BULLYING: REPRESENTAÇÕES SOCIAIS DE ALUNOS DE UMA ESCOLA DA REDE PÚBLICA DO SERTÃO PARAIBANO

Abstract

The Theory of Social Representations, formulated by Serge Moscovici, brings the idea that all thinking and understanding is based on a set of concepts, statements and explanations that originated in everyday life in the course of interindividuals communications. Manifested in environments of human interaction (and communication) and propagating in several ways, the violence has taken on increasing proportions and the school appears as one of the possible stages for its occurrence through one of its variants: the bullying. Bullying is one of the most common types of school violence and refers to a term used to designate asymmetric power relations, with some characteristics: victimization between peer, repetition over time and intentionality of aggressive behavior. With the purpose to better understand bullying in the school scope, this work aimed to identify the social representations that students from a public school have about bullying. The present work was about of a field study, exploratory and descriptive, of a qualitative nature, developed in a public school in the backlands of Paraíba. The sample was non-probabilistic, for convenience and had the participation of 15 students enrolled in high school at the school. For data collection, the following instruments were used: Sociodemographic Questionnaire, the Free Association Technique of Words and a Half-Structured Interview, being administered in a virtual way. The data analysis of Sociodemographic Questionnaire was performed with the aid of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and the data analysis of the (TALP) and of the Half-Structured Interview were made through Content Analysis, proposed by Laurence Bardin and through the IRAMUTEQ software. Through Content Analysis of the TALP, the following analysis categories were created: Types of Bullying (Physical Characteristics, Personal Traits and Sexual Orientation); Feelings Awakened (Victim's Feelings and Aggressor's Feelings) and; Motivating Aspects (External Aspects and Internal Aspects). With the IRAMUTEQ software, bullying established high connectivity with three representation fields: sadness, prejudice and disrespect. Through the Half-Structured Interview, in light of Content Analysis, the following analysis categories were outlined: Bullying through the eyes of students (Bullying as a form of judgment, Bullying as a form of play and Bullying as a form of prejudice); Bullying and its involved (A look at the motivations of the phenomenon and A look at the consequences of the phenomenon); Bullying in the school experience (The school as a space of violence and The school as a space for confronting violence). With the IRAMUTEQ software, the following classes were delineated: Bullying: An Overview; Bullying: aggressors and victims; Bullying: motivations, examples and consequences; Bullying: main perceptions; Bullying: possible interventions and; Bullying: the main participants. It is believed that this study is relevant to identify the representations that cross the violence incorporated into the school context, as well as enabling the understanding of how bullying can interfere in the teaching-learning process and in the socio-emotional life of students.