Search

Teachers' responses to incidents of bullying among students can be important for bullying dynamics. Theoretical models of teachers' intervention competence and the theory of planned behavior suggest that teachers' bullying intervention self-efficacy may be associated with teachers' responses to bullying and students' bullying behavior and bullying victimization experiences. Several studies report an association between teachers' self-efficacy and their intervention behavior in incidents of bullying. However, the possible association with student bullying perpetration has rarely been examined so far. The current study explores the association between class teachers' self-efficacy and students' bullying victimization, perpetration, and combined bully-victim behavior in a sample of 2,071 students and their 93 class teachers in Germany. The results suggest an association between class teachers' self-efficacy and students' perpetration behavior. The higher teachers' bullying intervention self-efficacy, the fewer students seem to bully other students. In contrast, teachers' self-efficacy was not associated with students' victimization experiences and students' bully-victim behavior. Possible underlying mechanisms, as well as limitations of the present results, are discussed. Further research is needed to substantiate the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current investigation hypothesized and tested latent bully/victim traits for physical, verbal, or relational bullying/victimization, both cyber and traditional behaviors. Data were collected from 1,356 German students who attended Grades 5 to 10: 48.4% males, 49.3% females from eight different schools in Northern Germany. Based on two samples for cross-validation (N training set = 525, N validation set = 525), study findings provided strong evidence of adequate model fit, both for traditional and cyber behaviors. Consistent with the current state of knowledge, bullying and victimization latent traits highly associated, more so for cyber behaviors than traditional ones. Thus, both the theoretical plausibility as well as statistical evidence support the application of latent modeling to these behaviors. Further research is needed to replicate the applied measurement models proposed in this work and to reveal moderators or measurement invariance across diverse populations. Nevertheless, the current evidence substantiates the importance of the application of a latent modeling approach to overcome known psychometric challenges of reliability and validity in bullying research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]