Violence at school: socio-psychological explanations and recommendations

The purpose of this article is to consider the potential of sociopsychological knowledge to explain the violence at school by addressing a number of foreign works. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of school bullying (we discuss various forms of bullying, roles in bullying, etc.). We discuss the need for higher levels of explanation than intra- and interindividual ones. We propose to consider bul- lying as a group process. The focus of attention is on a variety of social and psychological schemata, used to explaining bullying, special attention is paid to social identity theory, and a number of studies carried out in different countries [9,14,15,16,17,22 ]. We discuss the first studies carried out in the framework of the theory of social representations [25]. Considered are the basic principles of practi- cal recommendations that can be formulated on the basis of the results of research carried out in the framework of the sociopsychological knowledge.

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