The Asocial Approach to Bullying in School: Why Current Frameworks and Interventions are Insufficient.

This study seeks to understand 1) how school faculty and staff conceptualize bullying and "normal" conflicts, 2) the theoretical frameworks upon which these conceptions are based, 3) bullying and conflict intervention strategies used by school faculty and staff and 4) the ways these strategies account for power. Specifically, I investigate how faculty and staff at an elementary school perceive conflict and bullying incidents that reflect differential social status positions (e.g., sexist or homophobic teasing), how these faculty and staff interpret and respond to such occurrences and how their perceptions and actions reflect an awareness (or lack of awareness) of the role social power and cultural capital play in bullying/conflicts and intervention efforts. Current approaches to bullying and conflict are found to obscure ways in which power (i.e., social power rather than psychological or physical power) is salient to conflicts and to intervention strategies. During interviews staff demonstrate a common assumption that developmental or psychological problems cause children to be involved in conflicts and bullying. Furthermore, analysis of staff members' descriptions of their intervention strategies show they rely on conflict resolution techniques derived from psychological frameworks that presume children enter a conflict on an equal playing field. This study provides justification for further investigation of how current approaches to bullying and conflict may obscure or even reproduce children's unequal access to social power and strongly suggests that adding a sociological perspective to the current psychological perspective might account for and remediate (rather than reproduce) power differentials between children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]