Factors Related to Bullying: A Qualitative Study of Early Adolescent Students

Background: Bullying is considered a serious health problem in primary schools, high schools, and universities. It can have negative effects on both the bully and who is bullied. The negative consequences of it include depression, anxiety, drug abuse, etc. These consequences can be devastating in many areas of the person's future life like his/her relations with other people. The current study aims at investigating the factors that students and teachers believe can affect bullying. Methods: A qualitative design based on content analysis approach was used to collect the data and analyze the perspective of 72 Iranian students, 12 teachers, and 9 parents chosen by a purposeful sampling strategy in Gonabad. Semi-structured interviews were held in order to collect the data. Sampling was continued until the data saturation. The data were analyzed using a qualitative content analysis approach by MAXQUDA 2010 software. Results: In this study, five factors associated with bullying were identified. The factors include 'psychological factors', 'family factors', 'school factors', 'socioeconomic factors', and 'the influence of the media'. The first factor includes four sub-factors of psychiatric disorder, pride and arrogance, jealousy, and imposing will and opinions on others. The second factor includes four sub-factors of family violence, wrong parenting, siblings' bullying behavior, and parental employment. The third factor includes four sub-factors of not paying attention to the students' inappropriate behaviors, discrimination against the students, teachers' behaviors, and peer influence. The fourth factor includes three sub-factors of the lack of patience, neighbors' influence on our behaviors, and poverty. And the fifth factor includes two sub-factors of the influence of social media and the Internet, and violent video games. Conclusions: Bullying has different aspects and, therefore, we should pay attention to its psychological causes, family problems, school problems, and social and economic factors, etc. we should pay more attention to the lack of patience as a religious-mental variable which seems to be closely linked with a behavioral issue.