The Impact of Personality Traits and Physical Punishment on Bullying

Sammanfattning: Bullying is a phenomenon occurring all over the world. Previous research shows that youthswho are being physically punished by their parents are at higher risk for being involved inbullying. There are four groups when it comes to bullying, the neutrals, bullies, victims, andbully-victims. A limitation of previous research was that no one has examined why youthswho are being exposed to physical punishment by their parents often become a part ofbullying. Our focus was on the four bullying groups of youths in the ages 13 to 15. Weproposed that in order to understand how parents’ use of physical punishment against theiryouths is connected with being a bully or a victim at school, we need to take the personalitytraits self-esteem and impulsivity under consideration. The results showed that when parentsused physical punishment against their youths and the youths had certain personality traits,the risk for being a part of bullying increased. In conclusion, the youths were at higher risk ofbeing victims of bullying if they had low self-esteem, they were at higher risk of being bulliesif they were impulsive, and they were at higher risk of being bully-victims if they were bothimpulsive and had low self-esteem, meaning that we need to investigate further differentpersonality traits and their effect on youths bullying involvement in school.