An Examination of Bullying in Different Institutional Contexts: undergraduate student notions of bullying in the school, the workplace and university.

Abstract

This project investigated the views of 49 university undergraduate students regarding the phenomenon of bullying in three distinct settings: their memories of compulsory education (primary and secondary), their personal workplace experience (or workplace study placement), and their life at one post-1992 university. The research design used 'active interviews' comprised of phases of interviewing individually and in groups, in which progressively deeper layers of interrogation sought to question their initial constructions of bullying. The study addressed two main research questions: how did students construct the concept of bullying in different contexts or settings, and how did the students explain differences in these constructions. The findings indicated that participants tended to view school-based bullying as being precipitated by within-person traits and personalities, but workplace bullying was thought to be driven by organisational structure or institutional ethos. Bullying at university was more difficult for them to discuss as most claimed little or no experience, directly or indirectly, of bullying while in higher education. As the study progressed, the participants expressed their understanding of bullying firstly through stereotyped and clichéd terms, but became much more critical and analytical when they were presented again with some of the contradictions and anomalies inherent in their earlier descriptions and explanations. Another important contribution to knowledge is the finding that participants viewed the higher education context as having several features that were protective against bullying behaviour, reducing their experience of bullying in HE to almost nil. These features: porosity, value of the learner to the institution, and voluntarism, were shown to hold important implications for understanding bullying in organisations or institutions; they develop and extend existing models found in adjacent fields of study.