Doctoral Dissertation Research: Understanding the Ecology of School Bullying

到目前为止，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知之甚少，它们有什么影响，以及这些影响对青少年及其家庭的影响如何根据社会位置而变化。从文化社会学的理论工具，本研究旨在扩大经验的理解，青年冲突，问什么欺凌的做法和反欺凌政策完成，并探讨它们产生的意义。使用人种学方法，这项研究将着眼于青年如何经历冲突和欺凌反应，以及对欺凌的不同关注方式可能会掩盖年轻人如何参与，并受到影响，学校环境中的不平等。 了解校园欺凌的生态是一个民族志研究的欺凌行为和反欺凌举措的影响在东北部的高中社区。这个项目人种学的方法欺凌作为一组行为，出现在一个特定的背景下的一组相互依存的关系之间的个人，家庭，社区，制度规范和意识形态。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中的欺凌行为，并培养积极的学校氛围。通过深入的实地考察，观察学生使用社交媒体的情况，以及对80至100名青年、家长和学校官员的采访，本研究探讨了社区如何应对青年冲突的经历以及他们反欺凌举措的经历。除了为社会学奖学金提供贡献外，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。

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.