The Bully Report

Earlier this year, we ran the DoSomething.org Bully Project in partnership with the movie Bully. Teens filled out a 9 question survey on Facebook where they told us about the state of bullying in their school. Over 180,000 people took the survey.

We wanted to make sure that the data we present is as accurate as our methodology allows. After removing college students and adults retrospectively reporting on their secondary school experiences, as well as suppressing multiple responses and users who manually or incorrectly entered a school (i.e. responses not tied to a verifiable school), 54,763 unique responses remained from students in verified secondary schools. This report analyzes these 54,763 responses.

Sure. Just click here.

In April 2012, DoSomething.org launched an interactive Facebook application, The Bully Project (Bully App), which allowed students to report on their experience with bullying in their schools by responding to eight close-ended questions and one open-ended prompt. The application would then grade each school based a user’s selections and prompt the user to share their results with their friends.

The content of the Bully App was casual by design – prompts within the app were chatty and at times leading – and all participants self-selected to take part. However, due to the large volume of data captured and the ability to look at relative differences in response rates based on demographic information, insights into how and where bullying takes place, as well as what measures correlate with decreased reporting rates, have been possible. These initial findings compare favorably with external data sets.

The US Department of Justice in their School Crime Supplement (SCS) found higher rates of bullying at public schools compared to private schools, a finding consistent with users from public schools reporting the highest frequencies in the Bully App. Additionally, the SCS also finds that as students move up in grade, they report lower rates of abuse; again, consistent with responses pulled from the Bully App.

If you’re interested in using our data set to do your own analysis, email us at datarequest@dosomething.org. Any data that we send out will be anonymous, without any factors that could identify the respondent.

Take a look on our Bully Text page. We offer some advice on what you can do (and you can play the bully text game).