Doctoral Dissertation Research: Understanding the Ecology of School Bullying

博士论文研究：了解校园欺凌的生态

• 批准号: 1519053
• 负责人: Robert Zussman
• 金额: $ 1.2万
• 依托单位: University of Massachusetts Amherst
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-06-01 至 2016-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1519053&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Understanding; Ecology

To date, 49 states have anti-bullying laws and all 50 have policies in place to protect youth from conflict in schools, yet we know little about how these initiatives are locally experienced, what effects they have, and how these effects vary for youth and their families based on social location. Drawing on theoretical tools from cultural sociology, this study seeks to expand empirical understandings of youth conflict by asking what bullying practices and anti-bullying policies accomplish and exploring what meanings they generate. Using an ethnographic approach, this study will look at how youth experience both conflict and bullying response, as well as the varying ways attention to bullying may obscure how young people engage in, and are affected by, inequality within school settings. Understanding the Ecology of School Bullying is an ethnographic study of the effects of bullying practices and anti-bullying initiatives within a high school community in the Northeast. This project ethnographically approaches bullying as a set of behaviors that emerge from a context-specific set of interdependent relationships among individuals, families, communities, and institutional norms and ideologies. The field site is a rural high school that, like many US schools today, is expressly committed to eradicating bullying among its student body and fostering a positive school climate. Through intensive fieldwork, observations of students' use of social media, and interviews with between 80 and 100 youth, parents, and school officials, this study examines how communities respond to experiences with youth conflict as well as their experiences with anti-bullying initiatives. In addition to offering contributions to sociological scholarship, this study will accessibly speak to a broad social science audience, and help policy makers make better-informed decisions that take into account the multiple effects that anti-bullying initiatives have on school communities and the lives of young people.

迄今为止，49个州有反欺凌法，所有50个州都有保护青少年免受学校冲突的政策，但我们对这些举措在当地的经验、它们的影响以及这些影响对青少年及其家庭的影响如何因社会位置而异知之甚少。利用文化社会学的理论工具，本研究试图通过询问欺凌行为和反欺凌政策的效果并探索它们产生的意义来扩展对青少年冲突的实证理解。使用人种学方法，本研究将研究青少年如何经历冲突和欺凌反应，以及对欺凌的不同关注可能会掩盖年轻人如何参与学校环境中的不平等，并受到不平等的影响。了解校园欺凌的生态学是一项民族志研究，研究了东北部高中社区内欺凌行为和反欺凌举措的影响。本项目从民族志角度将欺凌视为一组行为，这些行为源于个人、家庭、社区、制度规范和意识形态之间的相互依存关系。现场是一所农村高中，像今天的许多美国学校一样，明确致力于消除学生群体中的欺凌行为，培养积极的校园氛围。通过密集的实地调查、对学生使用社交媒体的观察，以及对80至100名青少年、家长和学校官员的采访，本研究考察了社区如何应对青少年冲突的经历，以及他们在反欺凌倡议方面的经历。除了对社会学学术的贡献外，这项研究还将与广泛的社会科学受众进行交流，并帮助政策制定者做出更明智的决定，考虑到反欺凌举措对学校社区和年轻人生活的多重影响。