DefinePK

Abstract

Bullying has been a critical issue in schools for students. This study explores secondary school principals' perspectives on bullying practices, causes, impacts, and coping strategies. Despite extensive research on bullying antecedents and outcomes, frontline insights from administrators encountering incidents firsthand remain lacking. This qualitative study helped fill that gap by eliciting 11 principals' experiences with risk factors, consequences, and change approaches related to bullying. The data were analyzed through thematic analysis. According to the findings, principals perceive bullying as arising from aggressive tendencies shaped by adversarial home lives, peer groups, school climates, and societal issues. They expressed facing burnout and distress responding to endemic aggression issues while sharing that targeted youth can suffer declining achievement, isolation, and dropout risks long-term. Principals also noted how unchecked bullying erodes schools' social fabric and learning capacity schoolwide. Accordingly, participants advocated for coordinated ecological prevention and intervention across school programming, student support, families, community partners, and media campaigns. By conveying principals' applied perspectives, the study underscores key levers across social ecologies requiring attention to curb bullying and its academic, emotional, and institutional harms. Multitiered initiatives grounded in administrators' frontline insights show promise for translating research into supportive policy and practice changes.