Robert Thornberg

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• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Linköping University

Using the social-ecological and social cognitive theories as integrated guiding frameworks, the present study examined whether moral disengagement and defender self-efficacy at the individual level, and moral disengagement, quality of teacher–student relationships and quality of student–student relationships at the classroom level were associated w...

The aim of the present study was to investigate how basic moral sensitivity in bullying, moral disengagement in bullying and defender self-efficacy were related to different bystander behaviors in bullying. Therefore, we examined pathways that linked students' basic moral sensitivity, moral disengagement, and defender self-efficacy to different bys...

There is a widespread idea that in grounded theory (GT) research, the researcher has to delay the literature review until the end of the analysis to avoid contamination – a dictum that might turn educational researchers away from GT. Nevertheless, in this article the author (a) problematizes the dictum of delaying a literature review in classic gro...

The aim of this study was to investigate how individuals;who had been victims of school bullying;perceived their bullying experiences and how these had affected them;and to generate a grounded theory of being a victim of bullying at school. Twenty-one individuals;who all had prior experiences of being bullied in school for more than one year;were i...

The aim of this study was to investigate the collective action of bullying and its stigma processes and influences on identities. In accordance with interactionism, identity is a social process, constructed and reconstructed in everyday social interactions. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in four school classes, investigating six bullying case...

Bias-based bullying (i.e., bullying due to marginalized identities) is a significant and ongoing challenge within contemporary educational settings. Teachers are crucial in mitigating such harmful behaviors and cultivating positive peer relationships. The present study explores teachers’ perceptions of and intervention intentions in bias-based bull...

This study explored whether authoritarian or authoritative parenting practices for young adolescents would mediate the association between involvement in bullying and severe forms of violent behaviors. Cross-sectional data were collected from a matched sample of 120 African-American adolescents, ages 13-24 (Mage = 14.79 years, 27.5% boys), and thei...

The current study explores whether expressing feelings about violence through journal or notebook and/or school assignment might be associated with a decrease in delinquent activities, such as substance use, theft of property, and assaultive behaviors. A cross-sectional study with purposive sampling was conducted. The participants were comprised of...

Numerous empirical studies have contributed to the understanding of factors connected to stu-dents' bystander behaviors in peer victimization situations. Nevertheless, a crucial gap remains concerning the scarcity of longitudinal studies. Drawing on social cognitive theory, the present study examined whether moral disengagement and defender self-ef...

W artykule zaprezentowaliśmy przegląd badań i teorii dotyczących przyjaźni rówieśniczych. Zwróciliśmy szczególną uwagę na to, jaki wpływ na rozwój przyjaźni ma instytucjonalny i systemowy kontekst szkoły oraz w jaki sposób przyjaźń wiąże się ze zjawiskiem bullyingu. Analiza wyników badań pokazuje, że to zjawisko wciąż się nasila, mimo wprowadzanych...

The study aimed to explore bullying disclosures to teachers from the victims' point of view, with a special focus on the influence of direct and indirect bullying and student-teacher relationship quality. A sequential explanatory mixed methods design was adopted. First, 190 students with bullying experience completed a questionnaire. Second, 20 stu...

Self-reported measures of school bullying can be divided into two subtypes. Definition-based measures present a bullying definition followed by one question about being bullied and one question about bullying others, while behavior-based measures avoid using terms like “bully” and “bullying,” do not provide an explicit bullying definition, include...

The aim of the current study was twofold. The first aim was to examine whether callous-unemotional (CU) traits are directly related to moral disengagement and bullying perpetration as well as whether CU traits are indirectly related to bullying perpetration mediated by moral disengagement among adolescents. The second aim was to examine whether the...

Though school children tend to view peer victimization as morally wrong most do not to intervene on the victim’s behalf and some instead choose to aid the victimizer. The aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate how students’ defending and pro-aggressive bystander behaviors evolved over the course of one school year and their association t...

The aim of this study was to examine whether collective moral disengagement and authoritative teaching at the classroom level, and student-teacher relationship quality at the individual level, predicted individual moral disengagement among pre-adolescent students 1 year later. In this short-term longitudinal study, 1,373 students from 108 classroom...

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether authoritative teaching at the classroom-level was associated with bullying victimisation, and how this association evolved over the course of upper elementary school (i.e. in grades 4 through 6) by estimating whether the association declined with time. Data came from the first three waves of a...

Background Medical students experience emotional challenges during their undergraduate education, often related to work-based learning. Consequently, they may experience feelings of uncertainty and self-doubt, which can negatively affect their well-being. Therefore, it is crucial to support students’ development of their ability to manage distressf...

Peer victimization in schools most often occurs in the presence of bystanders. When bystanders intervene on behalf of the victims, they are often successful in stopping the victimization. Defender self‐efficacy (i.e., the belief in one's ability to successfully defend victims) has consistently been associated with greater defending and less passive...

