Have you or anyone you know ever been bullied before? Well, you’re not alone. I have a niece who was intensely bullied which caused serious harm emotionally and mentally. Not to mention, the parents were distraught, emotionally and mentally drained. My research question focuses on whether the Government (State and Federal) should establish stricter laws to prevent bullying which causes physical and emotional harm.
Even though the state, Federal, and local governments have acknowledged the growing problem and have adopted laws as well as action plans and some programs to prevent such obstruction, a good deal of these responses have been pushed forward with minimal consideration to what is known about bullying and its outcome. It’s imperative that bullying be stopped before it harms more innocent children and adults and takes more lives.
In 2010 the Department of Education reviewed state laws on bullying and identified key components which can assist those creating or trying to improve their bullying laws or policies in their state. In spite of the fact that there are no federal laws in place for bullying, schools are obligated to address such conduct under the laws enforced by the Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice.
There are, however, anti-bullying laws in place in every state. The purpose for this revision was to create a framework of the damaging effects bullying has on students, in addition to impacts on student academic achievements, school safety, student engagement, and the school environment. It also reaffirms that any form, type, or level of bullying is unacceptable, and that every incident needs to be taken seriously by school administrators, school staff (including teachers), students, and students’ families. (Key Components, 2018)
What Is Bullying?
Bullying is unwanted, aggressive behavior among school aged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. The behavior is repeated, or has the potential to be repeated, over time. Both kids who are bullied and who bully others may have serious, lasting problem (“What is Bullying”, 2018).
Bullying occurs not just in schools, but in workplaces and in homes. This unpleasant behavior has been around for decades and which seemed to be just a playful and teasing behavior, has now become an obstruction for many children and adults.
Bullying can happen in many different forms, such as, making threats, spreading rumors, attacking someone physically or verbally (teasing, name-calling, taunting, etc.), and excluding someone from a group on purpose (“What is Bullying”, 2018). Due to the traumatic nature, some victims never get over the distress that can come with bullying both for the victim and the bully. As a result of this, school violence has increased significantly and it’s causing deaths amongst classmates.
Where and When Bullying Take Place?
Bullying can occur during or after school hours. While most reported bullying happens in the school building, a significant percentage also happens in places like on the playground or the bus. It can also happen travelling to or from school, in the youth’s neighborhood, or on the Internet (“What is Bullying”, 2018).
The National Statistics shows that according to one large study, the following percentages of middle schools students had experienced bullying in these various places at school: classroom (29.3%); hallway or lockers (29.0%); cafeteria (23.4%); gym or PE class (19.5%); bathroom (12.2%); playground or recess (6.2%) (“Statistics”, 2018).
Effects on Bullying
Bullying causes unimaginable harm and even fatalities in some cases. National Statistics shows that 28 percent of U.S. students in in grades 6 through 12 experienced bullying and 20 percent in grades 9 through 12. Thirty percent of young people admit to bullying others (“Statistics”, 2018).
Physical, emotional and academic performance is compromised by bullies every single day for some of the children including adults in the workplace.
The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact bullying has in our children’s lives and what can be done to stop it before it harms more innocent lives. Bullying has become a huge problem in the school systems and our communities which threatens physical and emotional harm to a large number of people. Despite Federal and Government laws in place, it seems as though, the problem is sadly increasing.
Why does this research need to be conducted?
This research needs to be conducted to raise awareness of the problem and to provide parents, educators, students and the community information of how we can make the data decrease. Having stricter laws and zero tolerance can hopefully end bullying in our children’s schools and the communities.
What is its relevance?
The importance of this research is that making the sacrifice of being knowledgeable of the problem can save lives. People of different ages, social statuses, nationalities, and races are being violently under attack every single day.
I will be utilizing the semi-structured interviews to gather focused, qualitative documented data. This method will propose a balance between the flexibility of an open-ended interview and the focus of a structured ethnographic survey. By way of utilizing the semi-structured interview method, this will assist in the clarification of the research scope or the specific research question. This method can reveal valuable descriptive data analysis on the exclusive insights of participants.
Process to be Undertaken
1) Question Development Stage/Interview Guide:
2) Materials:
3) Demographics: Participants and interviewer(s) will be recognized.
4) Meeting Formation: This session will allow the interviewer to introduce her/himself, re-explain the research in study and get the participant’s consent (written).
5) Investigation: Upon interview completion, and assessment will be conducted of all the responses data for insights and principles.
7) Report Initiation: A report of the collected data analysis will be finalized and disseminated to the proper staff and will be utilized for future research studies at the university.
Methodology
This is the process which will be applied by the research so as to collect data which is needed for the analysis phase (Howell, 2013). Moreover, the methodology will cover the instruments used as well as data analysis techniques. The study instruments is a broad term which is used to refer to the devices applied in gaining information for the study. In this research the main focus is to analyze the impact of bullying on the lives of children as well as analyze the long-term consequence of the vice.
Instruments
In order to collect the relevant information, the research will apply a variety of instruments. One of the instruments to be used will be questionnaires, this will be applied to obtain information from a number of students selected to take part in the study (Franklin, 2012). In addition, face to face interviews will be administered specially to obtain information from the senior personnel such as the school counselors and administrators. A copy of questions to be used in the questionnaire is attached in the appendix.
