What a Bully Idea! : A Comparative Study of the Concept of Bullying on Anti-Bullying Posters
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Liao, Yu-Hsuan
Abstract
Being motivated by the claim that images should be regarded as one of human communication modes, this study aims to examine a collection of anti-bullying posters from adults and children of Taiwan and America. The information carried by both the images and verbal messages in these posters will be analyzed with a linguistic method to unfold how people’s attitudes towards bullying vary across and within socio-cultural backgrounds. A modified version of Kress and Leeuwen’s (1990, 2006) visual grammar is proposed to carry out the analysis. It is with the awareness that images can convey meaning as languages do that Kress and Leeuwen borrow the idea of grammar from linguistics and bring forth systematic rules for reading images, which are frequently adopted in previous poster researches. However, some modifications and adaptions are necessary complements to applying their visual grammar to poster studies, inasmuch as it is originally designed for images’ exclusive use, which contradicts posters’ involving two different modes of communication, namely images and verbal messages. With the adapted visual grammar, the gleaned information from the collected anti-bullying posters will be studied in two aspects, interpersonal meaning and ideational meaning. The former deals with the interactions between the posters and their viewers, identifying different groups of target viewers and the poster acts performed to them; the latter discusses what images in these posters are and whether they are presented in a narrative or conceptual manner. The results indicate that how Taiwanese and Americans understand bullying is deeply influenced by their culturally embedded ideologies, collectivism and individualism; Taiwanese tend to refer to an inclusive group of people in their anti-bullying posters, while Americans normally assign the responsibility of anti-bullying to an individual with a specific identity, like the bully, the bystander or the victim. Besides, they also show certain inclination to focusing on victims and focusing on bullies respectively by performing and visualizing different acts through the posters, such as offering support services to the victims, demanding the bullies to stop bullying, and so on. However, despite such general distinctions between these two cultures, the adults and children in a given society do not always have consistency in their attitudes towards bullying. It is found that Taiwanese children make their anti-bullying posters for non-specific target viewers much more frequently than adults do, and American adults ascribe the blame to both bullies and bystanders while most American children only impute bullying to the bullies. All these findings can provide some implications about the potential problems in both societies’ practice of anti-bullying programs: for instance, it is possible that Taiwanese children are ignorant of who should take the responsibility of anti-bullying, and American children may be unaware of the role of bystanders. Based on such analyses and findings, this study is expected to offer development directions for future bullying intervention and prevention approaches which can effectively halt the upward trend of its occurrence.
Subjects
anti-bullying
poster
visual grammar
cultural comparison
collectivism-individualism
victim-focused
bully-focused
SDGs
Type
thesis