Drawings say more than words: Bullying representation in children’s drawing in argentina

Abstract

Childrens’ drawings have been widely used as tool for investigating different aspects of development but relatively few research has investigated childrens’ drawings in relation with school bullying, because it may be difficult to represent this phenomenon graphically. Our study aims at investigating childrens’ drawings, in order to explore their capacity to represent the salient characteristics of the bullying phenomenon, i.e. power imbalance and intentionality of harm, as well as the group dynamic. A sample of 108 drawings from children from 8 to 12 years of age have been collected in Argentina and analyzed according to the coding systems developed by (Romera et al. 2015; Bombi and Pinto 1993 and Slee and Skrzypiec 2015). Results show that children represented generally the bully and the victim mostly as males, and depicted bullying as a group phenomenon. As for power imbalance and intentionality, there were significant differences on the body size, in the space occupied and in height of bully figure; childrens’ drawings on bullying clearly express the perception of its main characteristics, i.e. power imbalance, intention to harm and the group dynamic.