Creating and sustaining a positive school climate is not done in isolation but requires continuous ongoing work by several people within the school, and one of the most important actors are the teachers. In order to fulfil this very important task, the teachers need to collaborate with colleagues at school in an organized manner. In this study, we...

This study examined whether individual and collective moral disengagement (MD) in seventh grade were associated with bullying perpetration across seventh and eighth grade, and whether changes in individual and collective MD from seventh to eighth grade were associated with concomitant changes in individual-level bullying perpetration. In this short...

Despite the important role of peers in the social process of classroom citizenship, the peer influence related to moral disengagement, social goals, and a sense of peer community remain unclear. To this end, it was examined to what extent youth become similar to their friends in moral disengagement, social goals, and a sense of peer community. Part...

Background: Positive and consistent parenting practices are associated with the positive mental health of children. However, little is understood about the implications of the Russian military invasion on family dynamics in Ukraine. Objective: This research aims to estimate the prevalence of childhood conduct disorder (CD) and bullying perpetratio...

Relational issues at school, including bullying, tend to be interpreted primarily in terms of the behaviour of individual students. Whilst research has broadened this focus, more needs to be understood about how the design and management of the school environment and its resources may influence peer relations. The study sought to consider interconn...

Objective The current study examined whether bullying victimization was associated with bringing a weapon to school, fully or partly mediated by feeling unsafe in school, negative future education orientation, and skipping school. Method Data from 6199 students (12–18 years old), who had filled out the 2017 School Crime Supplement to the National...

Learning to work as a teacher in teacher education includes encountering schools during work-based learning. This period includes having mentoring teachers assigned to support student teachers in acquiring teaching skills and guiding in understanding teachers’ work. Mentoring conversations are commonly carried out, but rarely focus on student teach...

The overall objective of this study was to investigate the longitudinal association between diffusion of responsibility and pro-aggressive bystander behavior across three time points in upper elementary education. This three-wave longitudinal study included 1905 Swedish students who completed a questionnaire in at least one of the three waves: the...

Teachers have a major impact on students’ social cognition and behaviors, and previous research has found that students who have positive relationships with their teachers tend to be less bullied by their peers. However, this line of research is limited in that it has been (a) Dominated by cross-sectional studies and (b) Treated bullying victimizat...

The aim of this study was to explore and analyse teachers’ perspectives on factors influencing the school climate, to better understand teachers’ everyday efforts in influencing the school climate, including obstacles they might experience. Bronfenbrenner’s social-ecological theory was utilized as the overarching theoretical perspective. Data were...

The aim of the current study was to examine whether students’ perceptions of teacher support at an individual-level, teacher support and well-functioning class climate at classroom-level, and teacher support and well-functioning class climate at school-level were associated with peer victimization. Data were obtained from a Student School Survey ad...

Background: For prospective teachers, the school-based learning component of their teacher education programme is a crucial, and often demanding, part of becoming a teacher. During this time, mentor-teachers work in close collaboration with student teachers, who are often teaching in an actual school setting for the first time. As the relationship...

Student teachers commonly report encountering emotional chal- lenges in work placements during teacher education. Even so, the perspective of mentoring teachers has been given little attention regarding the student teachers’ emotional challenges. In this study, the authors’ aim is to investigate what mentoring teachers perceive to be the emotional...

Using the 2017 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) dataset, the present study examines the association between the types of school security measures and students’ bullying victimization and perceived school safety. The study also addresses whether these associations vary by sex and race/ethnicity as a bulk of research has treated sex and rac...

In their interactions with patients and health care professionals during work-based learning, medical students are known to experience emotionally challenging situations that can evoke negative feelings. Students have to manage these emotions. Students learn and develop their professional identity formation through interactions with patients and me...

This 1-year longitudinal study examined the association between student—teacher relationship quality and school liking in a sample of 234 students from two public schools in Sweden, who completed an online questionnaire on two separate occasions. The age range was 9–15 years in Time 1 and 10–16 years in Time 2. A path analysis showed that students...

This paper addresses how emotionally challenging experiences during work-based education may influence the professional becoming of student teachers and medical students. We conducted a qualitative analysis of eight focus group interviews with undergraduates from two universities in Sweden who studied to become either physicians or teachers, and in...

Despite the fact that bullying has been consistently linked to moral disengagement among schoolchildren, research that distinguishes among the four loci of moral disengagement (cognitive restructuring, minimizing one’s agentive role, distorting consequences, and victim attribution) to better understand bullying is scarce. The aim of this longitudin...

Moral disengagement (MD) refers to social-cognitive distortions that allow individuals to sidestep the self-regulatory processes that normally prevent immoral conduct. MD has been linked to bullying in childhood and adolescence, but most studies have used a cross-sectional design. Less is known about the longitudinal link. Therefore, the aim of thi...

