The aim of the research is to analyse the bullying suffered during school age, as well as the relationship between bullying experiences and young adult’s personality along the Big5 personality traits, as well as global self-esteem.
The study involved 209 young adults between the ages of 17 and 34, with a mean age of 21 years. The tools used in the survey are a demographic questionnaire, a self-reporting bullying questionnaire, the Big Five Inventory (BFI), and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. The research uses a correlation strategy, the statistical tests used in the data processing are descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test, Pearson’s correlation and analysis of variance (anova).
According to our results, a large proportion (77.7%) of respondents experienced bullying in school as children, 23.8% every day or almost every. 23.1% admitted they harassed others during their school years.
Regarding the personality traits, the results show that individuals who had experienced school bullying are significantly more neurotic and less extraverted than their than their unexperienced peers, and more frequently bullying is associated with lower extraversion, lower friendliness, and greater openness. Persons who had committed bullying are significantly less conscientious than their peers who have not.
As for help-seeking behaviour, nearly half of young people did not tell anyone about what had happened, only 28% sought help from an adult and only 13% actually received help. These results clearly stress the importance of developing school policies against bullying, which specifically address prevention, but also intervention.
Keywords: bullying, personality, self-esteem
