School Psychology Quarterly

2014, Vol. 29, No. 3, 233237

2014 American Psychological Association

1045-3830/14/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/spq0000090

Understanding School Climate, Aggression, Peer Victimization, and

Bully Perpetration: Contemporary Science, Practice, and Policy
Dorothy L. Espelage

Sabina K. Low

University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign

Arizona State University

Shane R. Jimerson
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

University of CaliforniaSanta Barbara

Existing scholarship suggests that classroom practices, teacher attitudes, and the
broader school environment play a critical role in understanding the rates of student
reports of aggression, bullying, and victimization as well as correlated behaviors. A
more accurate understanding of the nature, origins, maintenance, and prevalence of
bullying and other aggressive behavior requires consideration of the broader social
ecology of the school community. However, studies to date have predominantly been
cross-sectional in nature, or have failed to reflect the social-ecological framework in
their measurement or analytic approach. Thus, there have been limited efforts to parse
out the relative contribution of student, classroom, and organizational-level factors.
This special topic section emphasizes a departure from a focus on student attitudes and
behaviors, to a social-contextual approach that appreciates how much features of the
school environment can mitigate or perpetuate aggression. This collection of articles
reflects innovative and rigorous approaches to further our understanding of climate, and
has implications for theory, measurement, prevention, and practice. These studies
highlight the influence of school climate on mental health, academic achievement, and
problem behavior, and will hopefully stimulate interest in and further scholarship on
this important topic.
Keywords: school climate, peer victimization, bullying, assessment, aggression, school-based
intervention

Research findings from largely cross-sectional investigations has suggested that classroom practices, teacher attitudes, and the
broader school environment play a critical role
in understanding the nature and prevalence of
aggression, bullying, and victimization. Although there are many different definitions of
school climate, it is consistently described as
the character and quality of the school culture or
the overall ethos (i.e., milieu) of the environ-

Dorothy L. Espelage, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign; Sabina K.

Low, T Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University; Shane R. Jimerson, Department
of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology, University of
CaliforniaSanta Barbara.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dorothy L. Espelage, Department of Educational
Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
Champaign, IL 61820-6925. E-mail: espelage@illinois.edu

ment (Cohen, McCabe, Michelli, & Pickeral,

2009). This culture is created through the values, goals, norms, expectations, teaching practices, leadership styles, and bureaucratic structure of a school (National School Climate
Council, 2007), and as such, is best conceived
as a multidimensional construct, with psychosocial, organizational, and academic components
(Roeser, Eccles, & Sameroff, 2000). Cohen et
al., (2009) conceptualized school climate as
having different dimensions; safety (i.e., clarity
and consistency with rules), teaching/instruction, relationships, and physical environment/
resources. Positive school climate can minimize
problematic behaviors by promoting safe environments and supportive/positive relationships
for youth. A positive social school climate includes norms that support safety and respect for
all members of the school and includes teacher
and staff that model prosocial behaviors for
their students (Cohen, 2014). In addition, if

233

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234

ESPELAGE, LOW, AND JIMERSON

students have a positive perception of the school

climate, they are less likely to engage in externalizing or aggressive behaviors (Espelage et
al., 2000; Goldweber et al., 2013; Totura et al.,
2009). On the other hand, a culture of bullying or aggression in a school can both encourage aggressive behavior and discourage reporting of aggression by bystanders (Bandyopadhyay,
Cornell, & Konold, 2009; Espelage et al., 2000;
Goldweber et al., 2013).
Common cited indicators of school climate
include both student and staff reports of their
respective willingness to intervene in aggressive situations and administrative support in
efforts to prevent aggression in the school (Bandyopadhyay et al., 2009; Goldweber et al.,
2013; Harel-Fisch et al., 2011; Richard, Schneider, & Mallet, 2012; Totura et al., 2009;
Waasdorp, Pas, OBrennan, & Bradshaw,
2011). Although a few school climate studies
have used student self-report and aggregated
student data at the school level, a multiple informant approach that considers both student
and staff perceptions of perpetration and victimization is less common in the extant literature.
These dual perspectives are important, as student and staff perceptions can differ in significant and telling ways, and in combination, offer
a more reliable and comprehensive snapshot of
a schools overall health.
Another related indicator of school climate
can be discrepancies among students and staff,
with regard to awareness of problematic peer
behavior and teacher/staff willingness to intervene. At a basic level, teachers and staff often
have discrepant perspectives on bullying rates
in comparison to their students. Many teachers
are unaware of how serious and extensive the
bullying is within their schools, and are often
ineffective in being able to identify bullying
incidents (Bradshaw, Sawyer, & OBrennan,
2007; Kochenderfer-Ladd & Pelletier, 2008).
Divergence between staff and student estimates
of the rates of bullying are seen in elementary,
middle, and high school, with staff consistently
underestimating the frequency of these events
(Bradshaw et al., 2007). Although this discrepancy is not surprising (given staff and students
are exposed to different behavioral contexts and
nuances), passive or dismissive attitudes toward
bullying or a lack of immediate intervention
only serve to reinforce bullying behaviors because the perpetrator receives no negative con-

