In his own words:
The Research Master in Sociology in Groningen enabled me to specialize on a very interesting topic (bullying), to integrate the theoretical knowledge of literature studies with the statistics courses by working on my own dataset (thanks to my supervisor, René Veenstra, for providing the data), to receive useful feedback of our lovely and humorous research group (the WALM – Wednesday Afternoon Lunch Meetings), and to have the opportunity to present findings on prestigious and relevant international conferences and workshops.
A description of the research project:
Targeting the Group? A social network perspective on bullying.
Bullying in school classes can be seen as a group process; bystanders of bullying can encourage bullies, ignore victims, or intervene. My project examines bullying using models for social network analysis, by investigating a dataset of 27 Dutch school classes. We aim to examine how participant roles in bullying (bully, victim, reinforcer, assistent, defender, outsider; see Salmivalli et al., 1996, Aggressive Behavior) are interrelated by analyzing the complete relational structure within school classes: relations between children and between subgroups of children. The final aim of the project is to contribute to group-directed anti-bullying interventions.
Research visit:
Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Finland, under the supervision of
Prof. Christina Salmivalli, an international expert on peer relations in general and bullying in particular.
