Bullying y cyberbullying: fisionomía de una emergencia social. Esploratoria en escuelas de Roma y su provincia entre el alumnado de 9 y 14 años y su profesorado

This doctoral thesis has been developed in Italy and presents the results of an empirical descriptive study, conducted through a cross-sectional observational study, with the aim exploring bullying and victimization phenomena among students aged 9 to 14 years. The research is motivated by the need to address a delicate and urgent issue, as school bullying has reached such proportions and severity that it concerns families, schools and society as a whole. In this perspective, the thesis present a qualitative study (currently under review in an Italian scientific Journal), conducted by the author with teachers, to complement the student research, in order to have two complementary points of observation on the phenomenon of bullying: that of the teachers and that of the students. The thesis, enrolled in the doctoral program in Educational Innovation and Teachers Training at the University of Jaén (Spain), has an international character, as it was carried out under a cotutorship agreement between the University of Jaén (Spain) and the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio (Italy), and through the autor’s stay at the “G. D’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara (Italy), for research purposes. It is therefore a study academically supported by different prestigious institutions. The study was conducted with a quantitative methodological approach. The objectives are: to develop a theoretical model that allows determining the relationships between bullying, victimization, aggression, and depression in preadolescents and adolescents; to define relationship models between the variables under study based on the participants' gender. The research was carried out with students from 4th and 5th grade of primary school and 1th, 2th, and 3th grade of secondary school. A total of 23 schools, both public and accredited private, from the metropolitan area of Rome and its province participated. These schools were selected from neighborhoods with different socioeconomic and cultural contexts in order to examine whether known contextual factors influence the emergence of forms of school bullying and how they do so. The research involved 2.038 students. The study focused on the most common forms of bullying and cyberbullying, their identification by the aggressor, the victim, and the witnesses, as well as the analysis of the emotional aspects related to aggression and depression, associated with bullying and victimization. For the collection of quantitative data, the following instruments were used: the Questionnaire from the study "Evaluating Bullying and Cyberbullying, with the Spanish validation of EBIP-Q and ECIP-Q" (Ortega-Ruiz et al., 2016); the Aggression Scale from the "Psychometric Study of the Spanish Version of the Buss and Perry Aggression Questionnaire" (Matalinares et al., 2012); and the depression scale described in the study "Psychometric Characteristics of the Reynolds Adolescent Depression Scale in Community and Clinical Populations" (Figueras-Masip et al., 2008). The results highlighted the existence of significant structural relationships between bullying, victimization, aggression, and depression.