sequences (Yoon & Kerber, 2003) and it reduces trust between students and staff.
However, studies of the impact of teacher attitudes or behaviors and students experiences
with aggression and victimization are limited
and do not generally employ longitudinal or
multilevel designs, which are necessary to account for shared variance and nested data.
The articles in this special topic section emphasize a departure from a focus on student
attitudes and behaviors, to a social-contextual
approach that appreciates how features or subsystems within the school environment can mitigate or perpetuate aggression. This special issue is predicated on the notion that school-based
aggression is a reflection of the complex, nested
ecologies that constitute a schools culture
and thus, is best understood through an ecological framework. Despite this, current scholarship on this topic has too often been characterized by studies that capture only one dimension
of climate or a singular perspective, which fail
to account for the dependencies among subsystems within a school, leaving many questions
for the field. Given that school climate is a
multidimensional construct, reflecting different
social contexts, it is important to unpack the
most salient aspects of a school culture that are
associated with peer aggression and victimization. This requires the use of measures that yield
reliable and valid indexes of school climate and
multilevel statistical approaches that model the
nested nature of students in classrooms and
schools. Only then can we parse out those aspects that are to be targeted in professional
development training and school-wide prevention efforts. Also, in light of the plethora of
prevention programming around bullying and
violence, it is important to understand how the
school environment can modify or shape the
efficacy of prevention efforts.
Articles Featured in This Issue
Each of the articles in this special topic section include measures of school environment
and school climate that range from brief measures (Konold et al., 2014) to surveys that assess
a single dimension of climate (e.g., Wang et al.,
2014) to a wide range of characteristics of the
environment (Espelage, Bosworth, & Simon,
2014; Low & VanRyzin, 2014). It is important
to have both brief and comprehensive measures

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SCHOOL CLIMATE, PEER VICTIMIZATION, AND BULLYING

available to the field because of both practical

(i.e., the push back of using instructional time
for student and teacher surveys) and theoretical
reasons. Two articles in this special issue focus
on the construct validity of a brief measure.
First, Konold and colleagues (2014) evaluate
the psychometric properties of the Authoritative
School Climate Survey, a scale that consists of
items that assesses two key characteristics of
school climate: disciplinary structure and student support. These two constructs were empirically linked to two additional constructs on this
measure, including student engagement and
prevalence of teasing and bullying in school.
They evaluate the validity of this measure both
at the individual student level and school level,
which is the first study in the literature to do so.
Second, White, Salle, Ashby, and Meyers
(2014) evaluate the Georgia Brief School Climate, a nine-item measure of student perceptions of school climate. In their study, this scale
demonstrates strong construct validity and reliability among a large sample of sixth and eighth
graders.
Despite the overlap among the academic and
social environment in a school, very few scholars have examined the relation between school
psychosocial climate, academic achievement,
and victimization. In this issue, Wang and colleagues (2014) examine school-level climate in
relation to student reported victimization and
teacher-rated grade-point average (GPA)
among fifth graders (n 50 schools) in Canada.
In their article, multilevel analyses reveal that
both peer victimization and school climate were
independently related to GPA, but school climate did not moderate the relation between
victimization and GPA.
Espelage and colleagues (2014) also employ
a multi-informant approach by surveying teachers and staff through a comprehensive school
environment scale in 36 middle schools. Students then report on their experiences with bullying, victimization, and their willingness to
intervene in bullying situations. Through multilevel modeling, data suggest a school commitment to prevent bullying was associated with
less bullying, fighting, and peer victimization.
Student reports of bully perpetration and peer
victimization were largely explained by staff/
teacher commitment to bully prevention,
whereas fighting and willingness to intervene

235

were largely explained by student characteristics.

