Under Construction @ Keele 2017 Under Construction @ Keele Vol. III (3) | Page 27

who is classifying them. Further still, how important is it that we classify behaviours
as bullying, rather than simply as negative behaviours that impact students?
A few studies have attempted to measure student bullying using novel scales
specifically aimed at the HE population. Adena Young-Jones and colleagues created
a ‘Perceptions of Bullying Questionnaire’ based on a review of studies; they included
the categories of ‘verbal harassment’, ‘social exclusion’, ‘physical violence’ and
‘cyberbullying’. 29 Similarly, Nazan Dogruer and Hüseyin Yaratan also based their
scale on a review and therefore included ‘verbal’, ‘physical’, ‘emotional’ and ‘cyber’
bullying. 30 These coincide heavily with school-type bullying, and may be too
restrictive for identifying and measuring a broad range of behaviours. They
discovered that students experience verbal and emotional bullying, but rarely cyber
bullying; so few people indicated a physical-bullying involvement that this category
was removed from the scale. Physical bullying was also found to be the least
prevalent amongst undergraduates in the US in a study by Chapell. 31 However,
physical was defined as ‘hitting, shoving, pushing’, excluding other physically
aggressive actions, like interfering with someone else’s property.
A commonality between these studies is that they measure similar constructs,
and that students are indicating experiencing these behaviours at university, with
some more prevalent than others. However, thorough investigations are necessary
to robustly identify the range of behaviours that happen on campus. More
researchers should ideally aim for qualitative studies in which this can be explored in
greater depth; only students know what they find offensive. It is crucial to identify all
manners of offensive behaviour in order to record accurate prevalence rates of
bullying within HE.
Prevalence of Bullying
Within HE, the prevalence rates of traditional and cyber bullying seem to vary from
victims being rare, to over half of the sample admitting to having been a victim of
Young-Jones et al., “Bullying Affects More Than Feelings.”
Nazan Doğruer and Hüseyin Yaratan, “Developing a Bullying Scale for Use with University
Students,” Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal 42 (Supplement 1 to Issue 1)
(2014): 81S.
31
Chapell et al., “Bullying in College,” 53.
29
30