Student and parent attitudes toward bullying in middle school

Few studies have examined the role of parents in school bullying prevention efforts. The current study compared self-reports of bullying with parent reports in a sample of 287 middle school students. This study also examined whether parent attitudes toward bullying matched their child's attitudes and whether parent attitudes predicted their child's involvement in bullying. Additionally, one of the major objectives of anti-bullying work has been to change student attitudes toward bullying so that they are more sympathetic towards the plight of victims, less tolerant of bullying behavior, and more willing to seek help from staff. Therefore, the final research question of this study examined parent predictors of three student attitude scales, Willingness to Seek Help, Aggressive Attitudes, and Teacher Tolerance of Bullying. The results of this study indicated low agreement between student and parent report of bullying involvement as a bully or victim. There was little association between parental attitudes and those of their children. Nor did parent attitudes predict children's bullying behavior. The results from this study raise questions regarding parent knowledge of student bullying behavior and suggest the need for increased parental involvement in school anti-bullying efforts.

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Digitization of this thesis was made possible by a generous grant from the Jefferson Trust, 2015.

Thesis originally deposited on 2016-02-19 in version 1.28 of Libra. This thesis was migrated to Libra2 on 2017-03-23 16:36:41.