Bullying Prevention Programs Research Articles

Prevention Of Bullying Among Adolescents In The Lens Of Indonesian Policy And Law: Should Nurses Know?

Introduction: Indonesia has several institutions, policies, and laws to protect children from all forms of violence, including bullying that impacts physical, psychological, and social health and even death. However, the number of cases of bullying in adolescents still increases. It is related to a lack of knowledge about bullying and is associated with norms in the community.
 Method: The analysis uses a discourse analysis approach, "What's the problem represented to be". This method analyzes how the problem of bullying among adolescents is formed, and the forms of bullying prevention are represented in state documents. The analysis steps include: collecting the policy documents related to child protection and health (seven laws and three national policies); Reading the policy text as a whole; rereading the text and underlining the concepts; doing coding and theme analysis; and answering the question.
 Results: Three main problems of bullying in adolescents that can be identified include: Theme 1. Terminology of children and adolescents; Theme 2. Children are a vulnerable and disempowered group; Theme 3. Agreement and clarity on child protection related to violence, especially bullying, with perpetrators and victims being children.
 Conclusions: Laws and policies have a crucial role in constructing and representing the problem of adolescent bullying in Indonesia. Nurses can use these results to develop adolescent bullying prevention programs through firmness and alignment with policies and legislation.

Views of Catholic Middle School Students on Handling Peer Aggression

Aggression toward peers who are perceived as weaker or different is a widespread problem for middle school students including those attending Catholic middle schools. Middle school students’ normative beliefs about the acceptability of various types of aggressive behavior influences their own potential involvement in bullying. Therefore, how middle schoolers decide to respond to situations of peer aggression may affect their standing as either victims, bystanders to bullies, or as bully-victims in school environments over time. This study looks at how middle schoolers (sixth, seventh, and eighth grade girls and boys) in Catholic schools think it best to respond to peer aggression by examining their decision-making preferences for how targeted peers (from a vulnerable group) should respond to physical, verbal, or cyber aggression situations. Although significant effects regarding gender, grade, and type of peer aggression were found for the decision-making of the middle schoolers, findings reveal that overall middle schoolers’ preferences were well developed for resisting peer aggression. The study provides important insights for how to supplement commonly existing curricula on social emotional learning in Catholic Schools with decision-making training inputs for the design of future school-based bullying prevention programs. Preparing middle schoolers in Catholic schools to respond to stop peer aggression in a proactive way supports the mission of Catholic schools to create safe and caring school environments.

District-wide outcomes from a bullying prevention programming

Bullying in schools contributes to peer conflict, disruptive behavior, internalized victimization, and many other deleterious outcomes for students. This study examined the integration of a schoolwide bullying prevention intervention in a pre/post design comparing grade level aggregated data for elementary, middle, and high school across two timepoints. Results demonstrate that differences in response to bullying prevention occur across the two time points for each grade level. The greatest positive change was found for middle school students, indicating that bullying prevention could most effectively be delivered in middle school. Lack of significant changes may indicate that interventions may require more than one year, that the baseline scores were too high to detect significant change, or measures were not sensitive enough to detect change.

Facilitators and Barriers to the Sustainability of a School-Based Bullying Prevention Program

The long-term sustainment of bullying prevention programs has rarely been investigated. This study addresses this gap by identifying facilitators and barriers to the systematic implementation of KiVa antibullying program in real-life conditions, after an evaluation trial. The study is based on focus group interviews with teachers from 15 Finnish primary schools implementing the KiVa program. The schools were selected based on the annual KiVa survey data, with the criteria of long-term involvement in delivering the program and reaching successful outcomes in terms of decreasing trends in bullying and victimization. By utilizing thematic analysis, we identified program-related, organizational, and contextual facilitators and barriers to sustainability. The results stress the importance of organizational factors in promoting program sustainability.

The Longitudinal Relationship Between Peer Relations and Empathy and their Joint Contribution to Reducing Bullying in Middle School: Findings from a Randomized Trial of Cooperative Learning.

The positive peer relations arising from cooperative learning can contribute to the development of affective empathy, which in turn can reduce bullying (Van Ryzin & Roseth, 2019). However, from a theoretical perspective, the direction of effects between peer relations and empathy could be in the opposite direction, or bi-directional. In the current paper, we employed a process-oriented approach (i.e., cross-lag difference score modeling; McArdle, 2009) to investigate the longitudinal relationship between positive peer relations and affective empathy, as well as their joint effect on bullying. Using four waves of data from a cluster randomized trial including 15 middle schools (7 intervention and 8 control schools; N=1,890 students, 47.1% female, 75.2% White), we found a bi-directional or reciprocal relationship between peer relations and affective empathy, and change in both constructs predicted lower levels of bullying. Cooperative learning predicted positive change in peer relations and affective empathy, as well as lower levels of bullying. These results suggest that the structured social interactions that occur during cooperative learning can enhance student interpersonal relations, and simultaneously the experiential skill building of cooperative learning can contribute to a more profound understanding of the emotional states of others. These effects amplify one another and, in turn, significantly reduce bullying in middle school. Given that cooperative learning has already been demonstrated to enhance academic motivation and achievement (Roseth et al., 2008), we argue that cooperative learning offers an effective, attractive alternative to traditional curriculum-based bullying prevention programs (National Library of Medicine [NLM], NCT03119415).

