TEACHERS’ BELIEFS ABOUT BULLYING AND THEIR HANDLING STRATEGIES IN PUBLIC SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Abstract

The study aimed to analyze the relationship between teachers' beliefs about bullying and their handling strategies in public secondary schools. Three research objectives were put forward to conduct this research. Convenient sampling technique was applied to select 60 public secondary schools from south of Punjab. The sample of available teachers was also selected through a convenient sampling technique. A sample of (300) teachers, including (150) males and (150) females was invited to participate in this research. Existing reliable and valid research instruments were utilized to collect data from teachers.  Two questionnaires were adopted to collect data to measure teachers’ beliefs about bullying and for identifying handling strategies. Descriptive statistics, simple linear regression and t-test were applied to analyze the data. The result of simple linear regression shows a moderate but significant relationship between teachers’ beliefs and bullying handling strategies. As to bullying handling strategies, teachers reported multiple strategies used to handle bullying situations in schools. The means scores of item analysis showed that, the majority of teachers preferred to tolerate bullying behaviors, others believe in punitive actions, many teachers preferred to ignore such issues think that students can solve their matters by themselves. As to the t-test, the beliefs of both male and female teachers were found the same however the handling strategies of both male and female are different in their schools. Female teachers found more empathetic in contrast to their male colleagues.