By the Numbers: What the New York Times Tells Us About Bullying

Posted on 07. Nov, 2013 by Rebeldad in bullying, cyberbullying

I mentioned earlier in the week that the call for anecdotes about bullying — a joint project of the New York Times’ Booming and Motherlode blogs — was not just an opportunity to create an interesting anthology of bullying tales. It was also the opportunity to create a dataset that could be mined to learn more about exactly what people talk about when they talk about “bullying.” With so many stories, certain commonalities and trends were bound to emerge if the stories posted in the comments were examined closely enough.

So that’s what I did. I looked over all 255 comments (as of late Thursday evening) and code each and every one for a variety of factors: at what age (elementary school, middle school, high school, college) did the incidents take place? What was the sex of the victim? What kind of bullying was described (physical, emotional, cyber)? Did parents intervene? Was the anecdote a personal story of bullying, or was the narrative about the commenters child?

In the end, it ended being a relatively comprehensive dataset: 114 separate stories of bullying, which was more than enough to begin examining for patterns.**

There’s too much to examine in a single post without boring you guys, so this is the first in a three-part series. Next week, I’ll look at the differences in bullying patterns between boys and girls, and I’ll look at some of the striking differences between those who wrote about their personal experiences with bullying (in the long past) and those describing anecdotes of their children, which tend to be of a more recent vintage.

But the topline results are not without value. For starters, bullying is a sex-blind issue: 48.2 percent of posts talked about boys being bullied, 51.8 percent mentioned girls. A majority — 51.8 percent — involved children in elementary school.

Remarkably, more than a quarter of all stories dealt with a personal experience, despite the NYT’s clear ask for examples of where readers, as parents, intervened or failed to intervene. If anything, that’s a sign of how deep the wounds can be; years, even decades later, the NYT posts were an opportunity for readers to unburden themselves.

Perhaps the most interesting figure involved cyberbullying, which featured in only 4 of the 114 stories, a rate of less than 5 percent. The rate is almost certainly higher (no doubt there are bullying posts that failed the mention the involvement of social media), but given the attention to cyberbullying (remember, it’s the top keyword for Google searches about teens) and the general readership of the NYT blogs (from more-wired homes, I’d wager), the general silence on the topic is worth exploration.

** There are a number of reasons why this particular group of stories may not be representative of all bullying, and I won’t take pains to describe all of those biases here. Among other faults, there is certainly reporting bias (parents can only report what they know, and a child bullied in silence is invisible) as well as recall bias. The readership of Booming and Motherlode, too, may have surfaced more stories about certain age groups. Where details were not explicit, I have extrapolated details, including age and sex and type of bullying, from the context of the post. That extrapolation is an inexact process, but my hope is that the number of stories will, statistically, smooth out some of these liberties.