The study of school bullying has recently assumed an international dimension, but is faced with difficulties in finding terms in different languages to correspond to the English word bullying. To investigate the meanings given to various terms, a set of 25 stick-figure cartoons was devised, covering a range of social situations between peers. These cartoons were shown to samples of 8- and 14-year-old pupils (N = 1,245; n = 604 at 8 years, n = 641 at 14 years) in schools in 14 different countries, who judged whether various native terms cognate to bullying, applied to them. Terms from 10 Indo-European languages and three Asian languages were sampled. Multidimensional scaling showed that 8-year-olds primarily discriminated nonaggressive and aggressive cartoon situations; however, 14-year-olds discriminated fighting from physical bullying, and also discriminated verbal bullying and social exclusion. Gender differences were less appreciable than age differences. Based on the 14-year-old data, profiles of 67 words were then constructed across the five major cartoon clusters. The main types of terms used fell into six groups: bullying (of all kinds), verbal plus physical bullying, solely verbal bullying, social exclusion, solely physical aggression, and mainly physical aggression. The findings are discussed in relation to developmental trends in how children understand bullying, the inferences that can be made from cross-national studies, and the design of such studies.

This study examines the impact of a peer support service as an intervention to counteract bullying in a school with a serious problem. The impact of the intervention was assessed by a survey and by qualitative interviews with staff, peer supporters, users and potential users of the service. The survey indicated that the intervention had no overall effect on levels of bullying in the school as a whole or on the likelihood that peers would intervene to help. However, the interviews indicated that peer helpers and some victims were helped by the initiative, and some potential users of the service perceived it in a positive light. Some explanations of the findings and implications for implementation of such interventions are discussed.

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When a new field is explored, a variety of approaches can be used to clarify, identify and explain the phenomenon at hand. Traditional psychological research attributes a quasiphysical quality to the bullying phenomenon, and attempts to capture it by rigorous measurement of a number of variables. We argue that, while this approach has considerable advantages, an investigation of the way``amateur scientists'' explain``bullying'' can aid a more detailed understanding. The use of the Critical Incident Technique in focus groups allowed participants to make their implicit thoughts and feelings about bullying explicit. Participants revealed a number of auxiliary or alternative frameworks to account for bullying-related phenomena. It is suggested that these frameworks need closer scrutiny in terms of social representations. Implications of this approach are discussed in terms of their potential effect on policy development and implementation, highlighting the role organisational culture plays in this field.

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