A Guide to Understanding Your Bullying Results

Within the Tell Them From Me survey, bullying is defined as “when a person tries to hurt another person, and does it more than once. It can be physical, verbal, or social, and can also take place over the internet with emails or text messages. The bully is usually in a position of real or perceived power over the person.”

Secondary students are asked to indicate how often they have experienced physical, verbal, social or cyber bullying over the past four weeks. Primary students are simply asked to indicate whether or not they experienced each type of bullying.

Using the “Click to see breakdown of the results by question” feature of this measure located within the Interactive Charts, you can view the frequency of each type of bullying (verbal, social, cyber and physical) broken down by each response option.

 

 

For school planning or reporting purposes the frequency percentages will allow schools to focus on each element of bullying separately such that they can isolate which forms of bullying are experienced more frequently. For example, in the results presented above we can see that verbal bullying occurs most frequently. This level of information allows for interventions to be targeted to specific areas of concern. These results can also be drilled down by sex and year level/grade to further isolate if specific subpopulations have higher levels of bullying in comparison to others.

For example, in the year level breakdown below we can see that year 11 students have greater frequencies of each type of bullying in comparison to their peers, and their results are greater than the aggregate overall percentages.

 

The bullying results within Tell Them From Me are also presented as the percentage of students experiencing moderate or severe levels of bullying based on the definitions presented below.

Primary Survey

Moderate bullying: Students are considered to be ‘victims of moderate bullying’ if they indicated they had experienced 2 types of bullying in the past month. Possible types of bullying include: physical, verbal, social, or cyber bullying.

Severe bullying: Students are considered to be ‘victims of severe bullying’ if they indicated they had experienced 3 or more types of bullying in the past month. Possible types of bullying include: physical, verbal, social, or cyber bullying.

Secondary Survey

Moderate bullying: Students are considered to be ‘victims of moderate bullying’ if they have experienced any physical bullying in the past month, or any one of verbal, social, or cyber bullying more than once a week.

Severe bullying: Students are considered to be ‘victims of severe bullying’ if they have experienced physical bullying more than once a week, or any one of verbal, social, or cyber bullying at least 4-5 times a week.

The combined result, or percentage of students experiencing either moderate or severe levels of bullying will enable schools to quickly gauge the severity of bullying experienced by students according to the definition established by The Learning Bar.

Reporting

Within the One-Click reports, results are aggregated by year level and sex, and represent the percentage of students who were victims of moderate to severe bullying combined. For example, in the chart below, 35% of students in year 4 indicated that they were victims of moderate to severe bullying, compared to 52% of year 5 students and 50% of year 6 students. The text to the left of the chart presents the findings for girls and boys as well as the aggregate (or overall total) percentage at the school level (in this example, 44%) in comparison to the NSW Govt norm (in this example, 36%).

 

 

Within the Interactive Charts, the aggregate results are presented as the percentage of students experiencing moderate and severe levels of bullying using a stacked bar (see yellow and red bar below). The results show that overall, 41% (red and yellow bar) of students indicate that they were victims of moderate to severe bullying. However, the results also show that 17.6% (red bar) of those students indicated they were victims of severe bullying. Drill- downs can be applied to these results. The chart below presents results for a year level/grade breakdown. The results at the year level represent the percentage of students who were victims of moderate and severe bullying combined. For example, in the chart below, 50% of the students in year 5 were victims of moderate and severe bullying, compared to 40% of students in year 6.