Author(s)

Dimitrios Theocharis, Alexandra Bekiari, Athanasios Koustelios

Department of Physical Education and Sports, University of Thessaly, Thessaly, Greece.

The purpose of this study is to detect structures of verbal aggressiveness and leadership using social networks analysis. Standardized questionnaires including network and non-network variables have been distributed to 128 students and 43 teachers at secondary schools. We performed complete analysis of social networks and further processing by applying principal component analysis. According to the results, a complex structure of verbal aggressiveness occurred in the classes (networks) and the structure was necessary to be explored with several network indicators (Katz, pagerank etc.). Structures of verbal aggressiveness and leadership appeared to converge. The following types of verbal aggressors were proposed: a) the “mocker”, b) the “scorner”, c) the “insulter”, d) the “teaser” and e) the “ridiculer”. As for the leadership, two types of leaders have been revealed: a) the “ideologist leader”, b) the “realist” leader. It is noticeable that both leader types appear in the occasional (indegree) as well as in the accumulative (Katz) structure. This means a rigid character of these leadership profiles.

Verbal Aggressiveness, Leadership, Network Analysis, Typology

Theocharis, D. , Bekiari, A. and Koustelios, A. (2017) Exploration of Determinants of Verbal Aggressiveness and Leadership through Network Analysis and Conventional Statistics: Using School Class as an Illustration. Sociology Mind, 7, 27-43. doi: 10.4236/sm.2017.72003.