Bullying is defined as repeated negative behaviors that are directed against a person who has difficulties defending oneself (Olweus & Roland, 1983) and are triggered within a peer context (e.g., Rivara & Le Menestrel, 2016; Salmivalli, 2010; Schott & Søndergaard, 2014). Bullying can manifest in different ways (e.g., digital, physical, verbal, relational, bias-based), and are linked to detrimental outcomes for those who have been exposed to it (e.g., Reijntjes et al., 2010; Ttofi et al., 2011). These consequences can persist for many years, even into adulthood (Copeland et al., 2013; Myers & Cowie, 2016). Particularly damaging is persistent bullying over an extended period, which has been associated with more damaging outcomes than those stemming from short-term instances of bullying (Takizawa et al., 2015; Wolke et al., 2013; Zwierzynska et al., 2013). What is especially worrying is that even if bullying stops during school years, bullied students experience poorer outcomes on mental health in adulthood than among their peers who were never bullied (Bogart et al., 2014). Thus, there has been growing recognition of the significance of implementing measures to follow up with students exposed to bullying to prevent and reduce such negative consequences (Breivik et al., 2017; Lunder & Tharaldsen, 2020; Tharaldsen et al., 2017, 2021).

However, counteracting negative consequences from bullying can be a complex and challenging task. First, bullying may result in a diverse range of consequences, which may vary among genders (Carbone-Lopez et al., 2010), type of bullying (e.g., Sjursø et al., 2016), and complexity (e.g., bias-based bullying may be especially damaging since such bullying targets multiple social identities (Mulvey et al., 2018). Second, bullying can initiate a process in which peers socially construct the students’ exposed to bullying as different or abnormal in a negative way (Thornberg, 2015). Such collective shaping of the image of a student exposed to bullying can perpetuate the cycle of victimization and thereby limit the bullied students’ ability to use constructive coping strategies (Thornberg, 2015), commonly resulting in exclusion from social interactions (Schott & Søndergaard, 2014). Thus, it may be necessary to rearrange social dynamics in the peer ecology to mitigate consequences for students exposed to bullying, as suggested by previous research (Finne et al., 2018). However, assessing only the social context might be insufficient for counteract negative consequences from bullying since some students are still bullied even after whole-school anti-bullying programs are implemented (Kaufman et al., 2018) and may, in fact, experience worse consequences (e.g., Huitsing et al., 2019). Thus, researchers have argued that follow-up work should integrate individual-level actions (towards the student exposed to bullying), classroom-level actions, and school-level actions simultaneously (Lunder & Tharaldsen, 2020; Tharaldsen, 2021).

Previous research has shown that bullying has often been researched at either the system level (the influence of environment on bullying) or the individual level (the influence of individual characteristics on bullying) (Thomas et al., 2018); however, there is a need for knowledge about how the construct of follow-up work is understood by the authors of the studies in relation to the level at which they are conducted. Additionally, since the bullying literature has grown exponentially in recent years (Smith et al., 2021), there is also a need to investigate approaches for follow-up actions in recent empirical studies. Thus, an updated overview of the research on follow-up actions towards students exposed to bullying will serve several purposes. First, it will contribute to a better understanding of which levels of follow-up work have previously received attention and which remain under researched. Secondly, increased knowledge of how the construct of following up with students exposed to bullying is understood and used in research is necessary for a common understanding of how future research contributions can reduce the impacts of bullying in schools. Lastly, the results from this scoping review will also provide additional knowledge about methodological approaches and measurements. Thus, this review can guide policymakers and researchers in identifying important areas of future research. More specifically, our research questions are as follows:

  1. 1.

    What are the study characteristics (publication year, country, educational level, and gender proportion of the sample) of research on follow-up work towards students exposed to bullying?

  2. 2.

    What methodological approaches (methodology, method, design, sample size), and measurements are used, and what are the timeframe of the bullying measurements in these studies?

  3. 3.

    At which level are the follow-up actions taken (individual, class, school or combination), and what approaches to following up with students exposed to bullying do the authors refer to?

