Avaliação funcional da violência em uma escola municipal de Goiânia/GO.

Abstract

The present study had the objective of conducting a functional evaluation using different methodologies to identify and describe violent episodes in a municipal school in Goiania, Brazil. This study was divided into three phases: 1) Document Analysis; 2) Questionnaires and 3) Direct Observation. In phase 1, we analyzed the school’s incident book to identify, classify, and describe violent and non-violent behaviors (nondisciplinary), and identified their frequency of occurrence as well as antecedents and consequences. In total, 126 incidents were recorded, 67 of which were considered nonviolent and 69 that were considered violent. Among the violent recorded behaviors, “physical aggression” was the most frequent with 31 occurrences; among nonviolent behaviors, highest occurrence was “not doing homework”, with 20 recorded episodes. The most frequent antecedent was “disagreement with a classmate” (4 incidents) and consequence was “sent to principal’s office” (7 incidents). Questionnaires in phase 2 had the goal of identifying what the school’s students, teachers and staff report about certain aspects of school violence. Fourteen teachers, 15 staff members and 270 students participated in this phase. Results show that most students (93%), teachers (100%) and staff (80 %) have observed some kind of violence at the school. The type of violence most reported by students was “bullying” (68%); teachers and staff reported “verbal aggression” (93% and 67%, respectively). About 50% of students, teachers, and staff reported some violence-related activities in school and stated they felt safe in the school. Regarding interpersonal relationships in the school, teachers have a negative perception in terms of relationship between students (67%), and between teachers and students (44%). In phase 2, we conducted Direct Observations with audiovisual recordings of 6 students and 10 teacher which had the following objectives: producing behavioral categories of teachers and students with appropriate and inappropriate behaviors to verify whether there is a difference between two groups of students in terms of number of appropriate and inappropriate behaviors; identifying whether there is a difference in the types of consequent behavioral categories of teachers in the student-teacher relationship and calculating the frequency of different behavioral categories of teachers that appear as antecedent stimulus and/or context for the categories of appropriate and inappropriate students’ behaviors; and identifying the frequency of different types of teachers’ behavioral categories that occur after students’ behaviors, pointing out the most frequent ones. Concerning inappropriate behaviors, they were more frequent by “problem students” (196), than “well-behaved students” (112). Regarding consequences emitted by teachers, we observed a high rate of “No Consequence" In all three phases of this research, we observed that teachers do not produce consequences for appropriate or inappropriate behaviors emitted by students. Thus, we identified a need for interventions based on data obtained from functional evaluations that may produce effective change on violent behaviors.