Robert Thornberg is a Professor of Education at the Department of Behavioural Sciences, Linköping University. He earned his Ph.D. in Educational Research 2006. His current research is on school bullying, especially with a focus on social and moral processes involved in bullying, bystander rationales, reactions and actions, and students' perspectives and explanations.
His second line of research is on values education including morals, norms, and student participation in everyday school life. A third line of research is on teacher education, especially student teachers' motives to become a teacher and their experiences of distressed situations during teacher training. Thornberg uses a range of research methods including qualitative interviews and focus groups, questionnaires and psychometric scales, ethnographic fieldwork, cross-sectional and longitudinal designs, grounded theory, and statistical methods."
Areas of Expertise
Risk and protective factors associated with school bullying
Social psychology of school bullying
Moral agency and disengagement in relation to school bullying and the bystander position in school bullying
Students’ perceptions of why bullying happens and why different bystander actions take place
Values education in everyday school life
Grounded theory and its constructivist turn
Research Interests
Bullying and bystander behaviours, and their associations with individual and collective moral disengagement, self-efficacy, collective efficacy, and moral emotionsBullying and moral reasoning
Bullying and bystander behaviours, and their associations with classroom climate, with a particular focus on teacher-student relationships and student-student relationships
Motivational factors associated with defender, passive bystander, and pro-bully behaviour when witnessing bullying
The social interaction patterns of school bullying, normative discourses, and social constructions of the involved students
Students’ perspectives on and explanations of bullying and different bystander behaviours in bullying
Teachers’ and student teachers’ perspectives on values education
Emotional distressful learning situations at teacher and medical education
Students’ perceptions of school rules
