In this master thesis, the author investigated the relationship between peer violence and empathy in adolescents, and possible differences in the dimensions according to gender, age and school level. She was interested in the characteristics of the incidence of peer violence and the role of empathy.
The theoretical part describes the definition of peer violence and the prevailing forms, risk and protective factors, as well as the prevalence. The author then presents the roles in peer violence and the treatment and prevention process. This is followed by a presentation on empathy, which includes definitions and basic dimensions of empathy, as well as developmental aspects of empathy in children and adolescents and the importance of empathy in preventing peer violence.
The empirical part is followed by a presentation of the research, which involved 371 participants, 248 girls and 123 boys. The results showed that among all three groups of violence, verbal violence is the most common among primary school children, followed by emotional violence, and online and physical violence are the least common. The study did not confirm a statistically significant association in terms of differences in the experience of verbal peer violence, online violence and physical violence according to the gender of the child, but found that there were statistically significant differences in the observation of online violence between primary and secondary school students, with secondary school students being more likely to report online violence compared to primary school students. The central part of the master thesis was the hypothesis, whether there are statistically significant correlations between the level of empathy and peer violence (perpetration and perception). We found that the more the participants perceived that they perpetrated emotional and online violence against others, the more empathy they had. Another important finding of the study is that we also found a statistically significant correlation between perpetrators of violence and lower levels of empathy, with a correlation for verbal violence and physical violence. This demonstrates the importance of the level of empathy in relation to peer violence. We see that the higher the level of empathy, the lower the presence of violence. Similarly, based on our results, we can also argue that the expression of higher cognitive empathy increases with age. Statistically significant differences can also be confirmed in the levels of empathy by gender, as the results show that girls express higher levels of all types of empathy compared to boys.
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