Social skills and bullying: A systematic review

Abstract

Bullying is an important issue to be studied aiming to verify individual variables related to this process, as well as to develop interventions that can prevent or minimize the psychological distress of those involved. A lack of research studies that enable a greater clarification of the social skills involved in bullying is observed. In this sense, the present study aimed to conduct a systematic review of literature published between 2007 until April 2013 about social skills and bullying. The literature review was performed using the following databases: PubMed, Academic Search Premier - EBSCOhost, PsycINFO, ScienceDirect and ISI - Web of Science, using the keywords “social skills AND bullying” and “social skills AND bullying”. 1,126 articles were found. Articles in German, book chapters, theses, dissertations and abstracts, as well as those studies who did not address, concomitantly, the two themes associated were excluded. Only 24 articles were analyzed after the exclusion of the productions according to the criteria mentioned before. All articles were international, mostly empirical adopting a quasi-experimental and quantitative design. The most widely used instrument was the Social Skills Rating System (SSRS), and the country with a higher number of publications was Europe. The lack of Brazilian and Latin American studies on these issues highlights the need for further empirical research in this direction, since the results of investigations of this nature are essential for the development of interventions.

Keywords: social skills, bullying, systematic review.