Communication 151
Bullying among male and female high school students in the UAE
Proposal
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Section: 51
02/2014
Introduction
One of the main problems schools deal with these days is bullying. Despite the fact that different actions are taken by many schools to prevent or reduce this issue, bullying is still prevalent amongst schoolchildren. The definitions of bullying can vary from one perspective to another,; however, it has beenwas defined as the “intentional, unprovoked abuse of power by one or more children to inflict pain or cause harm/distress to another child on repeated occasions” [4, p.345].
Bullying causes much harm to both bullies and to those bullied. The results of this phenomenon can be psychological, psychosomatic and behavior symptoms. Therefore, it is necessary to know the causes that leadmake students to turn into bullies and harm other studentsothers causing damage to themselves along with those bullied. Many aspects and areas around students’ environment can affect them, such as their peers, parents, school atmosphere and media, can affect them.
Our team, however, wants to investigate and learn about the prevalence of bullying among male and female students, since it is seems that most of males experience physical bullying, while females experiencesuffer from psychological impact [1]. Thus, we are interested in addressing the following Research Question (RQ): “Does bullying affect male high school students more than females in the UAE?”.?” In order to answer this RQ, we need to investigate the topic of bullying according to different themes, such as its definition, the factors causing bullying, its effects of bullying on students, the difference in bullying between genders and real-life examples of bullying in life. Finding information about these themes will help us to address our RQ. Therefore, we will be explaining in details the steps we are going to take to collect and gain the information needed about bullying, and soto answer our research question.
Literature review
Bullying is aggressive behavior that harms other people [1]. There are various types of bullying, such as verbal bullying, physical bullying, and cyber bullying. Among all types, the most frequent one is school bullying. The main factors of this type of bullying are: poor parenting, violence at home, poor family relationship, and violent video games [3, 1].
Another reason whichthat may leadmake the student- – especially males- to – become a bully is having feelings of "insecurity but would result to bullying others to cover up his insecurities every timestime he feels vulnerable"[" [2]. Some factors that might affect females mainly rathermore than males are jealousy and old friendships [3]. All these factors atin the end can cause serious physical and psychological health problems for people involved.
Bullying victims may suffer from psychological, psychosomatic and behavior symptoms, including anxiety and insecurity, low self-esteem and low self-worth [4]. Those victimsThey can also suffer fromendure mental health problems, sleeping difficulties, bed -wetting, depression, which may lead them to beresult in their being absent from school [4, 5]. In some situations, bullying can lead to the suicidalsuicide of the studentstudents bullied. An example from real life is a recently published in article 6 about a 14-year-old boy, Adam Grigg, who hanged himself by a rope tilluntil death, because his classmates had bullied him.
Purpose and scope
The main purpose of our research project is to investigate and search the prevalence of bullying among high schools maleschool males and femalefemales in the UAE, how students deal with bullying and how its affectthis problem, in what way it affects them. Therefore, our team members identified the research question "Does bullying affect male high school students more than females in the UAE?".?" Our research is based on two variables (1 the independent: gender, (2 the dependent: bullying. We've also set a range of factors that we are going to discuss in the proposal (1 the definition, (2 the factors and causes, (3 the difference between males and females, (4 the effects and (5 examples of bullying.
We will cover in our research male and female high school students in the UAE, between ages 15-19. We will survey 40 male students and 40 female students from grade 9 to 12. Also, each member from the team is going to interview 1 instructor, 3 male students and 3 female students. The reason for this overload data gathering is that we want our results to be more accurate and precise.
Methodology
In our research, we'llwe are going to use three methods to gather data that will help us to answer our research question. We will use the process of triangulation to substantiate findings. The first method will be a social attitude survey. This type of surveyIt will help us to find answers forto general questions about beliefs and behaviors of the respondents.