Two articles assess changes in school climate
longitudinally. First, Gage, Prykanowski, and
Larson (2014) extend the cross-sectional work
of previous papers in this issue by examining
the association between school climate factors
and bullying victimization across three school
years in a large, diverse urban school district
using latent class growth modeling. They examine these associations across the transition from
elementary to middle school. Respect for diversity among students and racial diversity within
the student population predict decreases in bullying victimization. Further, perceptions of
teacher support associate with reductions in
bully victimization among high-risk elementary
youth, while peer support is predictive of reductions in bully victimization among high-risk
secondary youth. In the second longitudinal
study, Turner, Reynolds, Lee, Subasic, and Bromhead (2014) employ latent growth modeling
to examine anxiety, depression, and school climate as predictors of changes in physical and
verbal bullying perpetration and victimization
among Australian youth in Grades 7 through 10.
Similar to findings that Gage et al. present,
academic and peer group support are strong
predictors of decreases in bullying and victimization, and positive changes in identification
with school also associate with decreases in
bullying over time. Turner and colleagues also
find that increases in depression and anxiety
associate with increases in both bullying perpetration and victimization over time. These findings highlight the importance of examining individual psychological predictors of bully
perpetration and victimization alongside
school-level variables.
Cortes and Kochenderfer-Ladd (2014) point
to the important role of elementary classroom
climate, and teacher-student relationships in reducing victimization. They assessed climate at
the classroom level and found that elementary
school classrooms where children perceive
greater willingness to report bullying to their
teachers consisted of less victimization. Further,
in classrooms where the children indicated that
teachers would directly address bullying, there
was greater willingness among the children to
intervene. This validates previous literature,
suggesting positive, supportive relationships

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236

ESPELAGE, LOW, AND JIMERSON

with teachers is associated with less victimization (Corrigan, Klein, & Isaacs, 2010).
The final two papers in this issue on school
climate involve intervention studies. Nese,
Horner, Dickey, Stille, and Tomlanovich (2014)
evaluate the Expect Respect 3-hr intervention to
promote respectful behavior in three middle
schools who were implementing a school-wide
positive behavior support intervention. They
find that verbal and physical aggression was
significantly reduced in these schools, which
was assessed via direct observation. However,
no significant changes were reported in pre/
postratings of school climate, suggesting that
although aggression was reduced in this short
period of time, perceptions of the school climate
were not changed. Low and VanRyzin (2014)
also focus on the relation between school climate and stand-alone interventions, by examining baseline school climate as a moderator of
impacts of the Steps to Respect (STR; Committee for Children, 2001) over a 1-year period. In
this large scale randomized clinical trial, multilevel analyses reveal that positive school climate was strongly related to reductions in bullying related attitudes and behaviors in
intervention and control schools. After controlling for school climate, intervention status
yielded only one significant main effect. In addition, STR schools with positive school climate at baseline had less victimization at posttest. It is interesting that reductions in bully
perpetration were found for those intervention
and control schools in which the administration
had clear policies about bullying and had a clear
commitment to bully prevention. This study is
important in suggesting that bullying prevention
is a process, and that positive climate may be a
foundational component of bullying reduction
that also serves to enhance skills covered in
stand-alone bullying prevention programs.
Conclusions
Taken together, this collection of articles validates previous scholarship on school climate
(albeit with more advanced analytic methods),
presents new measurement approaches to
school climate, and furthers our understanding
of how climate works in orchestration with programs that specifically target peer aggression/
violence in schools. These articles spawn several areas that warrant further inquiry. These

include, but are not limited to (1) understanding

the temporal nature of school climate, and the
transactional linkages between climate and peer
aggression; (2) understanding how the different
dimensions of climate operate to affect levels of
problematic behavior; and (3) understanding
how adopted prevention programs work in concert with school climate. This special issue originated out of the acknowledgment that all children deserve to learn in safe and supportive
environments, and validates that central role of
relationships (or psychosocial climate) on student achievement, motivation, mental health,
and behavior. A healthy school community is
not hospitable to bullying behavior and other
forms of aggression/violence, but building and
maintaining such communities is an evolving,
complex process. It is our hope that future
scholarship and resources be dedicated to understanding this important topic.
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Received August 4, 2014
Accepted August 4, 2014