Do teachers really underestimate the prevalence of bullying in schools?

Abstract

Previous studies undertaken internationally have concluded that teachers commonly underestimate the prevalence of bullying among students at their schools. Evidence supporting this claim is based upon findings that estimations of bullying prevalence derived from the self-reports of individual students are higher than the estimations made by teachers. However, this conclusion was not sustained when both teachers and students were asked to estimate the overall prevalence of bullying at their school. Students (N = 1688) and teachers (N = 63) at 36 government schools in Australia were asked to indicate how often they thought students at their school were bullied in nine different ways by other students. Constituted as a reliable 9-item scale, teachers obtained significantly higher prevalence scores on this measure (p < .001) and also on five of the nine measures of specific forms of bullying (p < .01). An examination of available results for 16 schools indicated that higher estimates of bullying prevalence were made by teaching staff representatives at 13 of these schools (p < .01). It was concluded that the claim that teachers underestimate bullying prevalence is not supported when the perceptions of teachers and students are assessed using the same demonstrably reliable measure; indeed, the results suggest that currently teachers in Australia may over-estimate bullying prevalence. The higher estimates of bullying prevalence provided by teachers in this study may be attributed in part to their beliefs about the prevalence of school bullying derived from media reports rather than from their awareness of how often individual students are bullied.