Research on peer victimization knowledge level of family physicians and pediatricians

Objectives: Peer relationships of children have a substantial role in their social attitudes, behaviors, and introductions into society as social individuals. In spite of the fact that peer victimization is not recently encountered, it has been examined for the first time in the world in 1970's and yet in Turkey with a 30-year delay in 2000's. Since peer victimizations are being incrementally encountered throughout the world in recent years, number of the related studies conducted on peer victimization are increased. This study is conducted with the aim of assessing the family physicians and pediatricians knowledge levels on peer victimization. Materials and Methods: The study conducted on randomly selected two hundred thirty one physicians who work throughout the city Ankara as family physicians in family health-care centers and clinics, pediatricians in private and state hospitals, and physician associates and pediatricians in educational pediatric clinics. The acquired data analyzed with IBM SPSS statistics 22 software. In the course of evaluation, the normality of the continuous variables were calculated by Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. The data which was not distributed normally was shown as median (min-max). In the data set the descriptive distributions for the numeric variables and the frequency distributions for the categorical variables are given. It's checked if the both groups have whether or not diversities by unrelated samples t test. The relation between two categorical groups is inspected by chi square test. Moreover, the relation between two numeric variables is checked with Pearson correlation method. In the course of results' evaluation the significance level considered as p< 0,05. Results: Two hundred thirty one participant physicians of the study have a median age of 32 years old while have a median career of 7 years. 41.10% of the participants of the studyare male ans consider as the place most peer victimization encountered with the 26.61% "way to school", 40.37% "school garden", 48.62% "classroom", 10.09% "school canteen", and 25.69% "school restroom." As a respond of the description of peer victimization, 76.15% of the participant pediatricians elected out of the multiple choice "equal ages", whereas 32.11% "equal power", 54.13% "sustenance-required", 34.86% "having a goal", and 58.72% "reflex." Conclusion: Many studies on peer victimization could be reached in national and international publications however; it is hard to find studies on knowledge and awareness of physicians on peer victimization. In our country, in the field of peer victimization there is the necessity to conduct comprehensive studies on children ages, genders, socio-economic levels, disciplinary codes and procedures for the physicians to increase the awareness of peer victimization. As result of peer victimization, in the adolescent periods, characteristics of role model is determinant of the behavior of adolescents. Keywords: Family physician, peer victimization, pediatrics