The Aim of the Current Review

Scoping reviews are conducted to explore and identify a body of literature and gaps in knowledge, clarify concepts and definitions, and investigate research evidence to inform practice; additionally, such reviews are recommended for areas where much of the evidence is still emerging (Arksey & O’Malley, 2005; Peters et al., 2020; Tricco et al., 2018). Based on the abovementioned arguments, a scoping review was suited for the current study, which aims to provide an overview of the existing research on follow-up actions of students exposed to bullying, investigate the methodological approaches taken and clarify the concept of follow-up with students exposed to bullying, which currently to the best of our knowledge lacks a common agreed-upon understanding among practitioners and researchers. Moreover, since scoping reviews allow for less restrictive inclusion criteria and for such criteria to evolve post hoc (Gupta et al., 2023), this method enabled the understanding of follow-up work to evolve out of the process of conducting the review.

Methods

In this scoping review, we followed the guidelines from the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) (Peters et al., 2020). A protocol was outlined and agreed upon within the research team prior to this review and uploaded to the Open Science Framework Registry (https://osf.io/3mcps).

To ensure due diligence, we followed Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005) five-stage framework: (1) identify the research questions, (2) identify relevant studies, (3) select the studies, (4) chart the data, and (5) collate, summarize, and report the results. In sum, the aim was to (a) identify and characterize the existing follow-up actions taken towards students exposed to bullying at school and (b) conceptually map how the construct of following up with students exposed to bullying is used and understood in the literature.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

The inclusion criteria for the studies were that the studies described actions that were (a) taken to reduce or prevent consequences from bullying; (b) directed toward a student exposed to bullying in elementary/primary school, middle/junior high school, or upper secondary/high school; (c) taken within a school setting; and the study was (d) was written in English; and (e) was peer reviewed. Hence, the exclusion criteria were based on the following: topic (e.g., described initial actions solely related to stopping or preventing bullying); target group (the participants were exposed to bullying in early childhood education care, higher education, or workplace); context (described follow-up actions conducted in the municipality, such as EPS or psychiatric services, or in families etc.); language (any language other than English); and (e) was not peer reviewed.

Literature Search

Following the protocol detailed above, a systematic literature search of articles was carried out in January 2023 using a multistep search strategy. First, to identify search terms for finding relevant studies, we developed the keywords by (a) conducting pilot searches in electronic databases, (b) analyzing the text and index words used in articles to identify search terms for the topic, and (c) testing the search terms in the databases to see if two chosen articles would arise in the search. During the pilot searches, we also conducted unsystematic searches in Norwegian in Oria, Idunn, and Google Scholar but found no relevant sources. The development of the search string started with using terms such as “bullying and victimization,” which produced an unmanageable number of articles. Thus, synonyms related to bullying formulated in the past tense (e.g., previous* bullied) were used. The final search string thus consisted of three categories of search terms and their synonyms: “been exposed to bullying,” “follow-up actions,” and ‘school,” combined with the Boolean operator “AND,” and modified to suit the specific database. The search string is available in the preregistration for the study.

Before the full search was conducted, the search string was approved by two international experts in the field of bullying research. Given that the objective was to encompass a wide range of literature, no year limitations were used. The electronic search was conducted in the ERIC, Academic Search Premier, OVID (PsychInfo), SCOPUS, SocINDEX, and Web of Science databases due to their relevance to the topic. After the full search was conducted, the citations were uploaded to EndNote and imported into Evidence for Policy and Practice Information (EPPI), and duplicates were removed.

Selection of Sources of Evidence

The selected studies were identified in line with the inclusion/exclusion criteria after a pilot test by all reviewers was performed on 10% of the studies to gain a common understanding of the criteria. The reviewers then worked independently (reviewer 1 screened all studies, and reviewers 2, 3, and 4 screened one-third each) to screen the titles and abstracts of all retrieved studies. Disagreements were subsequently resolved through discussion. Then, a meeting was held among all the reviewers to recalibrate the eligibility criteria. From this discussion, the inclusion criterion (a) were changed from the protocol and were thereafter defined as presented in this review, producing a new common understanding amongst the authors. To our knowledge, a common agreed-upon understanding of the construct of following up with students exposed to bullying did not exist prior to this review. In the protocol, our inclusion criteria was “report theoretically or empirically on actions that have been taken or should be taken to follow-up students after bullying.” We detected during the screening process that the studies did not consistently describe their follow-up actions as actions taken “after bullying,” as suggested by, e.g., Lunder and Tharaldsen (2020), and used in our protocol. Thus, as a scoping review allows to revise the inclusion criteria post hoc (Gupta et al., 2023), we decided to change our initial inclusion criteria to actions that were taken to reduce or prevent consequences from bullying, but not limited to “after bullying.” This enabled a broader insight into how follow-up actions are understood and used in the literature.

