Bullying as a Special Case of Aggression

Procedures for Cross-Cultural Assessment

PANAYIOTIS KALLIOTIS
Division of Education, University of Sheffield, UK

ABSTRACT In this study bully/victim problems among five classes of

11–12-year-old children attending five elementary schools in Hellas
(Greece) were investigated by using Arora and Thompson’s ‘Life in
School’ questionnaire. In addition, five teachers in those schools were
interviewed in order to understand their views on school bullying and
aggression in Hellas. The majority of the items in the ‘Life in School’
questionnaire seemed to cross cultural barriers for assessing the inci-
dents of bullying from an international perspective. A Hellenic version
of ‘Life in School’ was created.*

Aggression in schools: the situation in Hellas

During the last three decades the face of my country Hellas has changed
dramatically in terms of economic growth and prosperity. The country
has been moving from an agricultural type of society to a postmodern
one. This transition came at a very rapid pace and was not a smooth
one—in comparison with most Western countries (Tofler, 1980).
Whereas the transition within the capitalist model of evolution from
the agricultural type of production to a postmodern one took half a
century for most Western countries, for Hellas it was a period of only

Our greatest debt is to the children and teachers of East Attiki (Athens, Greece)
who served as subjects and who, of course, must remain anonymous and to the
school personnel who facilitated the acquisition of the data. We would like to
thank the members of the Hellenic Pedagogical Institute for granting permission
to do this study (a pilot study) and the follow-up study (Study 2, in press).
Address correspondence and requests for offprints to: Mr P.A. (Panos) Kalliotis,
Division of Education, Education Building, 388 Glossop Road, University of
Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2JA, UK.
School Psychology International Copyright © 2000 SAGE Publications (London,
Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol. 21(1): 47–64 [0143–0343 (200002) 21:1;
47–64; 005686]

* Copyright of the Hellenic version of ‘Life in School’ questionnaire rests with the
author. Copies of the questionnaire are available from the author.

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 School Psychology International (2000), Vol. 21(1)
20 years (see the statistical data given by the Statistical Office of Hellas
for the financial years 1971, 1981, 1991, etc. [Στατιστικη ψπηρεσια τησ
Ελλαδοσ, 1994]).
These rapidly enforced changes implemented by economic growth
have had a great impact upon the whole Hellenic social and cultural
context. Schooling is no exception to this, but on the contrary is the most
dramatically influenced field of social life. Our schools are in a deep crisis
and the notion of schooling is questioned by everyone in terms of its
effectiveness and its flexibility to meet and fulfil anyone’s needs and
expectations.
Moreover, during the past decade a large pupil population has been
moving from the ex-Eastern bloc countries to Hellas, either as economic
or political refugees from Albania and the ex-Socialist Republic of
Yugoslavia, or as emigrants for reasons of reunification and repatriation
from the states of the ex-USSR. This boom in pupil numbers studying in
Hellenic schools has permanently changed the cultural face of education
from a unicultural to a multicultural one.
Furthermore, massive student mobilizations and demonstrations
throughout the whole country occurred during the years 1990–91 as a
protest against the government’s intention to cut the budgets of the
public schools and to create a network of private schools and colleges of
higher education with the introduction of a new proposed Bill for
Education in Parliament (Λακοπουλου, 1990; Ματση, 1990; Pαπτη,
1990; Zαγοριαυιτη et al., 1990). Among the students’ priorities and
demands for a better education for the new millennium was the issue of
changing the behavioural patterns of teachers and students in schools.
It was also the first time that Hellenic public opinion began to question
whether the violence in the streets had been transferred and adopted in
the schools (Γριβασ, 1990; Παυουσησ, 1990).
The outcome of these student demonstrations was to sensitize the
public to demand that the professionals address themselves to the ‘here
and now’ in order to prevent such phenomena from happening again
(Βιδαλη, 1994; Γεωργουλη-Kουκκου, 1994; Γαλαυησ, 1994; Kαλογριδη,
1994; Pαπτη, 1994; Zηση-Mατη, 1994).
Phenomena such as bullying and vandalism in our schools are no
longer isolated cases in ‘certain socio-economically deprived schools’
(Nεστοροσ et al., 1992: 14), but on the contrary are inherent character-
istics of our modern educational reality. If you can access the incidence
of school bullying, you can reduce it. Facing up to this reality, first
we conducted a big pilot study (Study 1—Kalliotis, 1994) concerning
pupil and teacher views about the notion of bullying in Hellenic
schools. Second, a replication of Study 1 (Study 2, in press) has been
implemented, aiming to understand what constitutes bullying for all
parties involved (parents, pupils, teachers) in Hellenic schools, gather-

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 Kalliotis: Cross-Cultural Assessment of Bullying
ing more detail about the circumstances in which children were bul-
lied.

