The Investigation of Mobbing Events Taking Place at Higher Education Institutions in Turkey Considering the Reflections on Media

The business-life related competition established in modern communities has also brought about some other problems. The attacks and intimidation attempts have introduced the term of “mobbing” which is defined as regular and continuous psychological violence faced by people always trying to produce and win from those who they work with. The term of “mobbing” has recently become a popular academic issue which has been sophisticatedly handled in relevant literature. Mobbing is defined as the act of continuous and systematic intimidation purposefully performed by either some employees or employers on some employees through emotional violence. As mobbing is considered to be significant for both corporate and employee, the starting point of this study was to investigate how mobbing acts are reflected on newspapers as they are mass communication means. One of the most important means of media is print media. Print media is the first means of media when mentioned about media. Newspapers are means through which people are always kept up to date about the latest news in civilized societies. With this regard, the most basic purpose of this study is to investigate the news about the mobbing events experienced in higher education system under the light of national policy documents and reports. The study was carried out based on a qualitative approach. The news released in print media was chosen purposefully as print media means report news in a detailed way, have an evidential value and can be read again on demand. The research group in this study consists of the mobbing news released on Hurriyet, Sabah and Zaman which are newspapers published in Turkey between the years of 2009-2013. These newspapers were purposefully chosen based on criterion sampling method. The most basic understanding underlying this sampling method is to study on all cases which meet the standards set prior to the start of the study. The newspapers mentioned above were chosen considering that they are published nationally, reference newspapers and belong to different publication groups. The data used in this study was taken from the archive of the three newspapers. When the archives of the newspapers was scanned, the word “mobbing” was taken as key word for the search. In qualitative researches, newspapers are considered to be public archive and used as reference documents. The data obtained was grouped depending on the newspapers which it was taken from, on the year of publication, on where they took place, on the gender of the victims and on who the sufferers are