The questions asked will be about definitions that best describe bullying, what do they think the main factors of bullying are, how people are affected from their own point of view, if they think that there is a difference between males and females regarding bullying, and lastly if they know any stories of bullying around them. The survey will be administered by hand among 40 female and 40 male students from ages 13-18 years old from different schools and different academic levels. While answering the survey, the members of our group will be assisting the students in case of any misunderstanding.
After answering the surveyquestions, students will be asked if it is possible to have an interview with them. In this interview we'll, we will try to start an informal conversation to get as much information as much as possible. Students in the interviewpersonal meeting will be asked to share their experience and willto answer some questions, which will help to corroborate the survey data. We'll also have an interview with 2 teachers and a counselor from every school visited. These interviews will enhance our findings because all teachers, and especially counselors, had been throughwitnessed a lot of bullying experiences. If we asked them the same questions that we'll askwe asked the students, we might get a different answer fromviewpoint with a differentnew perspective.
The last method will be an experiment. We plan to show the students video clips, including some bullying behavior, and we’llwe will ask the studentsthem to reflect on it and give their opinion about it. This will happen at the same time as interviewing the sample. Our group will get two laptops, 2 iPads, and a tablet to play these movies. For example, we'll play parts of the movie "Mean Girls" to know the attitude of the girls toward some bullying behaviors.
The movie is PG-13, which is acceptable to the sample that'llthat will reflect on the movie, yet we'llwe will make sure that we only use the appropriate parts. For male students we'll, we will show them some parts of WWE episodes, where all they do is fighting and beating each other, and from that we'llwe will find out how they view these men and what their thoughts about them are. We chose the movies based on what we read as a bullying behavior in both genders in the literature reviews. All these methods will take place in the schools, which will be visited thea week after submitting the proposal and receiving the approval.
Work plan and time line
Our research plan is shown in the Gantt chart (see appendixAppendix). We chose The Gantt chatchart to organize our tasks, and the chartit shows what we are going to complete in specific time and dates. The minutes of meeting and accomplishing the tasks will be recorded in the chartthere. We are planning on finishing all the tasks before the deadline and the reason for this is that we want to keep some space-time in case of emergencies. For example, we can use this time if some of the members wasn’twas not able to accomplish his/her task on time.
Conclusion
Both male and female high school students can get affected by bullying on account of to its huge prevalence among them. Thus, they can suffer from physical and psychological problems in resultsresult of facing bullying behaviors. Knowing the key reasons and the ways of bullying could help in identifying the amount of physical and psychological problems a student can get by being a victim in a bullying action, therefore, finding recommendations to address this problem. As our research suggested, male high school students have a higher chance in getting affected by bullying behaviors more than female high school students. In our case, it is important to know the amount of bullying students can deal with in one day in order to know how much it can affect them. Also, we would like to find out if there is a difference in the results between male and female students regarding this issue. We trust that this proposal meets with your approval and that you will allow us to proceed.
Reference
[1] R. Kaltiala-Heino, M. Rimpela, P. Rantanen, and A Rimpela, “ Bullying at school-an indicator of adolescents at risk for mental disorder”, Journal of Adolescence, vol. 23, pp. 661-674, 2000.
[2] “Bullying among teenagers”, [Online]. Available: http://teenagersview.com/peer-pressure-and-bullying/bullying-amongst-teenagers/
[3] J. Peters and Prof. J, Taylor, “An Overview on the Complex Topic of Bullying Among Girls”, pp. 1-9, June 20, 2010.
[4] R. Forero, L. McLellan, C. Rissel and A. Bauman, “Bullying behavior and psychosocial health among school students in New South Wales, Australia” Cross sectional survey, vol.319, pp.344-348, August 1999.
[5] J. Franlks, E. Rawana and K. Brownlee, “The relationship between strengths in youth and bullying experiences at school” , Educational Journal, vol. 30 No.4, pp 44-58, 2013
[6] Mail online news, “Hanging tragedy of boy tormented by school bullies”, [Online]. Available: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-110271/Hanging-tragedy-boy-tormented-school-bullies.html