Bullying as a special case of aggression

The incidence of bully/victim problems among Hellenic schoolchildren
reported in this body of research depends to a large extent on how school
bullying is defined, as well as on the instrument employed to measure it.
Bullying as a class of behaviours, can be conceptualized in a number of
different ways.
Problems of differing definitions (the semiotics of the word bullying),
sample selection and data collection procedures employed by various
researchers at the international level make bullying more complicated
and difficult for multinational comparisons. Data from one country
cannot be freely generalized to another (Besag, 1989).
The definition of bullying is an issue of paramount importance and
includes two distinctive dimensions—how the phenomenon is defined in
general and, at the level of a specific incident, whether or not all
participants would define it as one of bullying.
Over the last 20 years most of the empirical data about bullying have
come from the Scandinavian countries, based mostly on the pioneering
work of Dan Olweus (1973, 1978). In terms of definition, Olweus adhered
to the original Scandinavian interpretation of mobbing (Heinemann,
1973)—which designates group violence only —as compared to the more
widely used English definition of bullying which includes both group
violence and individual violence in its meaning (Pikas, 1989). In terms
of the extent of bullying, Olweus (1987) conducted an extensive study of
140,000 Norwegian students aged 8–16 years and found that 9 percent
reported being bullied, while 7 percent reported bullying others ‘now and
then’ or more often. Also, he found that self-reported bullying was more
prevalent in primary than secondary schools.
In contrast to the Scandinavian paradigm, English researchers have
concluded that there is no common consensus in defining it in detail
(Besag, 1989), although it is a concept about which there appears to be
general cultural agreement in the UK. This fragmentation of the
semiotics of the word bullying has led British researchers to employ
various techniques and methodologies to cover all aspects of the inci-
dents of bullying. Some of them focus upon physical aggression (Arora
and Thompson, 1987), while others include behaviour such as teasing
and social ostracism in the notion of bullying in schools (Smith, P., 1991).
Furthermore, some of them place an emphasis on lone bullies (Lowenstein,
1978), while others understand bullying mainly as a synergy of group
violence (Pikas, 1975).
In this paper, we conceptualized the notion of school bullying in the

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way it has been viewed by Smith and Thompson (1991). They stated,
‘bullying . . . can be taken to be a subset of aggressive behaviour. As with
aggressive behaviour generally, bullying intentionally causes hurt to the
recipient. This hurt can be both physical or psychological’ (p. 1). In
addition they stated that three further criteria (see also Besag, 1989)
distinguish bullying—that it is unprovoked, that it occurs repeatedly
and that the bully is stronger than the victim or is perceived to be
stronger.

Work done in the UK on bullying; accessing the incidence

With regard to the techniques and methodologies employed in the UK
accessing the extent of school bullying we have two main methodological
instruments.
The first instrument came from the work of Arora and Thompson
(1987) who developed the ‘Life in School’ booklet, which they applied to
high school children, aged between 11 and 14, in the North of England
in order for the children themselves to establish their own definition of
bullying. This was intended to avoid the problem of defining bullying in
the questionnaire by seeking the children’s definition of it. The ‘Life in
School’ questionnaire was in the form of a list of interpersonal incidents,
friendly and unfriendly in nature. Children were asked to indicate if they
had experienced these incidents during the previous week, only once,
twice or more or not at all. During the week immediately after, the
children were asked to examine a list of unfriendly actions to decide with
a yes, no or sometimes indication which actions constituted bullying.
They found six incidents of bullying behaviour which were identified by
50 percent or more of the children surveyed, as follows:
1. Tried to hurt me.
2. Threatened to hurt me.
3. Demanded money from me.
4. Tried to break something that belonged to me.
5. Tried to hit me.
6. Tried to kick me.
(Arora and Thompson, 1987: 112)
The incidence of the above actions was higher than anyone would have
expected.
For example, they found that of their sample of 14-year-old boys half
reported that someone had tried to kick them at least once in the last
week and 36 percent reported that someone threatened to break some-
thing that belonged to them. Among the sample of 12-year-old boys,
19 percent reported that other students demanded money, and 5 percent
said this had happened more than once in the previous week.

