Abstract
Bullying troubles parents, teachers, and children themselves. The emergence of bullying in children’s use of social media, often referred to as cyberbullying, has heightened concern for children’s social and emotional wellbeing. Bullying is troublesome in the context of how it is defined and identified in children’s social interactions with peers. The “trouble” with bullying for this thesis is that the common definitions and models of bullying are adult-generated and children’s perspectives are often missing in existing bullying literature. I have developed a child-centred approach to deconstruct assumptions in adult-generated definitions of bullying. I argue that marginalisation of children’s perspectives is a problem and present one approach to redressing the balance.
This thesis examines how children define bullying as a sense-making activity in the context of talking about their experiences of social media. It focuses on 11 – 13 year olds as a distinct social and emotional developmental stage, and a cohort for whom social media is becoming normal in their social world. Drawing on standpoint theory, social work theories, and childhood studies as a foundation, I developed a modified child-centred standpoint theory to critique the existing literature. The integrative research design I developed, including theoretical and analytic framework, supported an analysis of children’s methods for defining bullying to address this gap. The rich multimodal data set for this study was recorded at three schools in Wellington, New Zealand, designed to be consistent with ordinary classroom activities. The T-shaped analytic framework applies constructivist grounded theory for cross-sectional analysis of the data set, and ethnomethodology and membership categorisation analysis for granular analysis at key points.
My analysis revealed a distinctive interactional approach to making sense of bullying in participants’ accounts, in contrast with existing adult-generated definitions focused on behaviour or personality. Out of this analysis, I have developed a child-centred interactional model for defining bullying. This emergent model demonstrates the orderliness in children’s methods for defining bullying in the broader context of interactions that range from the playful to the conflictual and hurtful. This thesis offers new theoretical and methodological contributions to understanding this complex social phenomenon by placing children’s knowledges at the centre.