Typologies of School Bullying as Predictors of School Maladjustment among Secondary School Students in Rivers State

Abstract

The study investigated the typologies of school bullying as predictors of school maladjustment among secondary school students in Rivers State. Three research questions were answered while three hypotheses were tested in the study. The study adopted a correlation research design with a population of 61,049 (29,292 male and 31,757 female) Senior Secondary II students in the 286 schools in the 23 Local Government Area of Rivers State. The researcher simple randomly sampled five LGAs from 23 LGAs. Furthermore, two schools were sampled from each of the five LGAs making a total of ten schools. Stratified random sampling using 10% gave the sample size of 652 students (boys = 248 and girls= 404). Two measures, Typologies of School Bullying Scale (TSBS) and School Maladjustment Scale (SMS) were used for data collection. The face validity of the instruments was ascertained by three experts. The internal consistency of 0.88 and 0.91 were computed for TSBS and SMS through Cronbach alpha. Linear regression was used to answer the research questions while t-test associated with linear regression was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The study revealed that physical, verbal and sexual bullying are significant predictors of students’ maladjustment in the school. It was recommended that the school principals should institute stringent and drastic measures of dealing the bullies in the school. The researcher recommended that the teachers and the school authorities should make rules and regulations very obvious in strategic places in the school in other to regulate physical bullying among students in the secondary schools in Rivers State. Teachers and the students should not use offensive words in the school system in order to avoid incendiary and abusive words that can cause social withdrawals of the students. Students who are sexually bullied or molested should report to the schools’ disciplinary committee for appropriate actions in order to keep them socially active.