På elevens sida? : En kvalitativ studie om skolkuratorers uppfattningar och erfarenheter av deras arbete med elever som mobbar

The aim of this study was to gain knowledge and understanding of the school counsellors’ work with pupils who bully. The analysis is based on semi-structured interviews with six school counsellors who work at elementary schools in Sweden. We applied the social learning theory to analyse our data and to gain a deeper understanding of the subject. However, we only used the concepts from the theory that was most suitable for our study. Our study showed that the school counsellors had several different ways of working with pupils who bully. Principally, the work with pupils who bully include pupils, the pupil group, guardians and teachers. Our conclusion is that the school councillors utilise different kinds of reinforcements and different modes of modeling with the different individuals they work with in order to encourage a change in their behaviour. The councillors stressed the importance of being both a model of closeness and authority, coupled with positive reinforcement when working with the pupils. Working with guardians, school councillors use their authority as a model and negative reinforcement as well. Whereas with the teachers at the school, they are instead models of authority or likeness. Furthermore, they try to avoid negative reinforcement and instead use positive reinforcement