Bullying and Character Development

A substantive body of research demonstrates negative bias toward reporting characteristics of young people associated with bullying and cyberbullying in schools, as both victims and perpetrators. The current study proposes a different approach. A sample of 2,799 postprimary school pupils aged 12 to 19 years (M = 15.5, SD = 1.66), divided equally across males and females, completed the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths for Youth questionnaire (VIA-Youth; Park &Peterson, 2005) and Corcoran’s (2013) modified version of the net- TEEN questionnaire (Machmutow et al., 2012). A series of stepwise regression analyzes found that the strength of “prudence” was a common denominator predicting nonparticipation in school bullying—as both perpetrators and victims of traditional and cyberbullying. Furthermore, the current study identified a list of other character strengths, such as “fairness” and “love, which predicted noninvolvement of each of the 4 bullying groups (traditional bullies, traditional victims, cyber bullies, cyber victims) differently. Implications of the current research for both practitioners and researchers are discussed, including the potential for the creation of a prosocial, strength-based program to prevent bully/victim problems in schools.