Cultural Sensitive Quantification and Strategies for Intervention to CounterSchool-bullying in Muscat Governorate: A Mixed Methods Study

BACKGROUND: In recent decades, Oman has seen an improvement in its population's physical health. Demographically, the country is in the second stage of transition, with approximately 37% of the population under 20 years. There is a scarcity of studies that have used a culturally sensitive approach to quantify the topology and trajectory of amorphous entities like school bullying. Extensive empirical evidence has shown that adversity among children, including bullying, is a strong predictor of poor adult well-being. OBJECTIVES: To bridge the gap in the literature so that a factual and culturally sensitive intervention can be considered, this study has five interrelated objectives: (i) to establish cultural sensitive measures to identify the topology of bullying among representative school-going populations in Oman; (ii) to establish the prevalence of bullying and its covariates, (iii) to quantify whether prolonged bullying has the potential to trigger persistence and pervasive cognitive and psychiatric symptoms and (iv) to explore the efficacy of the school-based intervention on mitigating variation school bullying METHODOLOGY: A qualitative approach will be used to investigate the topology and the trajectory of bullying in Oman. Qualitative data will be examined to identify culturally relevant measures to determine the prevalence and associated factors of bullying in schools. Established diagnostic tools will be utilized to explore the presence of cognitive and psychiatric symptoms. The appropriate pilot study of the intervention study will be used to study mechanisms for the mitigation of bullying in schools. EXPECTED OUTCOME/ IMPLICATION: Oman has a predominantly school-going population and, via its free education that is drawn from 4.6% of GDP and 26.1% of total government expenditure, has been lauded internationally as the most improved nation with a literacy rate of 93.0%. To date, there is limited data on the topology and trajectory of school-based bullying that has been collected through the culturally sensitive approach. The expected outcome of this study may lay the groundwork for a culturally relevant approach to the phenomenon commonly referred to as bullying. This, in turn, would lead to the development of tools to identify the victim of bullying, its associated factors and its myriad effect on the affected pupils (cognitive and psychiatric), and its effect on significant others. Such a database will have the potential will spur culturally-specific evidence-based prevention and intervention.