Essay About Review Of Methods And Long Term Effects

Bullying
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School is the center of adolescent life. The adolescent learns more than
reading, writing, and arithmetic in the school environment. He or she also
learns socialization skills that shape their view of themselves as well as
relationships with others. Teens face problems in school today that
previous generations had not been forced to deal with One such problem is
school violence. Our nation has seen extreme examples of school violence in
Littleton, Colorado; West paducah, Kentucky; Johesboro, Arkansas; Pearl,
Mississippi; and Springfield, Colorado. However, school violence, also
called “bullying” is not always so extreme and/or obvious. In the
educational system today it is necessary, if not vital, to understand the
pervasiveness of bullying. In the article by Laura M Crothers and Edward M
Levinson entitled, “Assesment of bullying, a review of methods and
instruments, the authors discuss the issue of bullying as well as means and
methods to assess bullying.
Bullying can range from subtle behaviors such as social isolation of an
inividual, manipulation of friends or emotional pain, on up to the more
overt behaviors such as name-calling, verbal assault and physical assault.
Basically, bullying is described by the authors of the article as “the
process of establishing and maintaining social dominance through overt
aggression an doing so in ways that victims are unable to deflect because of
their lack of skills, their inability to effectively integrate with peers,
or their inability to debelop subgroups of peers.(______)
Bullying affects its victims immediately by means of psychological as
well as physical distress, difficulty concentration, and school phobia.
Long term effects include an inability to form and maintain interpersonal
relationships, as well as increased levels of depression and a damaged self
concept. Damaging effects of bullying are not limited to just the victim.
Children who bully develop the desire to overpower and dominate over
others. This leads to possible problems later in life as they perpetuate
the problems with future relationships. They may also develop social skills
that are predictors of poor adilt adjustment and will then pas these
maladaptive social skills on to the next generation. CHildren who practice
aggression with peers are much more likely to develop behaviors such as
domestic violence, criminal behavior and substance abuse (_).
According to the authors, there are various ways of collecting data on
bullying. These methods include observations, interviews, sociometric
measures, surveys, questionaires, teacher rating scales, and self-report
methods. Each of these methods has strengths and weaknesses. Observation
can be either structured or unstructured. Structured observation would be
utilized if a person wanted to gather information with regard to bullying on
a playground or within a particular setting. Unstructured observation would
be used if one wants to gather information in different contexts, i.e. the
locker room, buses, restrooms, etc. Observational methods are inexpensive,
fairly objective and typically are easy to conduct. However, observational
assessment may not correlate well over time, this can be overcome by
sampling behavior in multiple settings over long periods of time.
Interviewing is another method of assesment. It has been suggested that if
this method of assessment is used, the person conducting the interview
should be someone from outside the school. Students may be less