This qualitative study describes and explains nine teachers' perception of school violence and the impact it has on their performance. The theoretical framework utilized in this study was phenomenology. The research question: Have teacher perceptions of school violence impacted their performance? Participant selection was based on length of teaching career and the school where they were teaching. Data was gathered from clusters that were labeled "school violence" and "school violence at XYZ". The participants filled out the clusters and an interview was conducted to clarify and expand upon what was written by the participants.

Upon completion of the data collection, the interview transcriptions were analyzed and coded into meaning clusters. Transcripts were reveiwed by the participants for clarification, expansion, or deletion of comments. The researcher identified significant statements and eliminated redundant and irrelevant statements. This was reduced to the significant themes, allowing the emergence of sub themes that were common to the participants.

The analysis revealed three major themes that influenced the participants' performance as teachers. The meaning units (themes) to emerge from the data were: Global violence, school violence, and individual responses to violence. Sub themes from each of the major themes expanded their beliefs about school violence and these were analyzed to determine if their performance had been impacted.