From Representation to Attitude: A Quali-Quantitative Approach to the Detection of the Attitudes about the Representation of Bullying at School

The paper describes the process of building an attitude detection tool, starting from item identification to recomposition and synthesis. A combined use of both qualitative and quantitative approaches is proposed: a qualitative research aimed to bring out the representations of the phenomenon and the main meaning dimensions according to which the items to be inserted in an attitude detection scale are built; a quantitative step envisaged the implementation of the Rasch model to calibrate the above-mentioned tool.

This paper, specifically, analyzes representations and attitudes of the teachers on bullyng. The latent concept is the level of non-involvement perceived by the teachers in relation to bullying at school and the consequent relevance attributed to their own role regarding the possibility of "concrete intervention". The data collection was carried out in some secondary schools in a Southern Italian city and was repeated ten years later.

It starts from the assumption that the teacher's response to bullying at school unfold into several levels: from representation, which defines the substance and creates around the phenomenon a “patina” of common sense, to attitude towards the phenomenon, that is mediated by that in relation to the representations circulating on it, to the propositional attitude, that evaluates the possible interventions to be put into practice, to the acting behavior, which is a concrete expression of how the representations are rooted and a expression of the “stabilized” attitude in relation to bullying at school.

The paper highlights how recognizing specific attitudes (micro level)strongly linked to a representation of a phenomenon (macro level) requires, on the one hand, a quantitative approach that identifies the process that connects representations and attitudes, and on the other, a longitudinal approach that shows how the evolution of the social representations of a phenomenon causes the change of the attitude itself.