Given their significance to school violence, this study quantifies the association between bullying victimization and perceptions of safety separately for victimization where the type is not specified versus victimization that is physical in nature. Generalized liner mixed modeling was employed with 5,138 sixth- to eighth-grade students in 24 schools who self-reported on their bullying victimization and perceptions of school safety on an anonymous survey in fall 2015. Results indicate a multiplicative interaction exists with regard to the odds of feeling unsafe at school among those who were bullied at all (odds ratio [ OR] = 3.1) compared to those who were bullied physically ( OR = 9.12). For school nurses who work with students with a variety of concerns and health issues, this research indicates that the use of bullying victimization as an outcome, proxy and/or predictor, requires inquiry into the type of bullying experienced to aid in the care and support received.

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No abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of a family-centered intervention delivered during early elementary school, the Family Check-Up (FCU), in supporting parents’ use of proactive parenting skills and the role that parental self-efficacy (PSE) has in promoting proactive parenting. We predicted both direct and mediated effects of the FCU on changes in proactive parenting. Participants were the primary caregivers of 321 kindergarten children and were randomly assigned to either the FCU or to a school-as-usual control group (n = 164 assigned to intervention). Results indicated that the FCU initiated during kindergarten enhanced proactive parenting skills directly and was mediated by PSE. These results highlight the FCU as an efficacious intervention in early elementary school in promoting proactive parenting skills and PSE and underscore the role of PSE as a primary pathway toward improved proactive parenting.

To understand the ways that social media users connect with celebrities about bullying, 1,280,151 posts that mentioned one of the top 302 celebrity users named within bullying keyword posts on Twitter between January 1, 2012 and December 31, 2012 were analyzed. Social science and computer science methods were combined to identify how individuals defined celebrities according to bullying roles and what features of celebrities and the tweets were related to the bullying roles. The results show that Twitter users defined celebrities most frequently as potential advocates against bullying. The results of a Principal Components Analysis identified an advocate/confidant role dimension and the distribution of celebrities across these dimensions were associated with celebrity type and age. A sentiment analysis revealed that the sentiments of the tweets that defined celebrities as advocates were more likely to be positive (e.g., "THANKSSSSS FOR YOUR SUPPORT"), than negative (e.g., you are MEAN). Together, the results suggest that social media is a space that holds potential for advocating against bullying versus being perceived primarily as a space where cyberbullying occurs. Knowing that social media is a context where celebrities can act as advocates, defenders, and role-models in the fight against bullying can be used to inform prevention, intervention, and advocacy programs.