Over the years, The Spectrum has published a handful of articles on bullying. Last year, The Spectrum interviewed Ayraman Mishra, a student who described how the lifelong effects of bullying affected his transition to college.
In 2011, national news paid attention to bullying after a freshman at Williamsville North High School, Jamey Rodemeyer, died by suicide after experiencing a barrage of homophobic bullying. In response, The Spectrum conducted a survey of 612 students, where 51.3 percent reported that they had experienced some form of bullying.
One person who was interviewed for the feature was Amanda Nickerson, the director of the then-newly created Jean M. Alberti Center for the Prevention of Bullying Abuse and School Violence.
15 years later, the Alberti Center remains a strong research institution at UB, serving as one of the leading research centers in the U.S. for the study and prevention of bullying. It is still run by Nickerson who has watched the center shift its research directions as bullying itself has evolved over time.
The Alberti Center was founded in 2010 after receiving an endowment from Jean Alberti, a psychologist who graduated from UB in 1970, receiving her Ph.D. in educational psychology. Working as a clinical psychologist in the Chicago area, a pattern that resurfaced in her numerous interactions with adults was that many reported trauma relating to bullying as children, and that these effects had persisted well into adulthood.
The center underwent a period of transition and growth when Dr. Stephanie Frederick joined in 2019 as an associate director, bringing with her, her research into cyberbullying.
Frederick began her dissertation in the early 2010s.
“At that time, cyberbullying was getting a lot of attention in the media, and in particular, there was a lot of attention with youth suicide, and relating it to cyberbullying.”
Nickerson, on the other hand, fell into the study of bullying accidentally. She was a professor at the University at Albany when a graduate student Leigh Worral (née Cooper), now a staff member of UB’s Graduate School of Education, approached her about a potential study looking at the experiences of parents of middle school students, and how their previous experiences related to how they dealt with bullying relating to their own children.
One surprising finding was that parents who experienced physical bullying were less concerned about bullying in relation to their own children compared to parents who experienced other forms of bullying.
Subsequently, Nickerson began to study bullying, and was asked to help the center upon its creation in 2010.
One research area that Nickerson is passionate about is bystander intervention because “one of the things that we know is that [other students] are present almost all the time when bullying is happening in some way”.
Nickerson has been involved in a pilot program called Norms and Bystander Intervention Training (NABIT), which focuses on understanding the reasons why someone may not intervene, and teaching adolescents how to recognize issues of bullying, cyberbullying and sexual harassment with the goal of giving them tools to intervene.
One variable that has consistently been shown to not cause people to intervene is the fear of retaliation. Another factor is that individuals may perceive that the individual being harassed has done something to deserve it.
On the other hand, one personality trait that has shown to consistently cause someone to intervene is the amount of empathy that they possess, “affective empathy, being able to understand and feel bad that somebody else may be hurt by this bullying,” says Nickerson.
Some of her earlier work has also found that increased open communication and a closer relationship with parents has also predicted whether one will intervene.
Another factor is perceived popularity. According to Nickerson: “Those that already have people like them have self-confidence, they have efficacy, they believe that they can make a difference.” One memory that has stuck with Nickerson in her research was when a freshman high school student shared with her that he stood up to his sports team when he recognized that a teammate who had a nickname due to his small stature, had been taking the nickname particularly hard. Nickerson attributes the intervention to the fact that the student likely had a higher social status, and had the requisite empathy to recognize that something was wrong.
Dylan Harrison, a Ph.D. student in the combined counseling and school psychology program with the center thinks that adolescent bullying is inextricably linked to identity. “Adolsecents are often seeking social identity. I think that a huge component of social identity is feelings of belonging [...] it’s very common for kids during that period of time, when they’re struggling to figure out who they are, who their friends are, and how they can belong, that oftentimes bullying can be a really quick way to create an ‘in-group-out-group’. I think that research in that area is very important because we can help kids figure out other ways to achieve that sense of belonging.”
Kat Margiotta, a fourth-year Ph.D. student approaches her work at Alberti from a trauma informed perspective. “I'm really interested in research that looks at the impact of trauma and violence on kids and adolescents. I think that bullying can definitely be a part of that.” Margiotta agrees with Frederick that widespread access to social media leads to a “24/7” pattern where bullying spreads from the school setting to the home.
According to Frederick, as traditional forms of bullying have declined, new forms have emerged: “If you look at national surveys, and at these national datasets, we are generally finding an overall decline in traditional forms of bullying. If you look at subforms, if you look at what’s called bias-based bullying that targets for example someone’s sexual orientation, gender identity things like that, those tend to still be still quite problematic. If you look at these large datasets with cyberbullying, we are seeing a steady increase over the past 10 years or so.”
Currently, the center is working with Dan Fox, guidance counselor of Clarence Middle School to implement a digital citizenship program to promote online safety and prevent cyberbullying.
This is a passion project for Frederick: “How can we have empathy both in the real world as well as online? And so I think we're really hoping to scale that up a little bit and ideally, help schools and families become more comfortable talking about these topics, just as part of online safety.”
Katie Brown, a first-year Ph.D. student who is interested in social and emotional learning says that while the data has not been fully analyzed, the program at Clarence Middle School appears to have made a positive effect.
Prior to arriving at the center, postdoctoral associate Hannah Rapp published her dissertation on bullying and how it related to individuals with developmental disabilities. “Who gets bullied the most is students who have disabilities, who can’t communicate as well, who might have less friends to defend them or who don’t pick up on social cues like everybody else.”
Rapp’s dissertation found that parents of disabled students often “come out of these situations with hurt and unforgiveness towards the school system.”
With a final sample of 146 parents, Rapp read 146 stories of the endless ways that kids with disabilities can be bullied. One experience that she remembers was a story by “a mom who wrote ‘her daughter would wait for the bus at school and these two boys would tell her to lick trees and the telephone pole, and they told her to kneel with her hands behind her head, and she thought they were just joking because she had a [intellectual disability] and didn’t realize she was being bullied.”
The Alberti Center will continue to serve as a valuable resource for the studying and prevention of bullying.
Jacob Wojtowicz is the senior features editor and can be reached at jacob.wojtowicz@ubspectrum.com
