Adolescents’ Aggressive Behavior in the Representation of Teachers: Typical Manifestations (Semantic Analysis)

Background. Teachers’ ideas about aggression and deviant behavior of adolescents is an extremely important source of information, scientific consideration of which can both clarify the internal picture of the difficulties in teachers’ professional activities and assess the specifics of the manifestation of problematic behavior in adolescents.

Objective. The purpose of this article is a theoretical and empirical consideration of the phenomenology of aggressive behavior in adolescents as represented in teachers’ ideas. Another goal is to identify the main lexical units with which occur in the conceptualization of typical manifestations of aggressive behavior in adolescence.

Methods. The article analyses teacher’s answers to the open question: “What are the three most typical manifestations of aggressive behavior in adolescents?” The question was asked separately about younger (11–14 years old) and older (15–19 years old) teenagers. To analyze the data obtained, the methodology of text analysis by means of the R programming language was applied. The methodology included several stages: (1) tokenization of statements, (2) stemmization of words, (3) removal of stop words for the Russian language, (4) sorting meaningful parts of words by frequency of use. To determine the differences in the frequency of use for different lexical units, the Student and Mann — Whitney criteria were used.

Sample. The study was implemented in the form of an anonymous online survey, which was filled in by teachers from five federal districts of the Russian Federation. The overwhelming majority of respondents are female (94 %). The average age of respondents is 44.5 (SD = 11.7). A sample of 7,042 teachers was used for the analysis.

Results. The most frequent lexical unit was “aggress” [aggression] in both groups. In the representations of teachers regarding younger adolescents, there are also lexical units and their components: «krik» [scream], «drak» [fight], «grub» [rude], «poveden» [behavior], «fizichesk» [physical], «emocionaln» [emotional] and «slez» [tears/crying]. In relation to the older teenagers «poveden» [behavior], «grub» [rude], «drak» [fight], «fizichesk» [physical] and «zamknut» [withdrawn] are used.

Conclusion. The study identified the most frequent lexical units and their components used by teachers to describe aggressive behavior in younger and older adolescents. It was shown that the most frequent units and their components reflect typical manifestations characteristic of both ages. At the same time, the least frequent seem to indicate the specific risks characteristic of the age groups considered.

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