Unjustified aggression in early childhood education: A systematic, narrative and conceptual review of the current scientific literature

Abstract

Unjustified aggression in early childhood education has received less scientific attention due to the methodological and ethical difficulties involved in working with children. This limitation has generated a degree of conceptual ambiguity, due to the methodological and procedural diversity employed by researchers. The aim of this study is to provide a systematic review on unjustified aggression and victimization in the classroom in early childhood over the last decade. Following the guidelines set by Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA), a total of 3905 articles published between 2011 and 2021 were reviewed, which were narrowed down to a final sample of 52 papers that met the inclusion criteria. The results indicated a low scientific production, in which the existing research comes almost exclusively from developed countries, where 57.70 % were carried out with samples of less than 250 participants. A total of 67.31 % of these studies have used teachers' reports to obtain the information, victimization does not feature highly in these studies, and there are few longitudinal studies in this respect. The results are discussed in relation to both the need to reconceptualize the construct and the need to standardize the methodology to obtain more robust data on this interpersonal classroom dynamic in early childhood.