ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of bullying research conducted by the Rural Adaptation Project (RAP) and discusses how the RAP studies have examined the impact of bullying victimization from a sample of rural youth. Rural youth face stressors largely absent in urban and suburban environments such as geographic isolation, fewer community resources and restricted social networks. An important avenue for future research is the creation, implementation and evaluation of bullying interventions tailored to rural schools. Using logistic regression, a group of RAP bullying studies examined bystander behavior. Participants with high levels of friend support had a significantly higher probability of reporting frequent prosocial bystander behavior compared to students with low levels of friend support; a similar trend was found for teacher support. Findings indicated that social capital deprivation and antisocial capital had a stronger association with negative bystander behavior than social capital factors had on prosocial bystander behavior.
