Doctoral Dissertation Research: Understanding the Ecology of School Bullying

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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.