This master's thesis deals with the phenomenon of aggressiveness and the pedagogical response of gestalt pedagogy to it. First, we studied the accessible literature describing the problem of aggression as well as articles from the field of gestalt pedagogy, family and relational studies as well as related relational family therapy. Then, we conducted a survey on the occurrence of aggression in students of Marriage and Family Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Gestalt Pedagogy at the University of Ljubljana and the control group (students from other study programmes). The sample consisted of 155 people and the survey included a self-assessment questionnaire on aggression (Buss, Arnold H., Perry, Mark. The Aggression Questionnaire, 1992). The students were asked to complete the questionnaire two times in a three-month period. We sought to establish how the study programmes contribute to an individual’s degree of aggression and how this changed during the set period.
The aggression questionnaire divides aggression into four subcategories, physical and verbal aggression, anger and hatred. This division gives us a better and holistic insight into an individual’s degree of aggression. It was established that men are generally more aggressive than women, whereas the degree of anger is approximately the same in both genders.
Our survey indicated that the students of Marriage and Family Studies and Gestalt Pedagogy are less aggressive than students of other programmes. Further, we established that the degree of aggressiveness in the students who consciously work on themselves decreased more than in the students who did not experience this approach as part of their studies (control group). Comparing the groups of students of Marriage and Family Studies and Gestalt Pedagogy we did not find any statistically significant results in the degree and decrease of aggression.
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