Classroom-Level Differences in Child-Level Bullying Experiences: Implications for Prevention and Intervention in School Settings

Objective: Bullying occurs within children's peer groups and in classroom and school settings. Accordingly, this study aims to characterize student-level heterogeneity and change in bullying experiences by classifying students into bully/victim subgroups and to characterize how these child-level bullying experiences coalesce at the classroom and school levels. Method: A sample of 692 students in Grades 3-5 from 6 elementary schools self-reported the frequency of their involvement in bullying and victimization during the fall and spring semesters of 1 academic year. We used multilevel latent Markov modeling to identify bully/victim subgroups and classroom-level subgroup mixtures. Results: We identified 5 child-level victimization-bullying classes and 2 classroom-level mixtures, which differ in the proportions of children with few or no experiences of victimization or bullying and children who reported high levels of victimization. The proportion of classroom-level mixtures differed significantly across sampled schools, suggesting that classroom bullying climate may be partly a function of school-level phenomena. Conclusions: Classroom-level differences indicate a need for unique prevention and intervention approaches. Targeted classroom interventions may be useful for influencing students moderately involved in bullying to transition into an uninvolved state, but more intensive, individualized interventions may be needed for students who are highly involved in bullying behaviors.