90% of Elementary School Kids Are Bullied: Survey

Mar. 23 -- FRIDAY, April 13 (HealthDay News) -- Nine out of 10 elementary school kids have been subjected to physical or psychological bullying by their peers, while six in 10 have been bullies themselves, according to a new study.

"The results show that even going down to young ages, we have very high levels of bullying and victimization," said study lead author Dr. Thomas P. Tarshis, who conducted the research while with the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford University Medical Center.

Citing the lack of a fast and insightful way to gauge elementary school bullying, Tarshis first teamed with Stanford colleague Dr. Lynne C. Huffman to design a new and simple questionnaire that could be completed by children quickly and reliably.

The survey was restricted to a single page of multiple-choice questions aimed at a third-grade reading level and was designed to be completed in a classroom setting within five to 10 minutes. The children were asked 22 questions describing one of two bullying scenarios -- "direct" bullying involving physical violence or the threat of harm and "indirect" bullying involving social ostracizing, teasing, giving "looks" or spreading rumors.

With funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Tarshis and Huffman administered the questionnaire in 2004 to 95 boys and girls attending fourth through sixth grades at two California elementary schools and 175 students attending third through fourth grade in one school in Arizona. The schools from which the kids were drawn were approximately 60 percent white, 20 percent Hispanic and 6 percent African-American.

Of the nine out of 10 students who indicated they had been a victim of bullying at some point, most said they had been subjected to several types of bullying at least "sometimes" -- a finding the researchers defined as a "high level" of victimization.

The percentage of children who said they had been bullies themselves did not vary significantly between grades. By contrast, fewer fifth graders said they had been a victim of bullying, compared to children in the other grades.