This study aimed to investigate the association between polyvictimization and offline and online sexual harassment and whether the association might be mediated by internalizing problems, low school satisfaction, and dropping out of school. The analytic sample was derived from the Children and Youth Rights Survey in South Korea. It consisted of 6,3...

We investigate the importance of spatial, material, and organisational factors to gendered peer relations on the school football pitch. The study is part of an ethnographic research project exploring the relations between school bullying and the institutional context of schooling, focusing on the perspectives of teachers and pupils from preschool c...

The aim of the present study was to investigate and clarify the association between authoritative teaching at the classroom level and bullying perpetration and victimization among Swedish upper elementary school students. For this purpose, authoritative teaching was analyzed both as combined construct, and as the effects of the two dimensions that...

The current study examined whether different motives for entering teacher education and different coping strategies in distressful situations during teacher training were associated with teacher efficacy among student teachers. A sample of 517 Swedish student teachers completed a questionnaire. According to the findings from multivariate regression...

While teachers are obliged to report and investigate incidents of bullying, harassment, and degrading treatment in Swedish schools, research suggests that they sometimes struggle to decide which incidents to report. In this study, we investigate Swedish schoolteachers’ reflections on dealing with bullying, harassment, and degrading treatment, and o...

Guided by the social-cognitive theory and self-determination theory, this study examined whether moral disengagement is indirectly associated with pro-bullying, passive bystanding, and defending, mediated by autonomous motivation, introjected motivation, extrinsic motivation, and amotivation to defend victims of bullying among early adolescents. Pa...

The following paper aims to investigate how student teachers relate to the suitability of their student teacher peers after experiencing challenges to their emerging teacher identity, resulting in emotional responses. A constructivist grounded theory study was conducted in which 18 student teachers participated. Data from 14 individual interviews a...

När mobbning äger rum i skolan finns ofta andra elever i närheten som ser vad som händer. Hur dessa elever reagerar har betydelse för själva förekomsten av mobbning. I den här artikeln presenteras forskning som undersökt hur en del aspekter av skolkontexten hänger samman med hur elever som ser mobbning hjälper den utsatta, förblir passiva eller tar...

Constructivist grounded theory method (GTM) as outlined by Kathy Charmaz has its explicit roots in the American pragmatism and symbolic interactionism primarily developed at the University of Chicago during the early and mid-twentieth century. Symbolic interactionism considers people as active and interpretative agents who co-construct selves, iden...

The methodological paper illustrates the informed grounded theory (informed GT) methodology by briefly demonstrating a case study about synchronous video communications and teacher presence in distance education. Unlike Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory. Aldine. GT, the literature review is not delayed until t...

School climate is crucial for understanding everyday school life. For pupils, breaktime seems to be associated with how they feel about their school climate. To better understand school climate and what social processes pupils address, this study explores pupils’ perspectives on school climate with attention on how they perceive their breaktimes. T...

While the efforts of teachers are crucial for preventing and stopping degrading treatment, harassment, and bullying in schools, research has found that teachers’ understandings of such terms may vary significantly. In this qualitative study, we take a social-ecological perspective to investigate Swedish schoolteachers’ understandings of the terms d...

I denna kunskapsöversikt presenteras internationell och nationell forskning som sätter fokus på hur skolan på ett effektivt sätt kan motverka kränkningar genom att arbeta främjande, förebyggande och åtgärdande. Kunskapsöver­ sikten redogör för det aktuella kunskapsläget, identifierar faktorer i skolmiljön som ökar respektive minskar risken för krän...

The present study proposes and tests pathways by which racial discrimination might be positively related to bullying victimization among Black and White adolescents. Data were derived from the 2016 National Survey of Children’s Health, a national survey that provides data on children’s physical and mental health and their families. Data were collec...

Research on the transition from teacher education to beginning to teach have focused on the ability to teach, as well as on classroom practices, and how complicated socialisation processes impede developing skills when starting to teach. The aim of the study was to investigate emotionally challenging situations during teacher education and when sta...

This study examined whether student–teacher relationship quality at the individual level and student–teacher relationship quality and peer climate at the class level were associated with being a bully, a victim, a bully/victim, or uninvolved in school bullying, controlling for gender, age, socioeconomic status and immigrant background at the indivi...

Defending in bullying is a complex, yet important behavior that is likely associated with individual characteristics and group factors that operate simultaneously in the classroom microsystem. However, little research has longitudinally analyzed the role of multiple promoting factors at both the individual and classroom level. Drawing on the social...

Adolescents' aggressive behavior has been often linked to biases in morality. However, limited knowledge is available regarding the relative strength of different moral correlates, both at the individual and class-level, in predicting different types of aggressive behavior over time. To address this gap, the present study tested the prospective ass...

