Giving Victims of Bullying a Voice: A Qualitative Study of Post Bullying Coping Strategies in Rural Youth

Background: Youth typically cope with stressors such as bullying victimization through two distinct coping mechanisms: emotion-focused coping (EFC) or problem-focused coping (PFC). EFC is an internal coping strategy that focuses on emotion regulation while PFC involves active behaviors that are aimed to decrease or eradicate the stressor. Current research on adolescent coping is limited in scope and is primarily quantitative, examines urban and suburban youth in Grades 1 through 6, and neglects to specifically assess how victims of bullying cope with being bullied. The current qualitative study fills these gaps in the literature by examining how rural middle- and high-school victims of bullying cope with victimization.

Methods: Using a combination of the Transactional Coping Model and the Approach-Avoidant Coping Model as guiding frameworks, the current qualitative study explored the coping strategies of 22 rural middle- and high-school youth victimized by bullying. Data were analyzed using a descriptive/thematic approach with grounded theory overtones. Data were analyzed using concept driven coding, followed by open coding, and then constant comparison was used to ensure that codes were applied identically across all interviews. In addition, drawings depicting bullying situations were collected from youth.   

 

Results: Youth reported using both emotion- and problem-focused coping strategies: responding to victimization with internalizing, externalizing, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms (EFC), coping by seeking help from parents and teachers (EFC and PFC), coping by physically or verbally fighting back (middle school only; PFC), coping by standing up for yourself (high school only; PFC), and coping through prosocial bystander behavior (PFC). Youths’ drawings reflected many of these themes.   

Conclusions and Implications: Past research documents the high rates of internalizing symptoms reported by victims of bullying, however the current study makes a new contribution to the literature with the finding that victimized youth report symptoms of PTSD (i.e., sleep disturbances, nightmares, hypervigilance, intrusive memories, avoidance of situation that caused initial trauma) suggesting that bullying victimization is a form of interpersonal trauma. The current study also found that while youth often seek support from parents and teachers, these adults figures are unable and sometimes unwilling, to put a stop to school bullying. This finding suggests that school personnel in particular need additional training in handling bullying situations. While middle school youth reported sporadically physically or verbally fighting back against their bullies in an attempt to end specific incidents of bullying, high school aged youth reported that in order to end their victimization they had to learn to defend themselves constantly. Many high school participants reported that victims needed to learn to stand up for themselves to end their bullying. Finally, almost all interviewed youth reported engaging in positive bystander behavior as a means of attempting to protect their fellow classmates from suffering from the pain caused by bullying victimization. This positive bystander behavior provided youth with a means of bolstering their self-efficacy and self-esteem and likely helped them combat the helplessness of being bullied.