Essays on bullying are nothing new, considering the problem continues to plague schools across the world with devastating results, ranging from suicides to mass shootings. By assigning students the research about bullying, teachers bring the topic to the forefront of their minds and encourage discussion, increase understanding, and help find ways to stop or prevent bullying in school.
If you are reading this post, you must be at a loss. Where do you start a research paper on this topic? How do you structure it? Where do you find reliable sources? We’ll endeavor to answer these questions and more. By the end of our journey, you will be ready to complete your assignment and get a high grade.
Why Do You Have to Research Bullying?
WHY is the first question you ask whenever professors hand out new assignments. Without a clear understanding of the purpose of the paper, you do not feel obliged to give it your best. However, the topic of bullying is so important, there are actually a dozen reasons to appease your curiosity. You must learn about bullying to:
- Protect yourself from bullies. If you think only school children fall victim, you are either naive or too optimistic. While adults rarely resort to physical violence in the workplace, verbal, sexual, and even cyberbullying are present in most workplaces. As a recent graduate, you are the prime victim, without established connections within the team and no power over your coworkers. The research will help you identify the early signs of bullying and ways to protect yourself.
- Take action against bullying you notice. You might not be a bully, but if you let others become victims while you watch idly by, you are no better. While you might be afraid to confront a bully now, research will help you understand the reasons behind aggressive behavior and find effective ways to stop it.
- Understand yourself and others better. We are afraid of things we don’t understand. Once you realize what drives bullies to push and humiliate their victims, you will get the way our society works, and what words, emotions, and acts make us do what we do, even to our own detriment.
- Help your children once you start a family. In an ideal world, bullying would be eradicated in 5 to 10 years. However, considering the statistics, this seems unlikely. Therefore, there is a good chance your children will either be bullies or victims once they attend kindergarten or elementary school. Research on bullying will provide you with the helpful insight necessary to support and guide your kids should they become victims.
We hope these reasons are enough to get you excited about the prospect of bullying research. If so, let’s move on to the next question on your list. What should you study?
Research Paper Topics about Bullying
Even a simple search for bullying definition will return a dozen results. You can go with a dictionary explanation or a description by the World Health Organization, depending on the focus of your paper. This demonstrates how broad the issue is; therefore, it is impossible to cover its entirety in a single paper, unless you a writing a book or a Ph.D. thesis.
Let’s consider a few ways to narrow down the question and make it more suitable for your research paper. You can choose to confine your study to:
- A single country. If you don’t want to research bullying in the US, go with one of the EU states. It would be exciting to see whether Finland, a self-proclaimed educational leader, deals with bullying.
- One instance, year, or a decade. You can compare the evolution of bullying across several years or the months of one year. Zooming in on a single case of bullying and its repercussions is also an option.
- One school or district. If you get access to statistics or study numbers from a local school (or even your own), you can turn them into a case study, complete with practical recommendations on preventing hostile behavior among students.
- One form of bullying. Verbal abuse might not seem as powerful as physical damage, but it can cause adverse effects that last for decades and result in depression and even suicide. Cyberbullying is a new development, but no less worthy of your attention, considering the widespread adoption of social media and smartphones among school children.
You can apply several filters simultaneously to narrow down the research paper title about bullying even further. For example, you might only study cases of physical bullying in one school over the course of five years. This might seem too narrow for you, but the smaller the scope of your research, the more in-depth conclusions you are likely to draw. However, remember to keep the topic broad enough to collect enough sources and data for the required word count.
To help you generate ideas for your study, we’ve prepared a list of questions to ask about bullying when doing a research paper:
- Have you ever been a victim of a perpetrator of the bullying?
- What have you felt before, during, and after the act?
- What is bullying for you?
- Is bullying a necessary evil to teach children social interaction?
- Can bullying be totally eliminated?
- Is bullying ever good for the victim?
- Why are siblings bullying each other?
- Is physical bullying more damaging than the psychological one?
- Who is responsible for the bully’s behavior?
- How should bullies be punished for their behavior?
- Is bullying a sign of future antisocial behavior?
- Why do bullies and victims sometimes change roles?
- Should there be separate schools or classes for bullies?
- Why does bullying survive school and carry on to the workplace?
- Do bullies grow up to be more successful than their victims?
Tips on Research Paper about Bullying
You must have written a few research papers before, so it’s not your first rodeo. We’ll only touch on several critical issues that cause trouble for most students.
Use Reliable Primary and Secondary Sources
Depending on your research paper structure, you might use primary sources. These are first-hand accounts by bullies and their victims, surveys they fill in, and more. Ensure their testimony is not fictional, and there are records of the incidents they describe. Explain the purpose of your study and use the correct methodologies for statistical data analysis if you deal with survey results. Get permission in writing before you use any of the bullying accounts and avoid using real names.
There are plenty of secondary sources to support your research. However, you should be critical when choosing the works to cite. Use credible, peer-reviewed publications, reputable websites, and unbiased reports. Otherwise, your research paper will lose its credibility. A few right places to collect your sources include:
- American Psychological Association’s web page on Bullying
- StopBullying.gov
- National Education Association
- National Center Against Bullying
- Anti-bullying Alliance
- Academia.edu
- ResearchGate
- Google Scholar
- DeepDyve
Pay attention to the publication date, as cyberbullying is a relatively recent development, and several horrendous shootings and suicides caused by bullying occurred over the last few years.
Start Strong with Statistics
The hook is necessary to attract the reader’s attention, whether you write an essay or a case study. Research paper about bullying introduction can include a striking piece of statistics to draw attention to the problem. Here are a few good examples:
- Two-thirds of the school shooters were harassed or bullied at school.
- 87% of the bullies and their victims change roles over the years.
- Only 9% of the teachers correctly assess the number of bullying victims at 29%.
- 59% of the school staff expect the number of bullying victims to be under 10%.
- Bullying starts in kindergarten with 20% of children admitting to regular abuse.
- Less than 50% of bullies feel regret about their actions, while the rest are indifferent or satisfied about torturing their victims.
- Every fourth schoolyard bully in Norway gains a criminal record before turning 30.
- Bullies are 7 times more likely to use drugs and 5 times more likely to develop alcoholism problems.
Provide Visual Aids
Once you get deep into research and collect enough data to make your professor swoon, it is time to make it pop. Listing the numbers and percentages won’t do your hard work justice. Instead, use tables, diagrams, charts, and maps to enable the readers to assess the quality of your research at a glance. These should go into the Results section of your paper.
Your analysis of the visual and numeric evidence is better suited for the Discussion portion of the research paper. Here, you can compare the data sets, eliminate odd values, and draw conclusions based on the cleared and filtered data. You can also build predictive models and explain the repercussions of letting the bullying go on.
Don’t Neglect a Powerful Conclusion
What is a good conclusion for a research paper about bullying? It depends on your findings, but it should always include the rephrased thesis statement and your critical outtakes from the study. The rule-of-thumb states that a person not familiar with your work should understand the major points of the paper by reading the conclusion alone. Additionally, you can express your final thoughts and evaluate the results and suggest further research areas that could benefit your current results.
Not Ready to Take on the Research about Bullying on Your Own?
While being well-researched, this topic can turn into a trigger for some students, especially those that underwent poor treatment by their peers in school. Others might not be willing to examine their behavior and find out they were the bullies. Whatever your reason, there is a way to complete the assignment without putting yourself under undue stress. You can just delegate the writing to our experts. They have dozens of similar papers under their belts and can finish the assignment in record time. You only need to fill in the order form to get the ball rolling!