Factors related to knowledge, attitudes and practices on bullying among public high school teachers in Metro Manila

• Main Author: Pimentel, Yasmin Ann Illumin
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2012
• Subjects: Bullying; High school teachers; Health and Medical Administration; Other Social and Behavioral Sciences
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/4214; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/etd_masteral/article/11052/viewcontent/CDTG005178_P.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

Bullying has become and continuous to be a serious problems in schools. Among others, teachers considered as the forefront of bullying activities in schools either as an active participant or inactive observer. Past researches have focused on the students’ perception on bullying but not teachers. The study investigated the knowledge, attitude and practices and their relationships with the identified factors (i.e. socio-demographic factors, work-related factors and personal experiences on bullying) among public high school teachers in Metro Manila. Self-administered questionnaire was conducted to 127 teachers from 6 selected public high schools in Metro Manila. Frequency analysis showed that, teachers were mostly females and highly-educated. In terms of their professional background, majority of which have a teacher level 1- 3 with an average of 13 years teaching experience. The findings from this study also indicated that teachers generally had reasonable knowledge about bullying, but had mixed attitudes towards it. Majority of them were strongly against bullying, while a small percentage had a neutral stance. Chi-square analysis was used in determining the relationship of the factors. On the whole, relationships between knowledge and attitude with socio-demographic characteristics (Hypothesis 1), work-related factors (Hypothesis 2), and personal experience (Hypothesis 3) were in large part not confirmed. As could be gleaned, the anti-bullying attitude was not predominant, suggesting that attitude does not necessarily stem from having knowledge (Hypothesis 4). Except for two statistically significant relationships between knowledge and number of forms of bullying; and between attitude and number of anti-bullying practices, the study, on the whole, did not obtain evidence in support of the hypotheses posited. In the same way, regardless of their knowledge or lack of it, and attitude towards bullying, teachers had applied a number of practices against bullying (Hypothesis 5). Furthermore, the study revealed that teachers had no appropriate training or formal orientation on anti-bullying strategies. As a result of these findings, future research should continue to explore teachers’ crucial role and responses to bullying on a wider scale. After all, teachers’ knowledge and attitudes towards bullying are vital for improving prevention and intervention measures that might be adopted by the individual school system or the education system as a whole.