Thursday 23 July 15:40
- 17:10
Hall: 13 - Room 10 SA
Chair and Discussant:
Caravita Simona Carla Silvia
Co-Chair:
D'Urso Giulio
Division: Division 5: Education and School Psychology
School and education systems should guarantee safety and the best conditions to promote students' wellbeing. Nevertheless, processes of inequalities and unfairness can happen in school too, because of adults' negative behaviors, and violent peer dynamics such as Cyberbullying. These processes can affect students' psychological adjustment in terms of mental health and behaviors, and they need to be recognized and studied to develop effective interventions.
This symposium addresses this relevant topic with studies from five different countries of two continents. The first contribution explores online risks and the provision of online safety education in schools in England using data from a large survey. The findings highlight the need for schools to implement more consistent and more inclusive online safety education, especially to help the most vulnerable youngsters. The second contribution investigates longitudinal associations between teachers' violence and children's wellbeing in a sample of 3,170 primary school children in Sierra Leone, providing insights for the policies and the intervention. The following two contributions focus on unfairness in school as involvement in Cyberbullying. The third study examines, in longitudinal data, whether individual sensitiveness, parental stress and anti-bullying intervention can moderate the associations between being cyberbullied and anxiety and depression. Surprisingly, intervention in school appeared not to be a protective factor. The fourth study explores how parental styles can increase over time the risk of perpetrating Cyberbullying, and whether teacher support can buffer or hinder this risk. Lastly, the fifth study examines whether school factors can decrease the development over time of psychological distress, finding that classroom dynamics might exacerbate rather than alleviate the trajectories of distress. Altogether, results from this symposium indicate that students in school can experience several situations of unfairness, and the support received in school can be not enough to hinder the negative consequences. Recommendations for policies and practice are discussed.
