Understanding for Which Students and Classes a Socio-Ecological Aggression Prevention Program Works Best: Testing Individual Student and Class Level Moderators

Lisa Bardach,Dagmar Strohmeier,Petra Gradinger,Takuya Yanagida

doi:10.1007/s10964-021-01553-6

Abstract

School-based aggression prevention programs may not be equally effective for all students and classes, depending on student and class characteristics. This study investigated moderators of a cluster randomized controlled socio-ecological aggression prevention program’s effectiveness (change from pretest to posttest, sample: 2,042 preadolescents, mean age = 11.7 years, SD = 0.09, 47.6% girls) and sustainability (change from posttest to follow-up test, sample: 659 preadolescents, mean age = 12.7 years, SD = 0.08, 47.9% girls). The program worked better in multicultural classes, as greater ethnic diversity strengthened the program’s effectiveness and sustainability. Moderating effects of a positive social class climate and higher baseline levels of aggressive behavior and victimization were also found. These results advance socio-ecological theorizing and can help develop more contextualized interventions.

Highlights

Aggressive behavior represents a pervasive problem in childhood and adolescence, with a mean prevalence rate of around 35% for both aggressive behavior as well as victimization across studies and contexts
Inspecting the means and standard deviations of aggressive behavior and victimization at pretest, posttest and followup test separately for the intervention and control group as well as the change scores for aggressive behavior and victimization from pretest to posttest and from posttest to follow-up test separately for the intervention and control group revealed that the control group experienced an increase in aggressive behavior, while the intervention group showed a slight decrease from pretest to posttest
Between posttest and follow-up test, aggressive behavior and victimization decreased in both the control and intervention group, the decrease in the intervention group was much stronger for both outcome variables

Summary

Introduction

Aggressive behavior represents a pervasive problem in childhood and adolescence, with a mean prevalence rate of around 35% for both aggressive behavior as well as victimization across studies and contexts (see Modecki et al, 2014 for a meta-analysis). Aggressive behavior peaks in preadolescence (Inchley et al, 2016). Journal of Youth and Adolescence victimization from posttest to follow-up test) of the ViSC Social Competence program. The ViSC program is a cluster-randomized, whole-school socio-ecological aggression prevention program designed for preadolescents that has been implemented at scale and evaluated in several countries during the last decade (e.g., Strohmeier & Spiel, 2019; Strohmeier et al, 2021). Multi-level modeling was employed to test a set of conceptually and empirically relevant potential moderators of the ViSC program’s effectiveness and sustainability, including individual student characteristics (gender, initial levels of aggressive behavior and victimization) and classroom characteristics (positive social class climate, ethnic diversity)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion