How did you get interested in studying bullying? I get asked that question all the time. People

want to think that it was because either I was a bully or I was bullied. But the truth of the matter

was I was just really interested in popularity. And popularity led me to bullying because the kids at my

high school were the ones who bullied the most.

I went ahead and looked at that for my dissertation and found that they were four times more

likely to bully others than those who didn't have power, who were not popular.

And then it just kind of snowballed from there.

Okay.

So how much work is being done in the world of evidence-based bullying, intervention,

stuff like that?

So the past 25 years, we've studied this in earnest.

It's been primarily correlational.

I mean, it's going to be hard to do experiments on bullying when you think about it.

I mean, it's just not going to work, really. But we've looked at it primarily from a correlational point of view. The first thing was just to sort of document the prevalence and the like. And then after that, then people looked at individual factors that were associated with it.

Dan Olve has kind of led the charge.

He's a Swede who was living in Norway at the time, conducted the largest study at the time,

largest longitudinal study, but also intervention study, and then found a 50% reduction, but easy to do in Norway

when you have everybody involved. It's a small country. So anyhow, so he looked at what happens to

kids who bully as they move forward. So identified boys in grade nine found that a large percentage of them were criminically,

were involved in the criminal justice system by the time they were age 24. So that was kind of like

the first, I think, well-conducted study in this area that was beyond just descriptives,

although there are, it is still descriptive to some extent.

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