Then, before the full texts were screened, 10% of the studies were pilot tested by all the reviewers. Then, reviewers 1 (all articles) and 2 and 4 (half of the articles each) independently screened the full texts, before solving disagreements by discussion. Following the completion of the full-text screening, the reference lists of the included studies were read to assess potentially relevant studies.

Data Extraction and Analysis

The data were extracted in the EPPI-Reviewer after a pilot test of the data extraction form was performed on 10% of the identified studies (n = 5) independently by reviewers 1, 2, and 4 to calibrate the items. Disagreements were resolved by discussion. Two reviewers subsequently used the EPPI registration form to extract (a) study details (e.g., publication year, country, study design, methodology, methods and respondents and measurements), sample characteristics (e.g., number of participants, age, gender, and educational level), (b) definitions of follow-up actions (if applicable), and characteristics of the actions (e.g., name of the action, level of the follow-up action).

After the data extraction, two reviewers worked with categorizing the extracted information, aiming to characterize the descriptive characteristics, methodological approaches, and measurements and to conceptually map the construct of following up with students exposed to bullying within existing research. During this process, several meetings were held to discuss and compare the data, refining themes from the initial categorization by revisiting the data. To ensure a thorough and well-considered analysis of the data, we used a collaborative approach involving a back-and-forth process until consensus regarding the common descriptive categories was achieved. The data were transformed to visual graphs and tables using Excel.

Results

Study Identification

The electronic search produced 5445 hits across the six databases: 291 in PsychInfo, 2295 in Academic Search Premier, 911 in SocIndex, 345 in Scopus, 1407 in Eric, and 196 in the Web of Science. The identified studies were uploaded to EPPI-Reviewer. After 1385 duplicates were removed, 4060 articles remained for the title and abstract screening. Then, 12 studies from an initially identified report (Breivik et al., 2017) were added. From these 4072 articles, 4027 were excluded in line with the eligibility criteria: topic (n = 3719), context (n = 67), target group (n = 30), language (n = 129), and duplication (n = 82). The remaining studies for full-text screening were n = 45. Following the full-text screening, 29 additional studies were excluded: topic (n = 14), context (n = 2), publication type (n = 7), duplicate (n = 1), and availability (n = 5). Thereafter, 4 studies were identified from the reference lists. This resulted in a final sample of n = 20 for data extraction (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

PRISMA flowchart

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Research Question 1: Study Characteristics

The 20 studies included in this review were conducted from 2003 to 2022 in 11 countries. Most of the studies (50%) were from Europe, 35% from Americas, 5% from Oceania, and 10% from Asia. The highest proportion of research was undertaken in primary/elementary school only (55%), followed by middle/junior high school only (10%), and no studies were undertaken in upper secondary/high school only. The remaining studies researched both primary/elementary and middle/junior high school (15%), both middle/junior high school and upper secondary/high school (5%), or all three educational levels (15%). Ninety percent of the studies included both boys and girls. An overview of the studies is presented in Table 3, added as an Appendix.

Research Question 2: Methodological Approaches and Measurements

Eighty percent of the included studies used a quantitative methodology with self-report questionnaires as the method (n = 18), 10% of the studies used a qualitative method with focus group interviews (n =2), and 10% combined individual interviews and questionnaires (n = 2). The designs used were as follows: 40% used a randomized-control trial (n = 8), 35% used a nonrandomized control trial (n = 7), 10% used qualitative (n = 2), 10% used mixed methods (n = 2), and 5% used quantitative descriptive (n = 1). There were a wide range of sample sizes (from n = 5 to n = 7741). Most of the studies (80%) used a multi-informant approach, most commonly (55%) involving students exposed to bullying and their peers. All the studies included two or more different measurements. In total, 31 different measurements were found in the studies, distributed among the categories shown in Fig. 2. Table 1 explains the content of the categories in Fig. 2. Further, the timeframes of the bullying measurements used varied from “not reported” (n = 12), “last month” (n = 1), “the past two months” (n = 1), “within the recent/previous couple of/last months” (n = 3), “a previous six-month period” (n = 1) “the past school year” (n = 1), and “one year ago or more” (n = 1).

