Eureka! Institutional Repository

The study of parents’ and educators’ beliefs in Pella around school bullying, as well as the collaborative practices adopted for fighting the issue, is vital. It can facilitate the comprehension of the problem, reveal factors leading to its elimination identify stereotypes inhibiting dealing with it and allows the designing of educative and effective actions against bullying. Parents’ and educators’ beliefs influence the way that the parents and teachers react or intervene in intimidation and therefore, conserve it or discourage it. They also determine children’s decision to make known what they go through to their family or school. Nurture and education practices constitute two of the most important factors relating to: • The manifestation of the phenomenon and the strategies adopted by the children for dealing with the issue. • The psychosocial health of children. However, despite the increase of studies in relevance to the prevention and combating bullying, and also concerning the parents’ and educators’ role to the effectiveness of intervention programs (Eslea & Smith, 2000; McNeely, Whitlock & Libbey, 2010; Olweus, 2009; Swearer, Limber & Alley, 2009), neither parents’ and teachers’ beliefs have been researched adequately, nor their collaboration practices for the phenomenon. There are studies focusing on children’s opinion (Bibou et al., 2012; Thornberg, 2010) and also on educators’ (Bauman & Del Rio, 2005). Nevertheless, the studies which include parents and document their attitude towards school intimidation are very few (Eslea & Smith, 2000) or even the collaborative practices suggested by parents and teachers to children (Harper, 2011; Sawyer et al., 2011). In this research __ parents participated whose children attend/attended schools of Pella and __ teachers who work or have worked at schools of Pella. The parents and teachers filled in questionnaires for examining their opinion about: • The frequency of the involvement of children in intimidation issues. • The strategies adopted by kids, when they are being bullied or are present as observers. • The practices that children suggest when they are being bullied. • The strategies followed by themselves (parents and teachers), when children are involved in bullying. • The qualities of the children being involved, their families and their school. • The general dimensions of school bullying, such as the severity of the phenomenon, the emotions for the kids being bullied or bullying others, the responsibility that adults have for tackling the problem and the role of the peers. • Collaboration of school and family for fighting the problem. The statistical analysis was conducted with the statistical software SPSS. For an effective work on the data, there was a factor analysis of the sections of the measurement tool, which appeared from the factors with eigenvalue bigger than the unit. The specific factors concern the tackling strategies adopted by the children being bullied or observe alike practices (according to parents or teachers) and the response strategies suggested to children by their teachers or parents. At the beginning, the measurements of work are presented with various demographic factors, such as the parent’s sex and age, the teacher’s service years, the structure of the family and school or the education level, with impressive associations being revealed. Afterwards, the work results depict that the experiences of children along school bullying and the adopted strategies for fighting it, either as victims or as observers, have a relation to the nurture practices or discipline they received from their parents and teachers (according to parents’ and teachers’ beliefs). One important discovery is the variation of strategies that are suggested by the parents depending on the fact whether their children are bullying others or are being bullied. The parents suggest important ways to combat bullying at school, but also the teachers suggest ways to parents that are necessary to be taken into serious consideration for designing prevention and intervention programs against school intimidation. Still, the practices that the parents and teachers suggest to children being bullied, as well as the practices that the parents and the teachers follow to deal with children’s bullying experiences, appear to be associated with nurture, discipline and education practices they received themselves. The strategies recommended by the parents to the school and the opposite, along with the parents’ and the teachers’ opinions in reference to the children participating in bullying practices through various roles, have a connection to the nurture and education and discipline strategies they claim to be adopting. The results of the research emphasize the significance of the school – family collaboration and the awareness, updating and involvement of parents and teachers to prevention and combat programs. The results also stress the significance of parents’ and educators’ participating in psycho-educative programs in order to: • Identify easier the potential victimization of children • Understand the consequences of ineffective combat strategies for the problem • Conceive the importance of parental and educative practices for the appearance and conservation of bullying • Understand the impact on psychosocial health of the child • Comprehend the importance of a school – family collaboration to tackle the matter