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