When who helps has experienced suffering: the adherence to moral values in members of a peer support system who were victimized

• Grant number: 20/16345-0
• Support type: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Effective date (Start): May 01, 2021
• Effective date (End): March 31, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Education - Specific topics in Education
• Principal researcher: Luciene Regina Paulino Tognetta
• Grantee: Vitória Hellen Holanda Oliveira
• Home Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Studies have showed that one of the more efficient ways to overcome bullying is the use of programs in which the peers themselves are trained to offer help to the ones involved in the problem. In Brazil, the experience with the implementation of Help Teams - a kind of Peer Support System - has been studied and already offered promising results. It calls attention the fact that, among the students inside Help Teams, there are those who had been bullying victims, authors, and bystanders. Worldwide literature has been explaining the characteristics of bullying victims as those who, even with more difficulty to understand and express their own mood, are more likely to receive the ones in suffer. In face of these data, it is asked: are there differences about the adherence to moral values among students from Help Teams that considered themselves as bullying victims, authors, and bystanders? To answer this question, this investigation's aims are to determine how the students from Help Teams see themselves involvement in bullying scenarios, to verify if students from Help Teams who were bullying victims adhere to moral values as respect, justice, and sympathy and to analyze if there are differences in the form of adherence to the same values among students from Help Teams that were bullying victims and those who were not. The research is descriptive and exploratory. The participants of this investigation are 131 students' members of Help Teams obtained from a sample of 2.513 teenagers from the last years of Elementary School in public and private schools from the state of São Paulo. The instrument used consists in a questionnaire that contains dilemma-stories in which the mentioned values are at stake.