International Journal of Contemporary Educational Research

Abstract

It is seen
that violence has been escalating across the globe. In parallel with the
increase worldwide, violence takes place at larger scales especially in the
geography we live in due to reasons such as wars, terrorism, domestic violence
and school violence. Based on these harrowing experiences, we often see the
news about violence in the media, social media, and on TVs. Exposure to such
excessive violence seems to normalize the violence and leads to decreased
awareness. The purpose of this study is to determine how violence is perceived
by the preservice school counsellors (i.e., students enrolled in a
psychological counselling and guidance training program) who, as school
counsellors, are to take part in the efforts at schools to prevent violence.  Accordingly, the present study is aimed at
identifying the metaphorical perceptions of violence amongst the students
enrolled in the Department of Psychological Counselling and Guidance, Necmettin
Erbakan University.  In the study, the
research data was collected, analysed and interpreted using qualitative and
quantitative research methods. In order to find out what kind of perceptions
they have on violence, the students were presented with the following
incomplete sentence “Violence is (like) ….. because ……….” and then requested to
complete it. Based on the descriptions, five categories were elicited; threat;
purpose; destruction, psychological harm and (physical) harm; injury and death;
force. It was seen that metaphors were mostly used in the category of threat,
as opposed to the category of injury and death with the smallest number of
metaphors. Recommendations were offered based on the results of the study.