Background: This study sought to analyse the metric properties of the scores obtained with an adaptation of the Student Bystander Behaviour Scale (SBBS; Thornberg & Jungert, 2013) in Spanish primary-school students and to examine the types of responses students reported as witnesses to school bullying, along with their relationship to empathy. Me...

Bullying does not occur in a vacuum. It is not a coincidence when bullying emerges in a group. Knowledge of both the causes of bullying and how it can be prevented has increased radically in recent decades. We know more about bullying today than we have ever done before. This knowledge is vital to children’s and young people’s development and learn...

The overall aim of the present study was to examine whether moral disengagement and perceptions of antibullying class norms at individual level and at class level were associated with defending and passive bystanding in school bullying among school-age children. More specifically, we investigated the extent to which moral disengagement would contri...

Background: School climate is crucial: its character can affect pupils’ academic achievement, teachers’ working conditions and the wellbeing of everyone at school. A major concern for teachers is how to prevent and manage disruptive behaviours. Against this backdrop, there is a need for thorough investigation of pupils’ perspectives to better under...

For decades, social scientists have engaged in lengthy debates centered on defining traditional bullying, and these debates continue and are even more expansive with the advent of cyberbullying. As noted in this chapter, the majority of the definitions of bullying across the globe started with Olweus’s seminal writings and more recently contemporar...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-021-00555-z

This study investigates whether the quantity and quality of contact with migrants and perceiving that cultural diversity is accepted at school (as a dimension of the perceived school climate) are associated with perpetrating bullying toward migrant classmates. Quantity and quality of contact are also examined as moderators of the association betwee...

Highly responsive teachers tend to foster behaviors that are low in conflict and high in prosociality, among their students, leading to a positive classroom climate and to a decrease in bullying victimization. However, little is known about the interaction between teacher responsiveness and both student–teacher, and student–student relationship cha...

Change advocacy: how beginning teachers cope with emotionally challenging situations Beginning to teach after teacher education is commonly depicted as an emotionally challenging period. Beginning teachers deploy strategies to cope with the emotionally challenging transition from teacher education and starting a position as a teacher. One way of co...

The aim of the current study was to examine whether collective moral disengagement in the classroom was associated with bullying perpetration and victimisation. One-thousand-and-fifty-four students from 70 classrooms in 29 schools in the middle and southern parts of Sweden completed a questionnaire in their classroom. In line with the hypotheses, t...

This three-year longitudinal study examined both within- and between-person effects of moral disengagement on verbal bullying perpetration in early adolescence. Data came from the first four waves (T1–T4, Grades 4 to 7) of an ongoing longitudinal project examining social and moral correlates of bullying in Swedish schools. Participants included 243...

The present study aimed to investigate how those who had been chronic victims of bullying perceive their bullying experience from their initial attacks to their bullying exit, how they understood processes and actions causing a situation to become progressively worse, and how they interpreted their own coping behaviors. Nine individuals who were vi...

The aim of this study was to examine and construct a theoretical model of key elements that care workers perceive to have an impact on their autonomy, cohesion, and work motivation. Grounded theory was used for data collection and analysis. There were 20 participants from social welfare service, geriatric care, and women’s aid settings (women = 18,...

The overall objective of this study was to examine the links between teacher-student relationship quality and student engagement, delimited to affective and behavioural engagement. We used a sequential explanatory mixed methods research approach that consisted of a quantitative phase, in which survey data were collected and analysed within a short-...

In this qualitative study, we explore teachers’ perspectives on spatiality, school design and school bullying. The study is part of a larger, ongoing ethnographic research project into the relations between school bullying and the institutional context of schooling being conducted in schools in Sweden, focusing on the perspectives of teachers and s...

Time perspective has been recognized as an important psychological dimension with a pervasive and powerful influence on human behavior. To the authors’ knowledge, no studies have focused on the relationship between time perspective and cyberbullying behavior. The first aim of this research is to fill this gap by investigating the relationship betwe...

Guided by the social-ecological perspective, this study aims to explore how various social climates are associated with school motivation and the future orientation of 597 African American adolescents. We examined the direct and indirect effects of parent factors and school climate on future orientation through school motivation. School motivation...

This study examined whether students’ bystander behaviours in peer victimisation were associated with individual (IMD) and classroom collective moral disengagement (CMD). Self-report survey data were analysed from 1577 Swedish students in fifth grade. Multilevel analyses revealed that, when witnessing peer victimisation, students more often sided w...

Research into the prevalence of bullying is important to enable the correct allocation of resources to prevent and end bullying. One problem when gathering knowledge in how prevalent bullying is, is the considerable variation in percentage points in research studies. The aim of this study was to analyze how the estimated prevalence in Swedish natio...