The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt

How did you get interested in studying bullying?

I get asked that question all the time. People wanna 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. Um, 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 gonna be hard to do experiments on bullying when you think about it. Um, it's, I mean, it's just not gonna work really. (laughs) 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, um, individual factors that were associated with it. Dan Olweus kind of led the charge. He's a Swede who, uh, was living in Norway at the time, um, conducted the largest study, uh, at the time, longest- largest longitudinal study, but also intervention study. Um, and then found a 50% reduction, but easy to do in Norway when you have everybody involved. It's a small country. Um, so anyhow, so he looked at, um, what happens to kids who bully as they move forward, so identified boys in grade nine, found that, uh, a large percentage of them were criminally- were involved in, um, 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 bon- beyond just descriptives, although there are, it is still descriptive to some extent. And then, um, some people then focused, um, on the so- sort of like the broader context that it happens in, so like not just at the individual level but what do school-related factors look like? Kids are nested within schools or nested within their families. How do those interrelate? And then my focus was always on the neurobiology of bullying. I was really interested in documenting how it hurt people, not just at that level where it could be easily dismissed where people just say, "Ah, you know, you just need to be more resilient. Suck it up." Um, "Yeah, she's sad but she'll get over it." I wanted to show that no, it, it affects them in a way that's profound and places them at risk for the rest of their lives. So that was kind of like my area of research and since then, um, others have followed. Um, there's not enough of us. I think that we need to be looking at the neurobiology a little bit more carefully. It's a profound psychosocial stressor. And so that's kind of like the evolution of bullying research, and then there's another side group that looks at it from an evolutionary perspective, and I know you had Tony Volk on before and I do that a little bit too with Tony and the like. Um, so, yeah, it's, I think it's, we're getting there.