Introduction Adolescents are increasingly exposed to hate speech in both online and offline contexts, yet limited research has examined how such exposure is experienced and how it relates to adolescents' psychological needs and well-being. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory (SDT), this study explores how adolescents make sense of hate speech and how these experiences affect autonomy, competence, and relatedness in everyday peer and digital environments.Methods Ten focus groups were conducted with 46 Swedish upper secondary school students (girls and boys) aged 16-19 years. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis within a critical realist framework, allowing for an in-depth exploration of shared patterns of meaning across school-based and online contexts.Results Four interrelated themes were developed. Omnipresence of hate speech captured adolescents' experiences of hate speech as difficult to avoid and emotionally draining. Ambiguity of hate speech highlighted challenges in distinguishing hate speech from jokes, memes, or peer-based humor, complicating moral evaluation and response. Conformity to hate norms illustrated how social pressures encouraged tolerance of or participation in hostile talk to maintain belonging, often at the expense of autonomy. Finally, online-specific dynamics showed how anonymity and normalization facilitated hostile behavior, discouraged intervention, and undermined adolescents' sense of competence.Conclusions Adolescents experience hate speech as ambiguous, normalized, and difficult to resist, with clear implications for their autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The findings demonstrate how exposure to hate speech can shift motivation toward controlled regulation or disengagement, highlighting the importance of interventions that strengthen adolescents' psychological needs in both peer and digital contexts.

This paper explores how school-built factors and organisational dimensions contribute to bodily exposure, degrading treatment and bullying in school changing rooms. The findings in this study stem from an ethnographic research project exploring the relations between school bullying and the institutional context of schooling. The project focuses on the perspectives of teachers and pupils from pre-school class up to grade eight (i.e. approx. ages 5-15). In this particular study, we focus on participant observations and semi-structured interviews conducted at three elementary schools and one lower secondary school in Sweden.Analysis of the data was guided by constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014) [Constructing grounded theory (2nd ed.). Sage].Findings reveal how the changing room was a vulnerable and unsafe space associated with an ever-present fear of experiencing bodily exposure, degrading treatment, and bullying. Our findings illuminate how social-ecological elements such as the physical design of the space and organisational factors such as staffing and scheduling can both increase and decrease the risk of experiencing bodily exposure, degrading treatment, and bullying in the changing room. This demonstrates that much more consideration needs to be given to how social interactions and experiences within school changing rooms are influenced by school-built factors and the ways in which they are organised within the different social-ecological systems beyond the microsystem setting.

While teachers are obliged to report and investigate incidents of bullying, harassment, and degrading treatment in Swedish schools, research suggests that they sometimes struggle to decide which incidents to report. In this study, we investigate Swedish schoolteachers’ reflections on dealing with bullying, harassment, and degrading treatment, and on balancing their pedagogical work with juridical demands to report. The study is based on qualitative interviews conducted with teachers at three comprehensive schools in Sweden, which were analysed in relation to Bronfenbrenner’s social-ecological framework. The findings demonstrate that teachers make judgement calls regarding which incidents to report and that these influence and are influenced by micro-, meso-, exo-, macro- and chronosystem factors. The findings also suggest that increasing demands for professional accountability negatively affect the professional responsibility of teachers and may lead to them making judgement calls that are not always in the best interests of the children for whom they have responsibility. 

I en studie genomförd bland 234 elever i årskurs 4–9 i Linköping undersöktes sambandet mellan lärar-elevrelationer och studieengagemang över tid. Eleverna fick besvara en enkät om sin relation till lärarna och sitt engagemang i skolarbetet vid två tillfällen med ett års mellanrum. Resultaten visade att elever med positiva relationer till sina lärare var mer engagerade i sitt skolarbete både på kort och lång sikt. Vidare visade det sig att kvaliteten på lärar-elevrelationen vid det första mättillfället predicerade elevernas studieengagemang ett år senare, även när hänsyn togs till kön, ålder och tidigare engagemang. Däremot kunde inte elevernas engagemang förutsäga en förbättrad relation till läraren över tid. Slutsatsen är att det är lärarens förmåga att skapa och upprätthålla positiva relationer med eleverna som är avgörande för att främja deras studieengagemang. Resultaten understryker vikten av att skolor och lärare aktivt arbetar med att stärka och utveckla goda relationer till eleverna för att stödja deras engagemang och lärande.

