Grace Skrzypiec
Flinders University
Student Aggression and Well-being: A Multi-country Perspective
Participants: Eva Romera1; Mirella Wyra2; Laura Menabò3; Tali Heiman4 and Grace Skrzypiec2
1 University of Cordoba (Spain); 2Flinders University (Australia); 3University of Bologna (Italy); 4The Open University of Israel
Symposium Summary
Student aggression is a pervasive phenomenon that effects children and adolescents in nearly all schools across the world. In this symposium researchers from five countries will provide a global perspective of peer aggression and bullying, and its link to student well-being, as well as an intervention to reduce its prevalence. The researchers will outline the issues as well as provide an evidence-based approach for suggestions to reduce peer aggression and bullying for students in their countries. Researchers collected quantitative data about aggression and bullying from young people aged 11-17, living in Spain, Poland, Italy, Israel and Australia. Except for Italy, where an anti-bullying intervention (the P.E.A.C.E. pack) was evaluated, aggression and bullying data were analysed alongside other validated measures such as well-being, global self-concept, resilience and social support. Researchers reported on the wellbeing, resilience and global self-concept of students with levels of victimisation in Spain, Poland and Australia, with findings varying between countries. In Italy, the P.E.A.C.E. pack intervention showed promising results for severe victims of bullying. In Israel, victims of cyberbullying were highly likely to be victims of traditional bullying, and while girls were more likely to be victims of cyber bullying than boys, they were more likely to seek and receive social support. This symposium highlights the global effort being made by researchers across the world in their quest to understand and improve the lives of young people experiencing the detrimental effects of victimisation and bullying during their school lives.
Short CV
Senior lecturer in the College of Education, Psychology and Social Work and the (Co)Director of the Student Wellbeing and Prevention of Violence (SWAPv) research centre at Flinders University in South Australia. Grace is the PI of an international peer aggression and well-being project involving 12 countries and over 6000 students with funding from Flinders University. Research results of this project have been published in several journal articles and recently were published in a book in which each participating country contributed a chapter. Grace has been a joint investigator in the well-being and positive peer relations project in Maltese schools. She was PI on a similar research study with funding from a grant awarded by the International Baccalaureate Organisation, where she led a team investigating the wellbeing of 2,000 middle school students. Grace was the recipient of the 2014 Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Early Career Researchers in recognition of outstanding contributions to excellence in research. From 2018 to 2020 she was Co-President of the International Observatory on School Climate and Violence Prevention when the Observatory has its base at Flinders University. Grace’s background includes research on adolescent health with CSIRO and with adolescent offenders at the Office of Crime Statistics and Research (OCSAR) in South Australia. As a researcher at Flinders University, Grace has continued to research the well-being of young people, particularly in anti-social contexts, such as bullying and other antisocial behaviour.
Grace teaches statistics and research methods to post-graduate students and works collaboratively with other researchers at Flinders University. She also supervises postgraduate students undertaking Masters, EdD and PhD studies. Her research interests include high school students, peer aggression, bullying, student well-being, and teenage offenders.