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 Kalliotis: Cross-Cultural Assessment of Bullying
The second instrument comes from the later work of P.K. Smith and
his associates (Ahmad and Smith, 1990; Whitney and Smith, 1993) who
used a slightly modified Olweus questionnaire. Ahmad and Smith (1990)
gave figures which indicated an incidence of 20 percent for being bullied,
and up to 10 percent for bullying others from a sample of seven middle
schools and four secondary schools in the South Yorkshire area.
Whitney and Smith (1993) found a disturbingly high level of reports of
being bullied, especially in junior/middle schools, where 27 percent of
pupils said that they had been bullied at least sometimes in the current
term, and 10 percent said that bullying was happening at least once a week.
The figures were less in the secondary schools. Their study was carried out
in 17 junior/middle and seven secondary schools in the Sheffield LEA.

Using the ‘Life in School’ questionnaire to assess bullying in

Hellas
We have chosen to use the ‘Life in School’ checklist because we were
convinced that the advantages it offered fulfilled the aims of this study.
Hence:
1. It allows children to determine their own definition of bullying,
rather than assuming they understand and accept an adult’s verbal
definition.
2. It offers an indirect but more precise measurement of bullying in
schools. Due to the plethora of different interpretations of the defini-
tion of bullying by teachers, pupils and parents, and the complex
nature of bullying, it is almost impossible to gather precise informa-
tion if you are asking a direct question to pupils about incidents of
bullying. The ‘Life in School’ checklist has been designed, for the above
reasons and, as indicated by Arora (1994: 2) ‘in such a way, that is not
necessary to ask the direct question “are you bullied?” ’.
3. It is easy to use by pupils.
4. It is an anonymous questionnaire2 which means that it is likely to
yield a higher response to the negative items as many children are
reluctant to admit to such actions that happened to them if they have
to make themselves known.
5. Finally, it offers a large degree of flexibility. This study used the
questionnaire to explore aggression in Hellas, to establish if the
concept of bullying was seen as relevant among children in Hellas and
to see if the items chosen by children in Hellas have any relationship
to those chosen in the UK.
In addition, the ‘Life in School’ checklist as advocated by Arora (1994: 3)
could provide us with specific features concerning the incidence of the
bully/victim problem, such as:

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1. A Bullying Index (BI).
2. A General Aggression Index (GAI).
3. A comprehensive picture of life in schools, including positive
aspects.
4. A means of identifying individuals who are likely to be victims of
bullying.
5. Extra information of the respondents’ own choice can be obtained
by putting their own questions on the back page of the checklist.
The ‘Life in School’ questionnaire seemed to concentrate mostly on
incidents of physical rather than psychological aggression in the UK
schools. The Hellenic version traced evidence that some of the questions
on the checklist were appreciated by the pupils as a praxis of bullying and
explored further the psychological type of bullying (see Study 2, in press).
Concentrating on the physical bullying seemed to be the only disad-
vantage of the instrument, but this is understandable, given that the aim
of that part of the survey process was to find a definition which was as
clear as possible and received broad agreement from most children and
teachers.
In our main body of this research, we used a slightly modified version
(Hellenic version) of the ‘Life in School’ questionnaire which was in the
form of a checklist. It has been proved by Ahmad and Smith (1990) that
the best method for establishing incidence from middle school age
upwards appeared to be the use of an anonymous questionnaire.
The main purposes of this study were:
• to gather information about the extent of the incidents of bullying in
Hellenic schools;
• to make recommendations towards a feasible and practical anti-
bullying scheme to be introduced at the schools studied.

