Esplorazione dei problemi di bullismo tra studenti delle scuole primarie, secondarie e superiori

Experiences of peer bullying like those depicted in the opening vignettes are far too common an occurrence in schools worldwide. Being bullied can be tremendously painful, and victimization has been associated with a myriad of adjustment problems. It was reported that almost one in three students had been bullied by their peers at school at least once in the last month. The prevalence of student bullying varied largely in different countries and regions. One crucial cause of this was that there was no standard definition of bullying or cyberbullying in international surveys (UNESCO, 2019). Since the concept of bullying was initiated half a century ago, arguments over its definition, features, and effectiveness of anti-bullying programs have always existed. Relying on these research topics and to the related literature, this research aimed to identify the essential features of student bullying to distinguish it from other negative behaviors by classifying the relationships between bullying, violence, and cyberbullying, delimiting its connotation and extent, and defining it through new perspectives. To achieve these goals, three empirical studies were employed in this research. The first study was a questionnaire administered to 60 in-service primary, secondary, and high school teachers in China to learn teachers’ viewpoints about bullying problems according to their experience. For making up for the inadequacy in the first quantitative study, the second study interviewed three teachers in primary, secondary, and high schools separately to collect the data on the mechanism of student bullying, the related countermeasures adopted, and their effect. Based on the two studies’ results, the third study, the control condition of imagined contact experiments, tried to analyze the effects of a positive relationship between intergroup members in supporting vulnerable peers in bullying behaviors, thereby reducing the incidents of student bullying in schools. Based on the abovementioned analyses and results, this research proposed a new definition of student bullying characterized by three new features, classified bullying as the primary stage before student violence, and student violence was a qualitative change of bullying, which makes this definition more operable and practical in practice. The results of the third study, the imaged contact, showed that positive contact was associated with more empathy, better helping attitudes, and less intergroup discrimination, exclusion, and aggression. It was essential for peers to offer help to some unpopular or disabled students in class, thereby counteracting the occurrence of bullying evens and protecting the bullied students from further harm. Thus, peer’ supports are the potential power to address bullying problems. Furthermore, four strategic measures were put forward on the grounds of the abovementioned results in the end.