Bully victimization and pupil well-being

Pages: 260-266
Damanjit Sandhu, Manjot Kaur and Kirandeep Kaur (Department of Psychology, Punjabi University, Patiala, Punjab)

The problem of school bullying is on the rise worldwide. Bullying has proven to be damaging and destructive for the pupils as well as for the society at large. In most situations, victims do survive but carry scars for a lifetime. Bullying tends to have negative affect on the physical, psychological, emotional, academic and social well being of a child. The present study was conducted to understand the relationship between school bullying and pupil well-being. This study highlighted the impact of bully-victimization on pupil well-being and it also explored the links between bully- victimization and problem behaviour in Indian adolescent pupils. 200 school going adolescent boys and girls (age range 15-17 years) served as subjects in this study. Multidimensional Peer-Victimization Scale (Mynard & Joseph, 2000), Youth Self Report (YSR) (Achenbach,1991) and Friedman Well-Being Scale ( Friedman, 1992) were used. Reliability coefficients and Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficients were computed. The results of the study showed that Bully-Victimization is linked with internalizing problem behaviour and it is negatively associated with happiness, joviality, sociability, self esteem/self confidence and emotional stability. Another very interesting finding which emerged from the present study is that pupils face physical victimization and attacks on property together.