The school bullying research program: How it has developed, 1976-2020

Abstract

Several bibliometric analyses have commented on the rapid growth of research on bullying, and especially school bullying, over recent decades. There is now an international research effort, which might be called a research program, with several articles appearing on a daily basis. We review the previous bibliometric studies on school bullying and cyberbullying, which have mainly used the Web of Science database. To examine the content of research articles on bullying, we report an extension of previous research (Smith et al. 2021) to an examination of randomly selected samples of 100 journal articles relevant to school bullying over each of four time periods: 1976–95, 1996–2005, 2006–2015 and 2016–2020. Besides the number and country/continent of authors, and proportion of cross-country studies, we report on the type of article. For empirical articles, we report on the type of study (cross-sectional, longitudinal), type of data (quantitative, qualitative), source of data (e.g., self-reports, peer-reports, teacher nominations), main data focus (definitions/methodology, prevalence, correlates, attitudes, coping, cross-national), different types of bullying, various peer roles (bully, victim, bystanders etc.), differences in bullying (age, gender, ethnicity, disability), prejudice-based bullying, correlates of roles (e.g., individual, family, school, societal factors), peer roles, significant others, and interventions. We summarise what this analysis tells us about the development and focus of this research program, and some challenges the program faces in the future.