Converting the ‘Life in School’ questionnaire into the Hellenic

language
Our initial motivation for assessing and researching the phenomenon of
bullying came from the fact that in the modern Hellenic language there
is not an equivalent definition of the word bullying. It is also interesting
to note that the same problem of the absence of any equivalent word
describing school bullying is present in the majority of the Mediterra-
nean countries—for example, Spanish and Portuguese teachers, al-
though accepting that such behaviours do occur in their nation’s schools,
do not have a special word for bullying (Tattum, 1989).
Hellenic modern language is a very rich language especially in
describing precisely abstract notions and ideas, and it clearly is able to
define the notion of bullying. A word which covers and overlaps the

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meaning of the English word bullying in modern Hellenic language is the
Hellenic word ατακτοσ—which means someone who has no discipline
and order—and it has been identified by Hellenic teachers as the most
suitable word to describe bullying.
At the beginning of converting the ‘Life in School’ questionnaire for use
in the Hellenic language and culture we considered the general cross-
cultural difficulties entailed in this attempt. Does our educational
system differ from England’s and if so, what constitutes these discrep-
ancies? Are all these differences such as to distort the purposes of this
study and make the method (the ‘Life in School’ questionnaire) worthless
for cross-cultural reference? Do all the pupil’s actions (either negative or
positive or neutral) which are prescribed in the questionnaire happen on
a day-to-day basis in Hellenic schools? These were some of the questions
we set out to answer.
In terms of the definition of bullying employed in this study, we used
the following working definition: ‘We say a child or young person is
bullied, or picked on when another child or young person, or a group of
children or young people, say nasty and unpleasant things to him or her.
It is also bullying when a child or a young person is hit, kicked,
threatened, locked inside a room, sent nasty notes, when no one ever
talks to them and things like that. These things can happen frequently
and it is difficult for the child or the young person being bullied to defend
himself or herself. It is also bullying when a child or young person is
teased repeatedly in a nasty way. But it is not bullying when two
children or young people of about the same strength have the odd fight
or quarrel.’ This definition was adopted from that used by Smith and
Sharp (1994: 13). A good reason for choosing this definition is that it
includes and emphasizes all the possible types of bullying in school
(physical and psychological).
In converting the ‘Life in School’ questionnaire we were faced with two
specific problems concerning the transfer of the method to the Hellenic
language and culture. These were the problem of terminology used, and
of the consistency of the protocol for the translation and the administra-
tion of this method employed for the elementary and the secondary
schools, respectively.
In solving the first problem, we first took the negative questions of
the ‘Life in School’ questionnaire and translated them one by one with
the help of various lexicons and dictionaries from the original English
prototype into the modern Hellenic language. By doing so, we had
isolated two verbs (‘to hurt’ and ‘to threaten’) which were crucial in
captivating the meaning of bullying in the Hellenic language. Those
two verbs do not have sub-classifications in their meaning but are
suited in a more general etymological context for the modern Hellenic
language. Due to the fact that the verb ‘to hurt’ appears three times (in

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Q9, Q21 and Q25) in the original English version of the ‘Life in School’
questionnaire and this might be confusing to the Hellenic respondents,
we decided to redirect its general meaning by putting into parentheses
the words ‘physical’ (Q9, Q21) and ‘psychological’ (Q25) to make it more
precise. With regard to the meaning of the verb ‘to threaten’ (Q9) we
coloured it, emphasizing mostly the physical aspect. Furthermore, in
Q2 (called me names) we added the adjective ‘nasty’ (called me nasty
names) to give emphasis to the psychological profile of school bullying.
All these corrections have been applied in Study 2 (in press), as a result
of this pilot study.
In terms of the protocol used for the administration of this method in
Hellas we followed closely the design used by Arora (1994) to avoid
misinterpretations and inconsistencies from all parties involved in the
study. We decided to keep the method untouched because the pupils in
this study themselves advocated that all the notions which we had
presented to them were understandable. The only modification was in
terms of wording. In particular, the wording of the method for elemen-
tary pupils was more spacious and it has been enhanced with icons in
order to be more enjoyable for them to fill it in.

Study 1 (A pilot study)

Participants
A total of 117 children from five urban elementary schools aged between
11 and 12 years old in East Attiki, Hellas participated in this study. Also
five teachers from those schools were interviewed about how they
perceive incidents of bullying. The schools had been selected for partici-
pation in a random way and not because of any obvious bully/victim
problem. There were 68 girls and 49 boys.

