Victims’ Conceptualization of ‘Bullying’ through Narrative Discourse: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Narrative is a form of discourse through which narrators organize and construct the meanings of events based on their personal experiences and emotional perspectives. This article aims to analyze bullying victims’ narratives using Labov’s (1972) narrative framework, and to interpret the concept of “bullying” from the victims’ perspectives through van Dijk’s (1998) ideological analysis. The data analyzed in this study consist of bullying victim narratives collected through purposive sampling, selecting only stories in which the narrators explicitly position themselves as victims of bullying. The data comprises 400 narratives posted on the Pantip website (www.pantip.com) between January 2023 and December 2024. The findings reveal that 58.24% of the narratives exhibit incomplete storytelling structures, with the resolution and closing stages frequently absent, indicating that bullying is represented as an ongoing and unresolved experience. Across the narratives, storytellers’ voice as moving from victims toward acceptance, reflecting 2 interrelated conceptualizations of bullying: bullying as a condition of (ab)normality that victims must endure, and bullying because of deviation from social norms. The study further demonstrates that victims commonly propose endurance, self-adjustment, and emotional acceptance as solutions, framing bullying as a problem to be managed at the individual level. This narrative pattern reinforces dominant social norm ideologies that systematically reproduce and normalize “abnormality.”