This article presents Inkla, a youth participatory action research project initiated by secondary school students and supported by university researchers and students. The main goal was to help secondary school students explore intragroup relations in school classes and problems students may encounter as bullying or peer group exclusion. It was also intended to design practical methods to stop bullying and create supportive peer groups. A group of secondary school students became student researchers and conducted interviews in their school classes which resulted in including their peers and teachers in well planned and research-based collective action to prevent bullying and improve school life. Outcomes demonstrate that the student voice can support or change a school’s antibullying policy if the responsibility for bullying prevention is shared with students who are treated as agents of change. This article also describes the complex process of building participative relationships in youth participatory action research.
Bullying is observed in schools worldwide with as many as 35% of students bullied by others. Group context and dynamics are critical for preventing bullying and creating supportive school environment, and therefore the primary focus of this study was the importance of the group dynamics involved in the practice of bullying in school contexts. Fieldwork was conducted in 2 consecutive stages: field observations and interviews in 4 class units (with 102 students in total) in 3 public middle schools in Poland. During observation, 4 long-term bullying cases were identified, enabling the analysis of how middle school students perceive, understand, rationalize, and explain bullying behaviors encoded in the peer group dynamics. Subsequently, 47 semistructured individual interviews were carried out with the students from the observed classes. Grounded theory approach was used to analyze the data. The results show that students involved in a particular bullying case built and shared a system of beliefs and behavioral labels. That system comprised shared perceptions of class structure in which bullying is a punishment for threatening class reputations, a shared idea of normality that is shaped in opposition to victimized students’ appearance and behavior and self-labeling of their own behavior. In terms of policy implications, the findings suggest that it could be beneficial to plan antibullying programs as a targeted, nonpunitive restorative intervention involving peer influences to transform bullying relations by removing behavioral labels.
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