مرکز منطقه ای اطلاع رساني علوم و فناوري - The Predictive Power of Social Emotional Learning Abilities on Middle School’s Students for Bullying

Abstract :

Bullying is one of the major problems on today s schools. This problem negatively affects not only students’ social and emotional development but also their academic learning. The purpose of this study is to investigate the prevalence of bullying in participants, the differentiation of bullying in terms of gender and grade differences and social-emotional learning abilities’ (communication ability, problem solving ability, coping ability and self-esteem enhancing ability) effect on two types of bullying. Participants of this study were students from six different elementary schools in Buca and Konak districts located in Izmir in 2008-2009 academic years. The total participants of this study consisted of 547 elementary students. 276 of them were girls (50,50%) and 271 of them were boys (49,50%). Data collection tools composed of Olweus’ Revised Bully/Victim Questionnaire (Solberg and Olweus, 2003), The Social-Emotional Learning Skills Scale (Kabakçı, 2006) and demographic information form. Findings show that boys significantly tended to be more bully/victim than girls and there were some differences in bullying statuses among grades. Binary logistic regression analysis showed that problem solving ability and self-esteem enhancing ability have protective effect from involved bullying.