Bullying interventions in Hong Kong primary classrooms : teachers' perspectives of approaches and difficulties

Abstract

This study aims to investigate Hong Kong primary teachers’ perspective of approaches and the difficulties they met when implementing bullying interventions. Since there are not many research studies regarding the teachers’ view in Hong Kong context, this study aims to fill this research gap. Five in-service teachers from different types of primary schools in Hong Kong have been interviewed to find out their views. The findings presented that they favour different approaches and some of them used mixed approaches to deal with bullying. The difficulties they met included time constraint, incompetent to handle bullying, family education, difficulty to arrange schedule for whole-school bullying interventions and hard to provide specific interventions. The results indicate that further exploration can be done on how to facilitate teachers to develop successful bullying interventions.