THE RELATIONSHIP OF SELF-ESTEEM AND PEER VICTIMIZATION AMONG SCHOOLCHILDREN

Qufli OSMANI, Delvina BEKA

Abstract

Bullying and peer victimization have long been considered an important social and clinical problem. Bullying experiences among schoolchildren can cause low self-esteem and mental health problems. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between peer victimization by bullying behavior and self-esteem. The target group of this study consisted of 157 respondents aged 12-15, of which n=82 were female and n=75 male. The quantitative method was used to accomplish this research using the random sampling technique. Self-report questionnaires, PRQ (Rigby & Slee, 1993) were used for data collection, which aims to measure victimization from bullying at school, while the Rosenberg (1965) questionnaire was used to measure the level of self-esteem. The results show that a moderate significant negative correlation was found between peer victimization and students' self-esteem. Regarding the differential analysis, the results showed that there are no significant gender differences in the level of victimization. While the regression analysis shows that statistically, victimization contributes significantly to the expression of self-esteem, although at a low level. These findings suggest that adequate institutions intervene and pay more attention to these aspects, because the negligence of institutions can produce victims of bullying who can fall into a vicious circle, where after being victimized, their self-esteem level drops, so that they can be victimized again, which results in other negative mental health effects. Therefore, interventions that focus on the self-esteem of victims would be effective, and another suggestion is to conduct more longitudinal studies in the future.

Pages: 153 - 159