Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Bullying is a phenomenon extremely pervasive throughout the lives of all its participants.It represents a form of pro-active aggressive behavior occurring in contexts of power imbalances and frequently being a repeated experience.Bullying is ubiquitous, with its worldwide prevalence of victimization lying mainly over the 20% mark and almost reaching the 40% mark in Portugal.Its deleterious outcomes range from low academic achievement and some somatizations, to severe depression, suicides and homicides, hence the extreme medico-legal pertinence in understanding and preventing it.So far, the majority of the studies regarding bullying behaviors have resorted to indirect measures such as surveys and questionnaires, and only few have employed ethological methods and concepts to their design.The main objective of the present work was to approach bullying through an ethological standpoint in an attempt to gain a more comprehensive insight into this problematic.More specifically, we aimed to, resorting to naturalistic observations, identify a dominance hierarchy within a group of adolescents in school and to analyze a possible relation between rank order and engaging in bullying behaviors.Resorting to a sample of 6 male adolescents, rank orders were assessed and dominance indices were calculated for each subject.A focal instantaneous sampling was employed to measure both the frequencies and the durations of dominance-related behaviors.The sampling points took place every 30 sec, making a total of 2,5 minutes of sampling period per subject, within a 15-minute observation.A focal-only sampling was used as well in order to record, per subject, every behavior occurring in a bullying context.The results of this study revealed a rank ordering among the sample, with the top ranking element engaging significantly more in non-aggressive/non-intentionally aggressive dominance behaviors than the other hierarchical categories; the bottom rank subject displaying significantly more submissive behaviors; and with the individual occupying the second dominant position in the hierarchy exhibiting statistically significantly more aggressive behaviors in bullying contexts than the other categories of dominance, with the exception of the most dominant element.Together, these results support the hypothesis that engaging in bullying behaviors may be an antisocial, aggressive attempt to achieve dominance within a group.However, further studies at a larger scale and resorting to other methods (such as audiovisual recordings) should be conducted in order to increase the statistical power of the results of this study.
DOI: 10.34626/2ndv-sm02
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: UNICEF
OpenAlex ID: W2548300080