Looking back and looking forward: implications for making interventions work effectively

Abstract

This volume represents an unprecedented opportunity to reflect on interventions to address bullying problems at school. The contributors have been generous in their willingness to be part of this collective reflection. We benefit from their honesty in not only sharing the highlights of successful outcomes but also in providing rare glimpses of the challenges and disappointments in their well-crafted attempts to reduce problems of bullying among school children. From this vantage-point, we can look back on the efforts in many countries to address this universal problem, and look forward to sketch out intervention, evaluation, and policy strategies for a more-informed and effective collective effort to reduce bullying problems and support healthy relationships among children and youth. With ongoing research efforts, the theoretical framework for understanding bullying is constantly being refined; however, developmental and systemic perspectives comprise its essential foundation. These perspectives relate to underlying causes of bullying which may involve individual risk characteristics of children, problems within the family, dynamics within the peer group, and problems within the classroom and larger school climate. Developmental perspective By considering bullying problems from a developmental perspective, we can recognise different developmental capacities, motivations, and vulnerabilities, as well as different peer-group dynamics of children at various stages. A developmental perspective also reveals that effective bullying interventions must be ongoing throughout children's school careers. Developmental differences There is great variability in the types of children who are involved in perpetrating bullying and being victimised.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 77 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.