Table 1 Explanation of the categories from Fig. 2
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Fig. 2
figure 2

The proportions of different follow-up action categories were measured (n = 71)

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Research Question 3: Targeted Level, and Approaches Taken to Follow up with Students Exposed to Bullying

As the articles were reviewed, three categories emerged regarding whom the actions were directed at (i) students exposed to bullying, (ii) a group of peers (here: a small group of peers of the student exposed to bullying), and (iii) the whole school. The majority of the actions were directed towards students exposed to bullying, comprising 50% of the studies (n = 10). Twenty-five percent of the studies assessed actions only at the school level (n = 5). The remaining 25% of the studies assessed both students exposed to bullying and a group of peers (n = 5). 

From the interventions/actions referred to by the authors (presented in Table 3, added as an Appendix), four main types of approaches or following up with students emerged (Table 2): psychosocial support approaches (9 studies), peer support approaches (5 studies), teacher support approaches (1 study) and universal support approaches (5 studies).

Table 2 Explanation of the categorization of approaches taken to follow up with students exposed bullying
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These approaches were distributed among the studies as shown in the Fig. 3.

Fig. 3
figure 3

Proportion of follow-up approaches taken to follow up with students exposed to bullying (n = 20)

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Discussion

To enhance the understanding of follow-up work towards students exposed to bullying, this scoping review aimed to identify and characterize the body of related research on follow-up work in terms of previous studies’ characteristics (publication year, country, educational context, and gender proportion of the sample); methodological approaches (methodology, method, design, and sample size); and measurements, and conceptual mapping of the approaches used in the follow-up work based on the level (individual, class, school or a combination of levels) at which the actions were taken. Overall, the results showed that there is little research on follow-up work towards students exposed to bullying (n = 20). All the studies were conducted over the last decade; they covered a wide range of national and educational contexts and were conducted approximate equally among boys and girls. The methodological approaches were primarily quantitative and experimentally measured various mental health outcomes through self-report questionnaires completed by bullied students. No common timepoint for initiating follow-up actions towards students exposed to bullying was shared amongst the authors. Common approaches included offering psychosocial support, with a notable emphasis on individualized efforts for bullied students. Since no common agreed-upon understanding of the construct existed to our knowledge prior to this review, this overview enhances the understanding of follow-up work in preventing prolonged consequences of bullying.

Overview of Study Characteristics

Despite the growth in bullying research, there has not been an increase in recent years in the number of studies assessing follow-up actions towards students exposed to bullying. The limited number of related studies does not correspond with the exponential development in overall bullying research (Smith et al., 2021), implying a research gap in relation to the actions taken to follow up with students exposed to bullying. However, the included studies covered a wide national context, implying that this topic has gained interest worldwide. Additionally, all three educational levels were assessed, suggesting that potential age-specific consequences from bullying have been researched. However, the primary emphasis in related research on actions undertaken in elementary/primary school contexts may be explained by the importance of quickly addressing the consequences to limit the risk of their prolongation (e.g., Copeland et al., 2013; Myers & Cowie, 2016; Reijntjes et al., 2010; Ttofi et al., 2011). Also, the literature covered in this review might provide a foundation for policies that are sensitive to gender nuances in follow-up work. This is important, given that previous research has stated that boys and girls may experience different consequences from bullying (Carbone-Lopez et al., 2010).

