ATTITUDES AND BELIEFS ABOUT BULLYING AMONG AUSTRALIAN SCHOOL-CHILDREN

Attitudes and beliefs of Australian schoolchildren about bullying in s chools were assessed and related to age, gender and reported involveme nt in bullying others at school. Questionnaires were answered anonymou sly by 2940 boys and 2508 girls attending 20 South Australian coeducat ional schools; student ages ranged from 9 to 18 years. The questionnai res contained the following reliable multi-item measures: attitudes to ward bullying; normative pressure experienced by students to bully oth ers at school; attitudes to victims of bullying; perceived capacity to bully others; and proneness to bully others at school. Generally, the mean scores on the attitude/belief measures showed similar age trends to those indicating engagement in bullying behaviour. With increasing age, up to about 16 years, both boys and girls reported more engageme nt in persistent bullying and displayed attitudes and beliefs more sup portive of bullying. Beyond 16 years, however, both attitudes and beha viours moderated, as reflected in results showing significant curvilin ear (quadratic) relationships. Generally, pro bullying attitudes and b ehaviours were more common among boys. Multiple regression analyses co nducted separately for boys and girls showed that for both sexes each of the attitude/belief variables was independently and significantly r elated to pronensss to bully others; collectively they accounted for m ore than 30% of variance on this scale. Results on the attitude/belief measures were compared for two schools for which high and low levels of bullying were reported. As predicted, the measures individually and collectively discriminated between the schools. The implications of t hese results are discussed for strategies and practices to reduce bull ying in schools.