Understanding Young People’s Experiences of Bullying: The Contribution of the Child-Centred Approach

In recent decades the phenomenon of bullying has attracted a great deal of research interest within the field of developmental psychology. Researchers have explored the nature of bullying behaviour, its prevalence within schools, the social and personality factors involved in the behaviour, as well as developing and testing interventions designed to tackle the problem. However, much of this research has been adult-focused. This paper examines the suitability of a child-centred approach to bullying. By its very nature bullying is a behaviour that tends to occur away from adults. However, it does occur in the presence of other young people and their insight can be invaluable in understanding and tackling the problem. A number of researchers have used a childcentred approach to explore this topic and findings from these studies will be discussed in terms of their contribution to the understanding of bullying among young people.