Article Review on Bullying Paper Example

One of the prevalent problems facing the education sector is the recurring issue of bullying among students. The negative practice of bullying can be referred to as the systematic misuse of power by a stronger party towards a relatively weaker party through an aggressive behavior aimed at causing harm to peers and it is done repeatedly to assert the imbalance of power by the bully towards their victim. There are various forms of bullying which include direct and indirect bullying. Direct bullying happens where there is either verbal abuse or physical aggression like stealing, hurting insults, and fighting. Indirect bullying occurs where there is the malicious spread of rumors or social exclusion where one is not invited to participate in fun activities with their peers. The advent of technology has brought with it cyberbullying which entails the bullying conducted electronically via the internet or cyberspace.

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There are certain similarities that are evident between the two scholarly articles that touch on bullying. The most conspicuous similarity is that both articles address the effects of bullying to the parties involved (Fullchange & Furlong, 2016). Both the victim and the bully are affected in one way of the other by this negative practice. The duo of authors in both articles are interested in understanding what the long term effects are to both parties. The effects of bullying cannot be understated as they leave permanent physical, emotional, or mental scars to either the victim or the bully involved in the acts of bullying. The authors adopt different approaches to drive their point home that, indeed bullying has unintended ramifications to the parties involved voluntarily as bullies or involuntarily as the victims of the bullies. Both articles excel in presenting the long term effects of this practice in the education system.

The other similarity between these two articles is that they acknowledge that bullying starts at a young age in an individual's childhood but their effects transcend the childhood or adolescent stage will into adulthood (Wolke & Lereya, 2015). This is a better explanation why the vice is rampant in schools and other educational institutions because children love to make fun and challenge their peers who may seem odd or helpless among them. Parent or teacher intervention is often called upon when one child is being victimized by bullies because of some distinguishing feature or characteristic that distinguishes them from the rest of the children. Unfortunately, bullying often takes place at such an early stage in a child's development that making bullies understand that their actions have negative repercussions is almost impossible.

The other similarity in the scholarly sources from the two sets of authors is that the bullying experienced at the childhood phase by an individual makes it hard for both the bully and the victim to cope well in their future adulthood. Such people grow up with issues where the bully believes that they are superior and the victim believes that they are inferior, with both of them have serious adaptation issues in the future due to the perception that they deserve it all or that they do not stand a chance in life respectively. Their adulthood is characterized by insecurities stemming from their respective roles as either the bully or the victim in their growing phase.

However, there are fundamental differences which can be found in the two articles. One contrast that emerges between the two is that the first article focused its research on a specific region of California where high school children from the schools in this territory were used to undertake the study (Fullchange & Furlong, 2016). The experiences of these students with bullying and victimization helped in the findings of the research. This is different from the second article which is not specific as it did not narrow down the research to any specific region. The article generalized its thesis giving a blanket conclusion without narrowing down to any given region or demographic of students. It looks at the issue of bullying in children of different age range without necessarily focusing on a specific territory. Children of various ages were used to assess the long term effects of bullying (Wolke & Lereya, 2015).

The other conspicuous difference between the two is that the first article tied the consequences of bullying in children to their later social-emotional well-being (Fullchange & Furlong, 2016). This entailed looking at the self-belief of the victims, their emotional competencies, their belief-in-others, and how they engage others in their day to day living. The belief in self is especially important because it helps understand the high rates of suicide while belief in others helps gauge their relations with others. The second article, however, does not confine itself to the social-emotional aspect of bullying as it generally delves into the physical, mental, and social impact that the habit of bullying has on its victims and bullies alike. The authors of the second article are interested in a wide scope of the long term effects of bullying that cover the physical, mental, and social consequences brought about by bullying (Wolke & Lereya, 2015).

Finally, the two articles differ in the approach they used to conduct their respective research. The first article applied a research methodology of conducting surveys among the Californian school students. A sample of 14,000 high school students was used to collect data and aggregate the results which were eventually compiled under the research findings (Fullchange & Furlong, 2016). This was achieved through the social emotional health survey which the authors used to collect information from the high school participants. The second article, however, derives its arguments from secondary sources through a research that relies heavily on the literature review of existing bodies of knowledge compiled by other researchers. Although it gives accurate findings at the end of the day, the approach is an indirect and inexpensive way of conducting research compared to the direct approach of surveying as the primary research methodology.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, the two sets of authors for both scholarly articles execute a splendid job of raising the evergreen issue of bullying that is rampant in the education system. Despite their similarities or differences, both the articles contain invaluable information that would go a long way in helping students, education scholars, other researchers, and relevant stakeholders on the long term impacts brought about by the issue of bullying. The first article, however, is the most interesting to go through than the second scholarly article because it is narrows its research to a specific effect of bullying captured through the social-economic impacts of the practice to the school and adult lives of the victims.

References

Fullchange, A., & Furlong, M. J. (2016). An exploration of effects of bullying victimization from a complete mental health perspective. SAGE Open. doi: 10.1177/2158244015623593.

Wolke, D., & Lereya, S. T. (2015). Long-term effects of bullying. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 100(9), 879-85. doi: 10.1136/archdischild-2014-306667.