Abstract
The efficacy of youth violence prevention policies, programs, and practices partly depends on understanding the reasons for why students are targeted for victimization. However, what is known about why some students are targeted for victimization over others is limited to researcher-generated reasons and therefore may risk ecological validity. This study used a qualitative open-coding content analyses to make sense of 8531 students’ open-ended responses about the reasons why they were targeted for victimization at school. Results identified 35 commonly reported reasons, many of which are underrepresented in previous literature. Students primarily reported reasons related to relational dynamics, physical characteristics, non-physical personal characteristics, and characteristics external to themselves. These results portray reasons for being targeted as a social phenomenon with both individual and contextual components. Implications for theory, research, and practitioners are discussed.
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The authors acknowledge Texifter, LLC for their invaluable data analysis software support. Data collection was supported by the Tennessee Department of Education, Contract 33109-03813.
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Abbie R. Teurbe-Tolon is now at Project Return in Nashville, Tennessee. Brian Ketner is now at Hillsboro High School in Nashville, Tennessee.
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Gardella, J.H., Fisher, B.W., Teurbe-Tolon, A.R. et al. Students’ Reasons for Why They Were Targeted for In-School Victimization and Bullying. Int Journal of Bullying Prevention 2, 114–128 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42380-019-00017-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42380-019-00017-7