Procedure
A modified English version of the ‘Life in School’ checklist (Arora and
Thompson, 1987; Smith, G., 1991) for elementary/secondary school stu-
dents was translated into the modern Hellenic language and used with
permission. It consisted of 40 items, all of which required children to
respond by ticking one of three responses indicating the frequency of the
actions that might have happened to them during the previous school week.
The questionnaire was administered to each class separately. Each
child was given a copy of the ‘Life in School’ checklist and the procedure
for filling it in was explained. After 15 days the same questionnaire was
administered, this time requesting the pupils to circle the number(s) of
the item(s) that were most appreciated by them as a praxis of bullying.
On completion, the forms were collected in and the children were

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thanked for their cooperation.

Teachers’ sample
In order to understand the perception that teachers have about bullying
we conducted face-to-face structured interviews (with five primary
teachers) consisting of six questions. These were as follows:
1. Are there any children in your class that you think are bullies?
2. Why do you think that these children are bullies?
3. Are there any children in your class that you think are being
bullied?
4. Why do you think that these children are bullied?
5. What are you doing to prevent the incidence of bullying in your
class?
6. Is there any established school policy to deal with bullying in your
school?
These questions were used as the foundations for the development of the
Teachers’ Questionnaire that we have applied in Study 2 (in press).

Results of study 1

Extent of bullying

Frequency of the indicators of being bullied in school (UK items used as

definition). To obtain the percentage of pupils who were being bullied,
we took the two response options of ‘Once a week’ and ‘More than once
a week’ of the six items (indicators) which identify incidents of bullying
behaviour. The frequencies of the indicators (Q5, Q9, Q11, Q25, Q38,
Q40) with which children reported being bullied are presented in Table
1. Furthermore, in Table 1, we have combined the results of all schools
of the indicators (Q5, Q9, Q11, Q25, Q38, Q40) of being bullied for boys
and girls due to the fact that our sample was applied to 11–12-year-old
pupils. By doing so, we are able to have a more general picture for this
particular age group with regard to the extent of the incidents of
bullying.
The six different ‘negative’ items (indicators) did seem to have differ-
ent frequencies of occurrence. For example, approximately 21–27 per-
cent of children said that someone tried to kick them in the last week,
whereas only 5–14 percent of children said that someone had demanded
money from them and 3–12 percent of children said that someone had
broken something belonging to them during the previous week at school.
Overall, the results were alarming as each school had indicated approxi-
mately 30 percent of its pupils having been bullied at some time during
the school year.

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Table 1 Percentages of boys and girls who reported being bullied
during this term (all schools results) (Values are percentages)
Been bullied: Once a week More than once a week

Boys (N = 49)
Q5 Tried to kick me 35 27
Q9 Threatened to hurt me 16 18
Q11 Demanded money from me 20 10
Q25 Tried to hurt me 12 12
Q38 Tried to break something
that belonged to me 18 4
Q40 Tried to hit me 35 20
Girls (N = 66)
Q5 Tried to kick me 21 17
Q9 Threatened to hurt me 14 3
Q11 Demanded money from me 9 2
Q25 Tried to hurt me 24 6
Q38 Tried to break something
that belonged to me 8 3
Q40 Tried to hit me 20 12
Overall (N = 115)
Q5 Tried to kick me 27 21
Q9 Threatened to hurt me 15 10
Q11 Demanded money from me 14 5
Q25 Tried to hurt me 19 9
Q38 Tried to break something
that belonged to me 12 3
Q40 Tried to hit me 26 16

Sex differences
It has been indicated by many researchers that in general girls report
less bullying than boys. The findings of this study supported this
statement. We found that girls reported less incidence of bullying in
more items than boys (see Table 1).
Differences were obtained between boys and girls in terms of the
proportions obtained for being bullied (categories ‘Never being bullied’
and ‘Being bullied’) for the items Q5 = Tried to kick me (χ2 = 5.144,
d.f. = 1, N = 117, p < 0.05) and Q11 = Demanded money from me (χ2 =
6.427, d.f. = 1, N = 117, p < 0.05). No significant sex differences were
obtained for the rest of the negative indicators. On both the items Q5 and
Q11 boys reported higher percentages of being bullied than girls (see
Table 1).
In addition, significant differences occurred between boys and girls in
the extent to which they had been subjected to repeated aggression
(categories ‘Once’ and ‘More than once’) on the items Q9 = Threatened to

