Almost every day we find cases of violence amongst school children cropping up in the newspapers and media. Taking inspiration from this disturbing trend Delhi University’s Innovation Project team of Cluster Innovation Centre undertook an Innovative Project entitled “Aggressive Behaviour amongst School Children of India”
The team comprised of the following students: Aayushi Anand, Abhinav Sharma, Akshay Akash, Anand Kumar, Biraj Majumdar, Ened D’souza, Kritika Gosain, Shreya Khurana, Sruthi V S, Vivek Kumar Gaurav.
The team was supervised and guided by Principal Investigators: Dr. Achla Tandon, Dr. Subhash Chander and Ms. Geetanjali Kala.
Aggressive behaviour is a conflict generating act which often manifests itself though constant teasing, beating or just mocking. Children are not unaffected by what their peers do to them or others around them. This aggression in thoughts, emotions, words and action can have a significant impact on people’s personality formation, peer choices and even career desires. However, the fact that there is often compliance towards such attitudes and in some cases aggressors in schools are not only popular amongst students but may enjoy a good achievement quotient academically or in sports /extracurricular, makes matters even more complex. So, to understand this complication of what constitutes, instigates and motivates aggression and find possible solutions to this problem this project was undertaken.
Through interviews, questionnaires and narratives, students attempted to address the issues and factors relating to aggression in school settings. 1400 questionnaires were administered in several schools of Delhi, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Himachal Pradesh. In-depth schedules were conducted to obtain greater insight into the inter-sectionality of social institutions like family, school, media, and peer formations. Besides, an interventionist exercise at national-level inter-school competition was organized to encourage students to open up about their feelings. Other than that thirty five in depth interviews were conducted to acquire a viewpoint of the students on the forms of aggressive behaviour in school environment and form of semi-participant observation format was adopted to gain an idea regarding the issue of aggressive behaviour amongst the students in school premises.
At the end of exhaustive and extensive data collection, the qualitative and quantitative analysis was discussed in three perspectives: gender-wise, state-wise, and government-private schools. Examination of the data gave in depth understanding of the context and the participants. After the analysis of the data, a framework to address aggression in schools was developed.
Image credits: Innovation Project team, Cluster Innovation Centre