Data Collection
So as to obtained the necessary data for the research will select five schools within a State in the United States and select a total of 100 respondents randomly within grade 6 to 12. In addition, the school counselors together with an administrator per school will be interviewed. To ensure an appropriate environment for collecting the data the interviews will be conducted privately (Ndira, Slater, & Bucknam, 2011). Also, the pupils participating in the interview will be selected at random and allowed to answer the questionnaire in a private room under the guidance of a qualified counsellor. The interviews will be recorded inform of short notes and together with the filled questionnaires used in the data analysis.
Data Analysis
Once the data is collected it will be cleaned and the statistical values recorded in an excel sheet. The Microsoft excel tool will thereafter be used to analyze the data so as to obtain relevant statistics that can be used to make conclusions.
Ethical Considerations
In this study the human population will be used in a large scale especially when it comes to data collection. As a way of ensuring the confidentiality of the individuals who took part in the study a number of precautions will be put in place. The students will not fill their names in the questionnaires. Also, during the interviews each interviewee will sign a consent form which will guarantee that his/her identity will remain hidden unless it is necessary to reveal it under their permission (Creswell, 2008). Also, the raw data collected will not be shared with third parties where not necessary. Only the filtered data and the analysis outputs will be reported.
Before taking part in the study the participants will be verbally informed on their rights. That is participating in the study in purely voluntary and does not attract any payment. In addition, a participant is allowed to withdraw from the research at any step with no implication on them. Considering that some of the students filling the questionnaires may be under age their parents will be supplied with a consent form to fill and sign on their behalf. Permission will also be obtained from the school administration which allows the study to be carried out within the chosen schools.
In the information collection process, the study will seek the guidance of a professional counselor to ensure that the rights of the minors are not violated in any way and they are free and willing to take part in the study.
It is imperative to have strict laws for bullying, where the traumatic stress can certainly create a major stress for the children at school. There is a possibility that they might be fearful to attend the school, using the restrooms or going alone anywhere. The fear and anxiety can be mainly difficult for the children to focus on how they engage in the classrooms which will eventually make their learning more difficult. Hence, the laws and programs that reduce bullying practices are important, where the antibullying programs might be holding elicit responses which exerts a major indirect influence on bullying with limiting the effectiveness of anti-bullying activities (Espelage, Low, Van & Polanin, 2015).
It is seen that a small group of students might evidence reactance which can influence a wider group of students through modelling the antisocial behavior and encouraging the peers with disregard or disruption of programs.
The process is considered to be deviancy training which is likely to flourish in relativeness to the unstructured settings, where bullying occurs often (Rigby, 2017). The mechanisms set through antibullying initiatives might generally elicit the responses that could undermine the programs through recurrent focus group themes. The participants need to focus on limiting the extent to which the initiatives are influencing their peers (Evans, Adler, MacDonald & Côté, 2016).
There are different factors of psychological reactance which might be leading to influencing the student response for antibullying initiatives. The reactance’s are likely when prevention programs attempt to limit the behaviors of student value.
The strict laws can help in saving the lives where people of different ages, social status and the nationalities are seen to be violent under attack each and every day. The bullying has been a major problem in the communities that could threaten the physical and the emotional harms which are done to the people, at an enormous level (Formby, 2015).
Limitations and Delimitations
There are different limitations to the research. We need to know where the study is conducted, and whether the bullying rates are higher or not. It is also not clear if the findings are transferrable to other schools all over the country where the antibullying programs are generally considered to be successful.
The other limitation is the decision to engage the workers with focus group interviewers who might have introduced a completely biased factor towards a favorable evaluation for antibullying programs.
There is a need to reduce the disruptions with focus groups only limited to time of 45 minutes.
This could have reduced the percentage of groups, where theme was recorded.
The research delimits that the study might not be completely generalized for other populations or the youth who are not attending the schools, any longer.
Significance of the study
The study will be of assistance in raising awareness for the problems and then provide parents, educators and the students with proper information on how to handle the problem of bullying in society. The strict laws need to be reformed so that the children are not harmed through this.
Conclusion
Bullying is indicative of aggressive behavior among the children and bullying involves power imbalance. Bullying is often repeated, and it takes place over a course of time. Bullying can occur in various forms and one can make threats or spread rumors in the case of bullying. Bullying can take place at the time of and after the school hours. Most of the cases of bullying takes place within the school premises, as well as, the playground and/or on the bus. Bullying can give rise to unimaginable harm and it also causes fatalities in most of the cases. Bullying debilitates the academic performance of the students and it can also harm the professional performance of an individual. Deductive reasoning approach is applied in this research paper on the topic of bullying. It helps in examining prospects that can help a person in reaching rational conclusion.
The significance of the research is that it can pave the path for more research and governmental regulations would be reevaluated owing to this research. People should come together and become a community that can help in dealing with bulling in the schools, office and in the society.
References
Creswell, J. W. (2008). Educational Research: Planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research. Upper Saddle River: Pearson.
Franklin, M. I. (2012). Understanding Research: Coping with the Quantitative-Qualitative Divide. London and New York: Routledge.
Howell, K. E. (2013). Introduction to the Philosophy of Methodology. London: Sage Publications.
Ndira, E. A., Slater, T., & Bucknam, A. (2011). Action Research for Business, Nonprofit, and Public Administration – A Tool for Complex Times . CA: Sage.
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