They are “capable of discovering important discourses and nuances” (Mishna et al., 2009, p. Qualitative methodologies present an opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of the group processes of bullying and participants’ perspectives on peer harassment. One way forward within qualitative research on school bullying is to start with “interaction itself, attend to the social contexts in which bullying occurs, ask questions about meanings produced by such interactions and understand these interactions as not solely the province of young people” (Pascoe, 2013, p. In relation to this, we have reason to carry out much more research on school bullying using qualitative methods, as these approaches might be more suitable for examining issues such as perspectives, interactions, nuances, and which social processes are important in school bullying (Mishna et al., 2009 Patton et al., 2017). While the division between quantitative and qualitative research might be exaggerated (Bryman, 1999, Clarke, 2019), most research on bullying has used quantitative methods (Mishna et al., 2009 Patton et al., 2017). One way forward is to conduct more research that attends to participants’ perspectives and that tries to grasp how they make sense of their social worlds and how their perspectives can connect to wider social practices and conditions (Charmaz, 2021). However, school bullying research has long been focused on the individuals rather than on the social structures that facilitate bullying, which some believe explain why school bullying persists (Horton, 2016 Walton, 2015). Research on how social structures facilitate bullying has revealed how social processes related to normativity and deviance, social status, and issues related to gender and sexuality (e.g., Forsberg & Horton, 2020 Eriksen & Lyng, 2018 Thornberg, 2015 Rawlings, 2016 Ringrose & Renold, 2010 Walton & Niblett, 2013) are crucial in school bullying. I also suggest that this approach is helpful in dealing with ethical and theoretical challenges when researching topics known to negatively affect people’s lives and wellbeing - and when the social context makes it difficult for participants to address victimizing structures, positions, and processes. More specifically, I give different examples from the whole research process, e.g., maintaining a focus on participants’ main concerns, the coding process, being guided by sensitizing concepts, addressing issues of social justice and equity - and overall forming and maintaining a theoretically and ethically prepared researcher role. In this paper, I will show how CGT as a theory-method package, as well as symbolic interactionism and sociology of childhood, has been helpful in my research on school bullying (focusing on social structures, norms, and processes). This approach comes as a theory-method package with its use of a symbolic interactionism perspective. One such approach is the constructivist grounded theory (CGT) approach, which aims to be attentive to participants’ main concerns and social processes through both analysis and data collection. This calls for research approaches that can get closer to participants’ experiences and the different social processes involved in school bullying. School bullying is a complex social phenomenon in need of further exploration regarding its connections to contextual aspects, group norms, and societal structures.
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