School and community-based approaches for preventing bullying

With an increasing focus on bullying among the public, educators, researchers, and policy makers, there is a need to delineate what we know works in bullying prevention and what areas might benefit from greater attention. The social-ecological framework provides a useful tool through which to consider what contexts and factors within these contexts might yield promising results in bullying prevention. In this article we first provide an overview of bullying prevention program evaluations to date, and then highlight two salient components of the social-ecology that have received limited attention to date. Specifically, we discuss the role of teacher implementation in influencing bullying program effectiveness, and consider how community-based bullying prevention efforts might serve to address factors relevant to bullying involvement that are outside the sphere of influence of educators.