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 Kalliotis: Cross-Cultural Assessment of Bullying
2
hurt me (χ = 5.928, d.f. = 1, N = 117, p < 0.025) and Q25 = Tried to hurt
me (χ2 = 6.028, d.f. = 1, N = 117, p < 0.025), whereas for items 5, 11, 38,
40 there was no significant difference found between boys and girls. Boys
reported more bullying than girls on items Q9 and Q25. Both the items
Q9 and Q25 referred to the verb ‘to hurt’ and we speculated that this
happened because of the difficulty in translating the verb ‘to hurt’ into
the Hellenic language. The verb ‘to hurt’ is a general purpose verb in
meaning in the Hellenic language.
In order to define the verb ‘to hurt’ more precisely in its Hellenic
meaning, avoiding any misinterpretations and generalizations by the
students, we have redirected it by adding the word physically on item Q9
and the word psychologically on item Q25.Both these corrections have
been applied in Study 2 (in press).

School differences
Chi-squared tests (two tailed) were carried out to establish if there was
any noticeable difference between the five elementary schools on the
persistence of the incidents of bullying among them.
We found that in school E4 the incidents of bullying were more
prevalent than those in the other schools. Moreover, school E4 had
received the highest figures on both the General Aggression and Bully-
ing Indices among the schools involved in this Study (see Table 2).

Scoring the Bullying Index (BI) and the General Aggression Index (GAI)
Using the information that ‘Life in School’ gave us, we obtained the
Bullying Index and the General Aggression Index.
In scoring the Bullying Index we added the overall percentages of the
six negative indicators (Q5, Q9, Q11, Q25, Q38, Q40) taken from the
category ‘More than once’. Then, this sum was divided by 6. The number
which was obtained is the Bullying Index. On scoring the General
Aggression Index we added the sums of the overall percentages of the six
negative indicators (Q5, Q9, Q11, Q25, Q38, Q40) taken from the
categories ‘Once a week’ and ‘More than once’ respectively. Then this
sum of the sums was divided by 12. The number which was obtained is
the General Aggression Index.
The main purpose of each Index is to use it like a dipstick which can
be used at the beginning of an intervention and at later intervals in order
to find out whether the intervention is having any effect (Arora, 1994).
These indexes (GAI and BI), either per individual school or for all schools
combined, are presented in Table 2.
Looking at the figures we can have some idea of how often bullying
incidents are occurring. For example, in E4 both indexes have the
highest values (GAI = 20.00, BI = 25.16) among the schools, whereas for
school E2 the indexes were the lowest figures (GAI = 8.75, BI = 3.50). We

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Table 2 Scoring the General Aggression Index (GAI) and the
Bullying Index (BI) per individual school and for all schools combined

Elementary schools (11–12-year-old pupils)

E1 E2 E3 E4 E5 All schools combined
N = 26 N = 25 N = 32 N = 16 N = 16 N = 115

GAI 19.16 8.75 10.91 20.00 20.16 14.75

BI 7.33 3.50 8.50 25.16 15.83 10.66

obtained, by analysing our data for all schools combined, a Bullying

Index (BI) = 10.66 and a General Aggression Index (GAI) = 14.75.
Overall, these indices indicate that the incidents of bullying in the
Hellenic schools of our study are occurring in a moderate rather than a
high degree. The ranges of these indices can vary a great deal from school
to school due the age groups which have been studied, as well as to
within-school factors such as the effectiveness of good behaviour policies.
For example, BI in the UK can range from 4 to 8 for a whole secondary
school, but it is likely to be a higher figure with younger age groups. GAI
has been estimated to range from about 15 to 30 in UK schools, for both
the primary and secondary schools (Arora, 1994).
Further research work is needed with the ‘Life in School’ question-
naire to establish how large the changes in both indices, when used with
groups of particular sizes, need to be to reach statistical significance, and
how different factors such as age of the children influence the index. The
index was designed to be used on successive occasions with the same age
group of children in the same school, or the same group of children when
they were all a year older, giving a clear basis for comparison from one
occasion to another. When used, as it has been in this study, with large
differences in time, institutions and culture between the surveys consid-
ered, it is harder to be sure of the exact meaning of the indices.