In this article, we contribute to a discussion of ethics within school bullying research by reflecting on our own recent ethnographic study into the relations between school bullying and the institutional context of schooling conducted at three elementary schools and one lower-secondary school in Sweden. We argue for a reflexive, responsive, and flexible adult researcher role when conducting ethnographic research into school bullying; what we term the caring adult role. The caring adult role provides a means of ethically conducting research by helping to facilitate access, navigate power relations, provide a consistent starting point for deciding when to intervene in ethically questionable situations, and a way for adult researchers to differentiate themselves from those adults in schools who may be perceived by students as non-caring. We argue that this is an ethically sounder approach than one that suspends all adult-like characteristics and avoids directing or correcting the behaviour of children.

While the efforts of teachers are crucial for preventing and stopping degrading treatment, harassment, and bullying in schools, research has found that teachers’ understandings of such terms may vary significantly. In this qualitative study, we take a social-ecological perspective to investigate Swedish schoolteachers’ understandings of the terms degrading treatment, harassment, and bullying. The study is based on ethnographic research, which included participant observations and interviews conducted at three schools. The findings demonstrate not only the ways in which teachers blurred the conceptual boundaries between degrading treatment, harassment, and bullying, but also how such blurring was influenced by factors within the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem, and how the juridification of degrading treatment and harassment encouraged teachers to construct hierarchies of what they perceived to be more or less serious incidents.

In this chapter, I attend to how a Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT) approach has guided the design of some of my interview studies on school bullying. I focus on three key aspects in the constructivist approach that have been crucial in the design of the studies in question, including: (a) the theory–methods package combining symbolic interactionism and pragmatism; (b) how I included the sociology of childhood to explore students’ main concern(s) and develop my researcher role; and (c) the call for methodological self-consciousness to deal with issues of positionality. Throughout the chapter, I point to how these key CGT characteristics have offered me analytical tools for selecting what to attend to during data collection, for reflecting on myself as a researcher, and in shaping actions taken in the (re)design of the interview studies. I also examine how these aspects helped me reflect on positionality during my interview studies with students and use examples from some of my interview studies on school bullying for illustrative purposes.

In this paper, we draw on the concepts of figurations, capital, and hegemonic masculinity to analyse a bullying relation involving two fifth-grade boys at a Swedish comprehensive school. The findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork, which included participant observations and group interviews with eight teachers and fourteen students (seven girls and seven boys) from the same class. Our findings demonstrate the complexity of the relation between the boys and suggest that rather than constituting a straight-forward bullying situation involving a problematically aggressive 'bully' targeting a less powerful 'victim', it is part of a more complex figuration involving interdependent social relations that are tenuously balanced in terms of power dynamics and where the boys position themselves and are positioned in relation to the long-term symbolic norms of status dominant within their specific school field.

Teachers have a major impact on students social cognition and behaviors, and previous research has found that students who have positive relationships with their teachers tend to be less bullied by their peers. However, this line of research is limited in that it has been (a) Dominated by cross-sectional studies and (b) Treated bullying victimization as a global construct without differentiating among its different forms (i.e., verbal, physical, and relational). The links might be reciprocal but further studies are needed to investigate the directionality. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the longitudinal associations between student-teacher relationship quality and two forms of bullying victimization, namely verbal and relational victimization. Three waves of data from 1885 Swedish fourth- through sixth-grade students were analyzed with cross-lagged panel models. The findings showed that the student-teacher relationship quality predicted and was predicted by verbal and relational victimization. Our findings thus underscore the importance of striving for caring, warm, supportive, and respectful student-teacher relationships as a component of schools prevention efforts.