Investigating the relationship between reactive-proactive aggression and problem solving skills in middle school students

The main purpose of this research is to specify the prediction of the levels of reactive and proactive aggression of middle school students. Furthermore in this research, it is studied wheter the points of reactive-proactive aggression is changed or not related to gender or classes. The sample of the research is formed by 796 students that are studying in 5th, 6th and 7th grades in various districts of İzmir. In this research, "Reactive-Proactive Aggression Questinnaire" and "Problem Solving Inventory for Children" are used to collect data. The techniques of "Spearman's Rank-Order Correlation", "Stepwise Multiple Regression", "Mann Whitney U Test" and "Kruskal Wallis Test" are used for data analyzing. The result of the research, it is spotted that problem solving skills are significant predictors of reactive-proactive aggression and these variable explained 43.5 % of the reactive-proactive aggressions. Also in terms of gender and grade level, statistically significant diffirences are found. These findings are disscussed in the light of the findings of the other research results in the literature. Key Words: reactive-proactive aggression, problem solving skills.