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The experience of adolescense girls regarding verbal bullying in secondary school

The experience of verbal bullying at school may cause a female adolescent much distress. This distress can result in the adolescent experiencing life as traumatic and may influence her sense of well being negatively. Verbal bullying usually takes the form of name-calling, put-downs and insults. This can be very traumatic for adolescents and can lower their self-esteem, which may eventually lead to mental illness. The parents of adolescent learners often have the misconception that bullying is a normal part of a teenager’s life and are unaware of the distress it may cause the adolescent. The victimized adolescent should, therefore, be provided with support in order to avert the occurrence of mental illness. The goals of this study were to: • Explore and describe the experiences of adolescent girls regarding verbal bullying in secondary school settings. • Develop guidelines to assist mental health nursing specialists in helping adolescent girls to cope with bullying in secondary schools. The researcher used a qualitative, explorative, descriptive and contextual design with a phenomenological approach. The research population consisted of female learners in a secondary school setting. Purposive sampling was used in this study to identify participants. Data was collected by means of naïve sketches, one-to-one-interviews and field notes based on observations. Data was analyzed using Tesch’s method (in Creswell, 1994:190) of descriptive analysis. The identified themes were compared to available literature. The data collected from this study was used to develop guidelines to aid mental health nursing specialists to help adolescents to cope with verbal bullying.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:nmmu/vital:10045
Date January 2006
CreatorsJacobs, Ruwayda
PublisherNelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Faculty of Health Sciences
Source SetsSouth African National ETD Portal
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis, Masters, MCur
Format116 p, pdf
RightsNelson Mandela Metropolitan University

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