Linguistic issues in studying bullying-related phenomena: Data from a revised cartoon task

The actual words used to describe bullying-like phenomena vary, in different languages and countries. The word bullying corresponds well to other terms in northern European languages (such as mobbning in Swedish, mobbing in Norwegian, pesten in Dutch), but terms in Latin-based languages do not have a corresponding term and use terms such as violence (French) or prepotenza (Italian). Differences in meanings of terms are crucial in cross-national comparisons, and have been investigated using a stick-figure cartoon task. This chapter overviews these issues and provides data from a revised and updated version of the cartoon task, given in 9 eastern and western countries; Japan, South Korea, England, Canada, Iceland, China, Hong Kong, Pakistan, and Turkey. The term bullying was similar in meaning in England and Canada. There were considerable variations in meaning of other terms; wang-ta is low on physical bullying, but both wang-ta and ijime are high on severe social exclusion; by contrast, ha yan, qifu and zorbalik are low on social exclusion; ijime and wang-ta are low on some age/grade-related cartoons. Different terms pick up different weightings of physical, verbal and social exclusion items. Furthermore, the kinds of social exclusion will be weighted differently in different societies. Copyright © 2016 Cambridge University Press.