cross-cultural study of violence
Uploaded by professorzo on Mar 14, 2014
Lorenzo Davis
Descriptive:
a. Thai adolescents and Social Responsibility: Overcoming Violence in Schools and Creating Peace.
b. Vineekararn Kongsuwan, Wandee Suttharungsee, Marguerite J. Purnell, & Christine E. Lynn.
c. 2012
d. Research on Humanities and Social Sciences
e. Vol 2, No. 11 178-187
Summary:
This article is about understanding the cause of adolescent violent behavior within the culture of Southern Thailand schools and to learn more about the perceptions and attitudes that students, teachers, and parents have toward violence. Ultimately, the objective of this article not only focuses on adolescent’s social responsibility towards violence, but it also seeks to engage parents, students, teachers, and healthcare providers in a collaborative effort to reduce the abnormal culture of violence in Southern Thailand schools. The objectives were met by qualitative research designs such as focus groups and in-depth interviews with the teachers, parents, and students. Some of the designs focus on parent’s responsibility toward their children’s violent behavior; others focus on peer pressure, trust factors, student non-violent methods, and the normative subculture of violence. The methods were designed to identify the perceptions of violence within Thailand Schools.
The authors found that peer influences, lack of personal responsibility, lack of trust, and feelings of frustration for promoting non-violence correlates to the onset of violent behavior. They concluded that social responsibility towards violence requires community involvement whereby teachers, students, parents, and healthcare providers take an active role in reducing violence in Southern Thailand schools. The study influence the development of a curriculum that focuses on self-management strategies and prevention methods to create a safer, responsible, and academic learning environment.
Critique:
While I do believe that the researchers demonstrated a sufficient knowledge of the culture under study, I also believe that they did not expound upon the sub-cultural values inherent within southern Thailand, which gives rise to the perpetuation of violence. The researchers primarily focus on those who believed that violence is an abnormal behavior, rather than interviewing those who engage in violent acts. Their information came from those who only have an opinion about why violence occurs so rapidly within Southern Thailand schools. For these reasons, there is definitely a confirmation bias in this study design. Moreover, the researchers did not include parents in the focus groups, which defeat the purpose of integration and collective engagement. It also undermines the credibility of the researchers.
Correlational research designs were used and qualitative individual interviews were implemented. The sample was obtained from a large Southern Thailand high school and the students’ parents. The...