Studying the Phenomenon of Verbal Bullying in High School Students for Video Experience Design: A Case of an International School in Guangzhou, China

Abstract

Bullying is always a serious problem in schools. An occurrence of a bullying can cause a series of consequences, which consume money, time, and deteriorate interpersonal relationships between people. With the development of different technologies, more kinds of bullying emerged, and instead of physically, those bullying tend to be done on verbal ways. Different than physical bullying, verbal bullying is easier to be ignored by the community, including schools, parents, peers, even the victims themselves, due to its characteristics. In this way, raising the public awareness of verbal bullying is absolutely urgency. This paper aims to explore the phenomenon of verbal bullying in high school students with the consideration of their backgrounds, particularly in China, and to find out the unique parts of the phenomenon in the target region. The research method of this paper is divided into four steps. An online Questionnaire is adopted in the first step, which gathers the opinions about verbal bullying from high school students of an international school in Guangzhou, China. Following on is a video experience design for anti-verbal bullying in high school, which reflects the problems described and pointed out in the questionnaire. Then the first draft of the video will be presented to the students who were once experienced in the process of verbal bullying. The last step is to optimize the video according to the suggestions from the students who participate in the reflection process, and publish the video to the public. The result of this research shows several unusual points: firstly, countering on the problem that if students will laugh at people right in front of them, different gender shows a significant gap; secondly, particularly in the target region, the uncommonness of the victims’ interests caused students to bully them. Other than these, physical appearance and personality can also be the reason for students to bully others, and bullying was done both on the internet and in real world.