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. 

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.

Constructivist grounded theory has earned a place in research worldwide and been applied in diverse fields. However, in educational research of teachers’ work in the classroom from the perspective of the teacher, it has had a lesser impact on research methodology. We argue for the benefits to educational research when using a constructivist grounded theory methodology. Our arguments focus on three concrete benefits: (1) Constructivist grounded theory focuses on participants’ perspectives, or main concerns, (2) by using an open, exploratory approach, and, (3) could involve investigating the relationships between the focused codes, preferably by using theoretical coding. We argue that constructivist grounded theory adds an analytical edge to work in classrooms, when skilfully deployed. These benefits with constructivist grounded theory differentiate the approach against other qualitative methods. Another important feature is focusing on the actions, and social processes, and thus making use of several theoretical codes. As we will outline in this paper, these features of constructivist grounded theory could help produce theoretical insights that could be valuable additions to educational research and educational practices

We investigate the importance of spatial, material, and organisational factors to gendered peer relations on the school football pitch. The study is part of an ethnographic research project exploring the relations between school bullying and the institutional context of schooling, focusing on the perspectives of teachers and pupils from preschool class up to grade eight (approximately ages 5-13). The findings in this study are based on participant observations and semi-structured interviews with pupils at three schools in Sweden. Our findings illustrate how social-ecological elements of spatial, material, and organisational factors such as school design, the material construction of the pitches, and the temporal organisation of the space through scheduling promote gendered positioning and fevered interactions which influence peer relations and sometimes contribute to degrading treatment, harassment and bullying. Our study demonstrates how these processes need to be understood as complexly related to social-ecological factors beyond the football pitch setting.

Skolmobbning är ett utbrett problem som fortsätter att negativt påverka livet för skolbarn, föräldrar och skolpersonal. Trots mycket forskning kring fenomenet är forskning om skolmiljöns betydelse för skolmobbning eftersatt. Syftet med projektet var att undersöka hur olika skolfaktorer påverkar skolmobbning och skolpersonalens förmåga eller vilja att ingripa samt vilken betydelse genus har för mobbning och ingripande mot mobbning.