O bullying nas escolas brasileiras : as formas de mensuração e seus desdobramentos para a compreensão do fenômeno

Abstract

This thesis investigates bullying among elementary school adolescents in Brazil, focusing on developing a robust critical analysis of the bullying measures available for the country. The main objective is to verify how the measures of bullying victimization among elementary school adolescents available for Brazil – namely, the National School Health Survey (PeNSE) and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) – capture bullying in schools and whether they produce reliable estimates of the phenomenon they purport to measure. Bullying is defined as a set of aggressive behaviors intentionally and repeatedly perpetrated by a student (or a group of students) against others, characterized by an imbalance of power between aggressor and victim. Although this phenomenon has been investigated since the 1970s internationally and since the 2000s in Brazil, the field of research is still full of inconsistencies. Researchers often fail to assess the three basic aspects of bullying – intentional aggression, repetitiveness, and power imbalance – in their research, generating data that often relate more to aggressive behavior in general than to bullying. The critical analysis of the bullying measures available for Brazil involved a detailed scrutiny of their content in light of four other measures used internationally: Revised Olweus Bullying Questionnaire (OBQ), Health Behavior in School-aged Children (HBSC), Global School-based Student Health Survey (GSHS), and Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS). The most basic and immediate difference was that the international measures provide a definition and explanation of bullying, while PeNSE and PISA do not. Furthermore, PeNSE and PISA do not capture the power imbalance criterion at all, and only PeNSE captures intentional aggression. By failing to capture the basic component of the imbalance of power between aggressor and victim, both measures make it impossible to differentiate, among the students who answer positively to the question, those who are in fact inserted in a relationship of oppression, in which a more “powerful” student subjugates a weaker one, from those who experience mutual exchanges of daily aggression with their peers in balanced power relations. The results of the measures were then analyzed comparatively. It was found that there is no agreement between them in terms of the prevalence generated, the territorial distribution of the phenomenon, the distribution between urban and rural schools, between boys and girls, among other factors. There are also divergences in the sense of the associations of the measures of bullying victimization with various characteristics of the students and schools. The main contributions pointed out for the measures are: suggestion of including a definition and an explanation about bullying that contemplates and translates to the student the three key elements of the definition of the phenomenon; exclusion of controversial items, in the case of PISA; combination of different sources for collecting information about bullying; and inclusion of validity screening questions in the questionnaires. Finally, an innovative measure of bullying is proposed as part of a research program to be developed in the future.