Overview of Methodological Approaches and Measurements

The majority of the included studies were quantitative and had an experimental design, which is consistent with other areas of research on bullying (Hong & Espelage, 2012). However, the discrepancy in methodological approaches may limit the possibility of capturing the complexity of follow-up work. RCT was the most common research design, and it potentially offers good opportunities to enhance knowledge about best practices. Nevertheless, since there may be individual differences arising from bullying (e.g., Carbone-Lopez et al., 2010; Reijntjes et al., 2010; Wolke et al., 2013), RCTs could be a less preferred design to research follow-up actions towards students exposed to bullying, since the evidence derived is insensitive to, e.g., interpersonal influences on children (Oakley et al., 2003). Thus, single case experimental design studies may be preferable, due to their potential of demonstrating causal effects individually for the participants (What Works Clearinghouse, 2022). Accordingly, we recommend more mixed methods research to enrich the understanding of the phenomena being study (Creswell et al., 2003), thus enabling richer insights into the complexity of individual experiences, perceptions and contextual factors is possible.

An additional challenge in the literature was that the research methods used in the articles were predominantly self-report questionnaires, which may contain bias due to their subjective nature (e.g., Bouman et al., 2012). Since bullied students often blame themselves for the bullying they experience (Thornberg et al., 2017) and tend to attribute this to hostile tendencies when interpreting social information cues (Guy et al., 2017; van Reemst et al., 2016), self-reports alone may not be a reliable method for investigating follow-up actions towards students exposed to bullying. This may underscore the need for observational research methods, as these can potentially provide less biased analysis of the participants (Crothers et al., 2006). Research employing observational methods is also lacking in the literature on bullying (Espelage & Swearer, 2003). Additionally, biases related to self-reports are more likely to occur when researchers use only one reporting method instead of multiple methods (Bouman et al., 2012; Cornell & Cole, 2012). Thus, a combination of methods is needed to research follow-up actions towards students exposed to bullying.

In contrast to the methodological approaches, the portrayal of the measurements used in the studies was more varied, potentially directing attention to the importance of mitigating different consequences from bullying to prevent their continuation (e.g., Bogart et al., 2014). This variety could be explained by and underscores the idea that bullying can cause multiple consequences. However, because mental health outcomes account for the largest proportion of measurements, more than half of the studies treated follow-up actions as individual work seeking to mitigate the consequences for students exposed to bullying as they appear, conflicting with the importance of changing the peer ecology (Finne et al., 2018; Schott & Søndergaard 2014; Thornberg et al., 2017). Additionally, a relatively high proportion of studies measuring bullying incidence was detected. This might imply that some authors assume that follow-up actions towards students exposed to bullying are merely the prevention of new or persistent incidences of bullying, relying on research showing that bullying might persist despite efforts being implemented to stop it (Huitsing et al., 2019). This understanding of follow-up work towards students exposed to bullying could advocate that consequences after bullying needs to be addressed either on the individual or the system level in addition to stop the bullying, posing a risk for unsuccessful mitigation of the consequences for the student exposed to bullying.

Nevertheless, the unequal distribution of what was measured in these studies may imply that several aspects of the multilevel understanding of follow-up actions following exposure to bullying have been proposed in previous research (Finne et al., 2018; Lunder & Tharaldsen, 2020; Tharaldsen, 2021). On the other hand, the variety of measurements poses the risk of spreading areas of knowledge too far apart to reach a consensus on important issues (Volk et al., 2017), thus underscoring not only the need for meta-analyses to investigate validity across findings but also the fact that follow-up actions are understood differently among the authors. To gain a more rigorous understanding of how the construct of follow-up work towards students exposed to bullying is understood by researchers, the approaches taken in the studies thus need to be considered.

The results from analysis of the timeframe of the bullying measurements indicated that no common “timepoint” for initiating follow-up actions are shared amongst the authors of the included studies. The high frequency of studies not specifying the timeframe since the student was exposed to bullying poses a risk that the bullying was still ongoing while initiating the action. Initiating follow-up actions to mitigate consequences while bullying persists may however be problematic; a student exposed to bullying may interpret the follow-up action received as if the adults approve the bullying, potentially reinforcing the process of stigma and self-blame experienced by many students as a result of exposure to bullying (Thornberg, 2015). Thus, it could be argued that actions to stop bullying should be taken before initiating actions to reduce or prevent consequences from it. Furthermore, the alternative option detected in this review, where follow-up actions are initiated after a period of time (e.g., 1 month, 6 months, or more than 1 year ago), may also cause problems; students exposed to bullying have expressed that they felt unsafe at school and struggled with negative consequences right after the active bullying actions ceased (Lunder & Tharaldsen, 2020). Consequently, the absence of studies following up with students exposed to bullying right after the completion of anti-bullying initiatives is therefore concerning.

