Mothers' Stress Management and Self-Management Training Effects on Bullying in High School Female Students

A well–determined behavioral problem in adolescence is bullying. Bullying is low–level violence in the form of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse of one or more students against others repeatedly occurring over time. Bullying has recently attracted researchers' and educational psychologists’ attention. It manifests in traditional and cyber aspects. Violent behaviors can affect numerous educational factors; thus, reducing these violent behaviors can play an essential role in improving school conditions. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the effects of stress management and self–management training on mothers to reduce their daughters' bullying.

This was a quasi–experimental study with pretest–posttest, one–month follow–up, and a control group design. The statistical population of this study consisted of the mothers of first–grade female high school students in Tehran City, Iran, in 2018–2019. Initially, two schools were selected by the convenience sampling method. Then, traditional cyberbullying questionnaires were administered to all students (N=700) to measure conventional and cyberbullying. Of them, 48 students whose pretest score was about one standard deviation (13.06) higher than traditional and cyber bullying (24.67) were identified. Next, their mothers were randomly assigned to 4 groups (3 experimental & 1 control; n=12/group). The first group received stress management and self–management training, the second group received self–management training, and the third group received stress management training; however, the control group received no training. The collected data were analyzed in SPSS using repeated–measure Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA).

The present study results indicated that the effect of integrated training (stress management & self–management) was significant on traditional bullying (p<0.001) and cyberbullying reduction (p=0.002). Furthermore, the effect of self–management training was significant on the decrease in conventional bullying (p=0.013). Moreover, the conventional bullying of students was reduced significantly in integrated training compared to the stress management group (p=0.013). Furthermore, comparing the efficacy of the educational methods presented no significant difference between the study groups. However, Eta–squared revealed that the integrated training and self–management training methods explained higher correlations between cyber bullying and traditional bullying.

The present study results suggested a significant decrease in the scores of the experimental group compared with the controls in the posttest. Accordingly, teaching stress management and self–management to mothers effectively reduces bullying in their daughter children.