The form bullying takes

The two most common forms of bullying were reported to be kicking/
hitting (Q5, Q40) and teasing (Q9, Q25), as shown in Table 4. All the
negative indicators of the ‘Life in School’ questionnaire were appreciated
by the pupils as incidents of bullying with an overall percentage of
acceptance over 50 percent.

Extra information obtained

In an attempt to maximize the usefulness of the ‘Life in School’ method
we created questions of our own interest, first concerning the place
where incidents of bullying might tend to occur most, and second to

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Table 3 Percentages for (a) where in school the pupils were bullied;
(b) to whom they spoke first about being bullied
Elementary schools (11–12 years old)

(a) Where in school they were bullied

N = 117
In the classroom 22
In the corridors 10
In the playground 68
(b) To whom they spoke first about being bullied
N = 117
To your class teacher 15
To your parent(s) 32
To your classmate(s) 53
To no one 0

whom a bullied pupil had first spoken about them. These figures are
presented in Table 3.

Interpretation of the results

Similarity to UK results
Our results have been evaluated and compared with those of (a) the
Kirklees Study (Arora and Thompson, 1987) and (b) the Wolverhampton
Anti-bullying Project (Smith, G., 1991, 1994) because these studies used
the same methodology as ours. By making such a comparison we are
aiming to emphasize the usefulness of the ‘Life in School’ method in
assessing bullying in a cross-cultural perspective.

The perception of the incidents of bullying for the Hellenic pupils. We

found that just over half the Hellenic pupils saw the six ‘negative’ items
(indicators) of the ‘Life in School’ checklist as instances of bullying. These
figures were in line with the figures which came from the research in the
UK schools (Arora and Thompson, 1987). We present these figures in
Table 4. The correlation coefficients which exist between our results and
the results of the Kirklees study (for boys r = 0.46 and for girls r = 0.79)
allow us to say with some degree of certainty that English and Hellenic
students recognize and identify the phenomenon of bullying in a similar
way. However, Hellenic students did not perceive the rest of the ‘nega-
tive’ actions which were included in the structure of the ‘Life in School’
checklist as a praxis of bullying, apart from item 2 (Called me names—
without the adjective ‘nasty’).

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 School Psychology International (2000), Vol. 21(1)
Table 4. A comparison of the actions most often perceived of as
bullying by Hellenic pupils and the Kirklees study (Values are
percentages)

Elementary schools (11–12 years old)

Questions (Items) Boys Girls
N = 80 49 N = 73 68

Q5 Tried to kick me 48 55 53 63
Q9 Threatened to hurt me 63 65 74 79
Q11 Demanded money from me 55 39 60 48
Q25 Tried to hurt me 65 66 70 78
Q38 Tried to break something of mine 55 50 41 40
Q40 Tried to hit me 50 60 53 69

Note: The percentages of the Kirklees study are shown in Roman, and bold
numbers show the percentages of the Hellenic study (Study 1).

Sex differences. Overall, girls consistently reported being less bullied

than boys on all the items. This bears out the results of the Kirklees study
(Arora and Thompson, 1987) and those from the Wolverhampton Project
(Smith, G., 1994). With regard to the difference between boys and girls
on answering Q9 and Q25, it was indicated clearly from the average
frequencies that boys felt more ‘threatened’ by school bullying than girls.

The place of bullying. Our data on this issue (Table 3) are fairly similar
to other studies which have been done in the UK : Whitney and Smith’s
(1993) study found that 76 percent of pupils reported that they were
bullied in the playground, compared to 30 percent in the classroom and
13 percent in the corridors. Boulton (1994) reported the results of an
interview study involving 110 schoolchildren between 8 and 11 years old.
He found that over 51 percent of both boys and girls experienced bullying
in their school’s playground in the last year. Finally, Blatchford and
Sharp (1994) interviewed 11-year-old pupils. They found that one in five
of the 11+ expressed worries about bullying, fighting and being beaten
up in the playground.

