Overt and Relational Aggression Among Elementary School Children

The purpose of this study was to investigate overt and relational aggression in a group of elementary school students in Shiraz. 506 students (241 girls and 265 boys) were recruited from grade levels 1 to 5, to participate in this study. The Aggression Scale developed for this purpose contained 21 items for assessment of relational and overt aggression of students by the teachers. Construct validity of the scale was confirmed by factor analysis. Intercorrelations among items were factor ana- lyzed using principal axis analysis followed by oblique rotation. Three factors emerged: Physi-cal, relational, and reactive-proactive aggre-ssion. Reliability of the scale and sub-scales was satisfactory using different methods. The co-efficient alpha was. 91 for the total score. Sex differences were significant, the mean scores for boys are reported to be significantly more than girls in overt and relational aggression. How-ever, there was no significant difference in the proportion of relationally aggressive boys and girls when they were classified as severely agg-ressive. Significant effect was found for grade level in relational aggression and reactive- proactive aggression but significant effect was not found for grade level in physical aggression.