Being bullied, quality of life and gender. A quantitative study of students at lower secondary school on bullying and self-perceived quality of life

Abstract

The subject of this thesis is bullying. The thesis is related to the project “Trivsel i Tromsø”-TiT (Well-being in Tromsø), which is managed by The Department of Education at the University of Tromsø. A questionnaire within the frame of the TiT-project has been answered by pupils, their teachers and parents at 6 schools in Tromsø. It included both a standardized “Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire” and quality of life questionnaire called KINDLR. It also includes a separate section of questions considering traditional- and cyberbullying. I have performed various quantitative analyses using SPSS. One objective is to find whether there are differences in the reporting of being bullied, with respect to gender. Another objective is to find whether there are differences in the reporting of “quality of life” with respect to being bullied or not and to gender. The results show that more girls than boys report being bullied in general. Cyberbullying does not seem to be a major problem and seem to come partly in addition to the traditional bullying. Most students report a relatively good QoL, but girls report poorer QoL than boys, and the students who report being bullied either way, report a lower QoL-score.