Differences from UK results

The extent of the incidents of bullying. With regard to the interpreta-

tion of the indices of bullying (BI) and of General Aggression (GAI) we
can distinguish that first, our GAI = 14.75 is a low score in the range
indicated by Arora (1994). Second, our BI = 10.66 is a high score, but this
was expected because of the age of our sample. The younger the age
group, the higher the BI figure (Smith and Sharp, 1994). This figure

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 Kalliotis: Cross-Cultural Assessment of Bullying
emphasizes the existence and the extent of incidents of bullying in
Hellenic schools, and indicates that bullying does not exist in a vacuum
and is present in Hellenic schools.
The low figure of General Aggression Index (GAI = 14.75) leads to the
question whether Hellenic pupils have a different pattern of bullying
from that described in the UK studies, related more closely to psychologi-
cal bullying for both boys and girls. A further question is whether this low
index score relates to the fact that no anti-bullying policy has yet been
established in Hellenic schools.

To whom pupils first spoke about bullying. An issue which arose during
the analysis of data in this study was the identity of the people to whom
Hellenic pupils had mentioned the incidents of bullying (see Table 3). On
this issue, there is a noticeable difference between English and Hellenic
schools. Approximately one out of three children answered that they
communicated without any fear with their parents and told them all the
incidents of bullying which happened in the last week in their schools.
In contrast, a remarkably low percentage of English pupils had spoken
to their parents about the same issue. For example, in the Kirklees study
only 3 percent of all children (Thompson and Arora, 1991) mentioned
incidents of bullying to their parents.
We believe that this difference has a cultural basis and leads to some
questions for further research, such as whether this difference between
English and Hellenic children is a result of different patterns of communi-
cation between parents and children in the two countries. If there is a
different communicative pattern, why do Hellenic pupils more freely
recount incidents of bullying to their parents? Does the Hellenic educa-
tional system support children’s attitudes on this issue? On the other hand,
could the difference be one of family values between the two cultures?

Teachers’ perceptions about bullying. Teachers considered that they

could be instrumental in changing children’s behaviour. Most of them (4
out of 5), felt that the bullies behaved as they did because of impoverished
and unhappy home environments. Others (2) felt that the bullies’
behaviour was deeply engraved on their souls and based upon their
idiosyncratic characteristics in such a way that it would not change.
Most of the teachers (4 out of 5) felt optimistic about the anti-bullying
approach that they adopted in their classroom and felt that they had
spoken adequately enough to their children about bullying. In general
they were aware of the bullies, but we felt that they tried to under-
estimate the problem of bullying by mentioning that ‘one or two girls and
two or three boys had problems’ (Kalliotis, 1994: 111). It is worth noticing
that all teachers agreed that if there was any bullying in their classroom
it was probably at a verbal or ‘mental’ level rather than being physical.

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 School Psychology International (2000), Vol. 21(1)
Conclusion
Due to the complicated nature of bullying and to the exploratory stage
of this study on assessing bullying in Hellas, most of the data that are
presented in this paper are descriptive. Research needs to be extended
to greater numbers of all the parties involved (pupils, teachers and
parents) in the Hellenic schools, in order to provide the impetus for
greater understanding of the process of bullying and subsequently for a
successful intervention programme directed at reducing the suffering
that some victims have to endure, without support at the present time,
in Hellas.
The present results confirm the view that schools have to take
seriously the problem of bullying in order to regain parents’ trust, and
to reaffirm teachers’ abilities to act properly against bullying, otherwise
the whole issue of schooling is at stake in Hellas. In conclusion, the
problem of bullying is not being adequately addressed in Hellas. The
incidence of it is high and affects thousands of children in elementary
and secondary schools throughout the country. To be more specific, the
results of this study brought into light evidence that:
• the ‘Life in School’ questionnaire is a workable methodological tool on
assessing incidents of aggressive behaviour among Hellenic school-
children;
• there is a considerable degree of bullying among Hellenic schoolchil-
dren, either as bullies or victims;
• a climate of serious concern about bullying has not yet surfaced in
Hellas because there is no established anti-bullying policy imple-
mented by the Hellenic schools;
• there is an enormous shortage of Hellenic educational research
concerning the field of bullying either in mainstream or special
schools. Bullying seems to have been neglected totally by professional
investigation in Hellas.

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