Overview of the Targeted Level and Follow-up Approaches

The picture was somewhat clear regarding whom the actions were directed at, confirming the findings of previous research (Breivik et al., 2017). Bullied students were the most common targets of the actions, which is likely due to the fact that there are so many potential consequences linked to bullying but could mean that contextual factors are neglected in the follow-up literature. Research on actions aimed at restructuring the social environment of the bullied students was absent from the sample. This is worrying, since bullied students are often excluded from social interactions (Schott & Søndergaard, 2014), are placed in a position where they are not able to employ constructive coping strategies (Thornberg, 2015), and have difficulty overcoming negative reputational biases that form against them even when they behave in socially acceptable ways (Dodge et al., 1982; Hymel et al., 1990). Thus, research aiming at repairing wounds within the classroom environment after bullying to reduce the consequences of bullying (Finne et al., 2018) are needed. Hence, it is worrying that none of the identified studies assessed the classroom level.

Additionally, there was a lack of research assessing the individual, class, and school levels simultaneously. Within the literature on acting at different levels simultaneously, only bullied students and peer groups were assessed. Thus, the understanding of the construct of following up with students exposed to bullying among the authors of the empirical studies assessed in this review seems to conflict with the findings of previous theoretical studies suggesting that follow-up work is multifaceted and includes both individual and systemic work simultaneously (Lunder & Tharaldsen, 2020; Tharaldsen, 2021). Furthermore, actions assessing both the universal and individual levels simultaneously are needed within bullying research (Thomas et al., 2018). Hence, additional research using a multilevel approach is recommended.

Despite the homogeneity in levels targeted by the follow-up actions in the literature, there was a variety of follow-up strategies targeted at students exposed to bullying (Table 3 added as an Appendix). The variety of approaches in the studies can be understood as a result of the various consequences that have been linked to bullying. However, the divergence in actions taken in the literature could create barriers for practitioners when implementing follow-up actions towards students exposed to bullying due to a lack of a common agreed-upon understanding of this work. Collaboration across disciplines, which has been suggested to be important in follow-up work after exposure to bullying (Lunder & Tharaldsen, 2020; Tharaldsen, 2021), may be challenging without a well-defined concept and common understandings. The actions taken in the literature may thus lead to disagreement about the merits of different approaches to follow-up work towards students exposed to bullying.

Adopting only an individual-level approach may lead to the conclusion that the consequences of bullying are rooted only in the bullied student. In view of this, follow-up actions might be directed only at healing the wounds of the bullied student and therefore neglect potentially persistent negative dynamics in the classroom or community (Finne et al., 2018). The individual-level approach taken within the literature in this study might also conflict with the teacher’s role in supporting bullied students in coping with their situation. Studies underscore the importance of teacher support for students’ mental health and well-being (e.g., Thapa et al., 2013; Thoits, 2011) and in the coping process after bullying (Lunder & Tharaldsen, 2020). Excluding teacher support might therefore imply that bullied students are responsible for their own coping process after exposure to bullying.

Furthermore, an emphasis on the peer support approach identified in this review may correspond with research highlighting such support as a protective factor for bullied students (Cowie & Smith, 2009). Nevertheless, employing only a peer support approach can result in some students in the environment being held entirely accountable for reducing and preventing consequences for bullied students. Such responsibility should lie with the teacher after bullying has occurred (Lunder & Tharaldsen, 2020; Sjursø et al., 2019), and are therefore problematic.

The last approach identified in this review, the universal approach, includes actions taken to amplify teachers’ control at the school, but will however argue that targeting the school environment alone will be sufficient to reduce the consequences of bullying. These conflicting research findings indicate that whole-school approaches might not be effective for everyone, and may even worsen the consequences of bullying for these students (Huitsing et al., 2019; Kaufman et al., 2018). Thus, additional research should be conducted using different approaches simultaneously, and such efforts can be facilitated by a common understanding of the construct of follow-up work.

