Browsing by Author "Pihlaniemi, Misa"

Aim. Bullying at school is a perennial problem. Bullying is a phenomenon that always leaves traces and which have long-term negative consequences. Bullying affects the individual, relationships people between, the school and also society. During the fall of 2022, it has been reported in the media cases of bullying in Finland that have ended in serious acts of violence. When the students find themselves a significant part of their everyday life at school, it is important that they enjoy school and want to go there. In addition, the school has statutory obligation to intervene immediately in the event if bullying, violence, racism or other discrimination occurs. The purpose of my study was to investigate how bullying affects students' identity and identity construction. The research questions were the following: 1) How does bullying affect students' identity? 2) How does bullying affect students' identity construction? Methods. I have carried out my study as a qualitative literature review. The featured articles were included according to predetermined selection criteria. The final research material consisted of five scientific articles that I analyzed through thematic content analysis and two different steps. In the first step I have analyzed and summarized the research material according to an article summary and in the second step I then made a meaningful summary where I categorized the central content of the articles in relation to my research questions. Results and conclusions. In the final analysis process, five main theme areas emerged on how bullying affects students' identity and identity construction. Thematic areas were the following;appearance and body hatred, self-esteem and sense of worthlessness, closeness and social relationships, normal and deviant, socially interacting and personal characters. The results show that exposure to bullying affects students' identity and identity construction in a very negative way . The participants in the studies stated that exposure to bullying led to problems with the identity construction in the form of insecurity, feelings of inadequacy, body hatred, anxiety and depression. In summary, the results demonstrate that loss of belonging, self-loathing and identity struggle followed close to the feeling of being socially discredited by classmates. The results also show that the social identity was negatively affected in that the vulnerable were often excluded from friend groups and was labeled as deviant.Bullying continued to lead to impaired adaptation to the adult role,including forming lasting relationships,integrating into working life and being financially independent .