000 and 2015, with the number of articles increasing every year (p. 49).

Numerous authors have pointed out that research into school bullying and cyberbullying has predominantly been conducted using quantitative methods, with much less use of qualitative or mixed methods (Hong & Espelage, 2012; Hutson, 2018; Maran & Begotti, 2021; Smith et al., 2021). In their recent analysis of articles published between 1976 and 2019 (in WoS, with the search terms "bully*; victim*; cyberbullying; electronic bullying; internet bullying; and online harassment"), Smith et al. (2021, pp. 50-51) found that of the empirical articles selected, more than three-quarters (76.3%) were based on quantitative data, 15.4% were based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative data, and less than one-tenth (8.4%) were based on qualitative data alone. What is more, they found that the proportion of articles based on qualitative or mixed methods has been decreasing over the past 15 years (Smith et al., 2021). While the search criteria excluded certain types of qualitative studies (e.g., those published in books, doctoral theses, and non-English languages), this nonetheless highlights the extent to which qualitative research findings risk being overlooked in the vast sea of quantitative research...

Language: en