Limitations

The results of this scoping review should be interpreted with some caution. First, the scope of the identified studies was limited since the sample included only peer-reviewed articles written in English. Thus, gray literature was excluded, limiting the coverage of the articles. Moreover, that we included studies taken to reduce consequences from bullying, but not limited the actions to be initiated after actions taken to stop bullying, may limit the findings from this scoping review in different ways. First, we might have included studies with an action that we interpreted as a “follow-up action” but was intended as an action to stop bullying from the authors, and which thereby second, may impacted the results derived from this study. The analysis may lack comprehensive coverage of relevant information due to the general aim of a scoping review, which is to provide an overview of the current research; therefore, the content is not synthesized or theorized in depth. Additionally, this review identified only school-based actions, overlooking the importance of collaboration at the broader system level, such as within municipalities or families (Tharaldsen, 2021). Also, all relevant literature may not be covered due to the priori defined inclusion and exclusion criteria for this review. For example, we excluded studies describing actions solely taken to stop bullying, risking that we excluded studies with actions taken to stop bullying with a follow-up component not described in the abstract.

Implications for Further Research

The results of this scoping review showed that there is a lack of consensus on the construct of follow-up work towards students exposed to bullying. The approaches identified in the literature ranged from directing the action towards the student exposed to bullying aiming to reduce or prevent consequences in various ways, to indirectly aiming to reduce or prevent consequences from bullying through peers or the school environment. The focus on these approaches could have implications not only for research in terms of how interventions should be carried out and what they should consist of but also, importantly, for practitioners, as this results in confusion about how conduct follow-up work; if the approaches detected in this literature are adapted in isolation, there is a risk that the social contexts are overlooked. These studies predominantly employed self-report questionnaires completed by bullied students and thus contained a risk of bias. Hence, mixed methods design research, such as for instance combining observations with self-reports or interviews, should be carried out to generate new information and expand on the information obtained (Creswell et al., 2003) from self-reports and enable the inclusion of the social context in the follow-up work.

Furthermore, the wide range of measurements in these studies may prevent the formation of a consensus on important issues (Volk et al., 2017), potentially creating barriers to collaboration across disciplines in follow-up work towards students exposed to bullying. Implementing a multilevel approach combining the individual and the system-level to following up with students exposed to bullying could enhance the existing understanding of follow-up work in a more comprehensive way. However, little is known about the effectiveness of such actions, and empirical research addressing individuals, classes and schools simultaneously is needed. Finally, the lack of agreement on the timeframe of initiating follow-up actions calls for a common consensus. Specifically, to cover the research gap on follow-up actions initiated right after actions taken to stop bullying, we recommend that future studies endorse such perspective.

Conclusions

There is a research gap related to studies on follow-up work towards students exposed to bullying, even though this topic has gained interest worldwide. Follow-up work is examined and studied across various levels (e.g., individual, peer, school). However, the diversity of approaches to following up with students exposed to bullying that emerged in this scoping review indicates a need for additional system-level research, in combination with providing support for the students exposed to bullying. Also, the potential importance of initiating follow-up actions following actions taken to stop bullying tends to be a crucial yet overlooked area for research. Exploring these options, in combination with more methodological variation, such as mixed methods design, is recommended to gain enriched explanations of the individual and contextual factors potentially affecting students after exposure bullying. Finally, when synthesized, the research suggests that follow-up work towards students exposed to bullying is not uniformly conceptualized, highlighting the need for a common, agreed-upon understanding. The key takeaway from this scoping review on follow-up work towards students exposed to bullying is to clarify its conceptual framework to increase a common consensus.

To mark the initial steps towards a common agreed-upon understanding of follow-up work towards students exposed to bullying, we suggest some areas of focus for further research: (a) follow-up actions should be initiated right after actions taken to stop bullying; and simultaneously, (b) provide individual support for bullied students addressing their specific needs; (c) restructure negative social dynamics in the peer ecology, enabling an appropriate re-socialization of the student exposed to bullying; (d) reframing a new, inclusive class culture where negative actions are replaced to prevent new or persistent bullying. By endorsing such perspectives, we may advance towards a more nuanced comprehension of strategies that effectively mitigate or prevent consequences from being exposed to bullying.