BULLYING IN SCHOOLS: DOES EMPATHY HELP

Bullying is a universal problem, affecting students in schools all around the world. It makes life miserable for those who are bullied, and some victims have been so upset that they committed suicide. Bullying is an act of intentional harm, carried out repeatedly. It can take the form of physical, verbal, social or emotional and cyber bullying. The bullies are aggressive in nature and the emotion they harbor is anger. Their home environment is one of conflict, and lack of warmth. The victims of bullies are sensitive and lack social and problem-solving skills and easily fall prey to the bully. They are anxious, depressive and lonely. As a result of bullying, their school attendance falls, and academic results are low. To tackle the bullying problem in schools, many programs have been introduced which have reported to increase empathy in students, and consequently, reducing bullying. This article emphasizes the importance of bullying prevention programs in schools with empathy as a core component, because it is impossible to eradicate bullying by enforcing policies and rules only. The solution of bullying is to develop empathy which will help students to appreciate differences, and to develop a sense of community in students. Keywords: Intervention Program, Reducing Bullying, Schoolchildren and Empathy

Teaching Strategy in Early Childhood Education: Child-Friendly Classroom Management to Anticipate Bullying Behaviours

Bullying behaviour can have a negative impact on a child's physical and psychological health. Bullying in the classroom is a challenge for early-childhood educators. Preschool is the first place outside the home where children face social challenges when interacting with their classmates. Child-Friendly Class is the first step and part of the Children Friendly School (CSF) as a UNICEF program and an important Indonesian government policy to prevent the emergence of child bullying behaviour. This study aims to identify needs in the process of developing a Child-Friendly Classroom Management model to anticipate bullying behaviour. This research and development method uses an adaptation of the Rowntree model which includes three stages of the process and data collection techniques using interviews, questionnaires, and observation. The results of this study indicate that the preparation of an effective classroom management guidebook to create child-friendly classes needs to be followed up immediately. Several findings related to teachers' perceptions of classroom management, and child-friendly classes prove that child-friendly classes have not been implemented properly in PAUD institutions, with bullying behaviour still appearing in early childhood in PAUD institutions. PAUD teachers understand that it is important to implement classroom management but so far there has been no manual on how to manage effective classrooms as well as training related to the implementation of effective classroom management. The creation of child-friendly classes is believed to be able to help teachers suppress the emergence of bullying behaviour in early childhood.
 Keywords: Child-Friendly Classroom Management, Bullying Prevention, Early Childhood Education

School Bullying from Multiple Perspectives: "A Qualitative Study"

The study aim to identify the reality of school bullying from the perspective of the victims, bullies, educators, and workers in one of the private schools at Nablus city. The researchers employed the qualitative research method that was based on face-to-face interviews. Moreover, the age range of the selected sample was between 13-16 years old. The study's findings revealed the forms of bullying at the school, its causes, and the school policy to tackle it. Most of the results were characterized by having a problematic definition of "bullying." Moreover, the school was confused about dealing with bullying in all its forms, and there was a clear strategy to address the problem. The study recommend the necessity of school-based bullying prevention and treatment programs designed to reduce the bullying phenomenon at schools.

Parents’ preferences on the content of a 3D-school group work bullying programme: a needs assessment

ABSTRACT National and international research studies that involve parents for obtaining their insight on content of school bullying prevention programmes are minimal. The purpose of this research study was to conduct a needs assessment to obtain parents’ preferences in terms of the content that are to be included or addressed in a potential three dimensional-bullying programme (3D-bullying programme) for parents, educators, and learners in a South African context. This research study used a self-developed questionnaire and a cross-sectional survey at five schools in South Africa (SA) with varying socio-economic circumstances. The research methodology followed a quantitative research approach and a quantitative-descriptive survey design. The findings could be useful for developing a three-dimensional social group work school bullying programme to address bullying in primary schools.

Adolescent Characteristics, Suicide, and Bullying in High School.

Youth Risk Behavior Survey 2011-2017 data were examined for associations among high school population subsets who self-reported suicide risk behaviors and experiences with bullying. High-school students who reported suicidal risk behaviors were 4.64 times more likely to have experienced bullying electronically. Ninth grade and female students were more likely than others to experience suicide risk behaviors and bullying. At the interpersonal level, school nurses are able to identify students who are experiencing bullying and who exhibit suicide risk behaviors. At the systems level, bullying prevention efforts should target all students. School nurses, administrators, policy makers, and health providers should consider data-driven recommendations in bullying prevention programs.

Under the skin: does psychiatric outcome of bullying victimization in school persist over time? Aprospective intervention study.

Research has shown a direct path between peer victimization and poor mental health outcomes. However, the impact of bullying prevention on mental health is a largely unexplored field. Therefore, our study examined the longitudinal association between bullying development and trajectories of psychiatric symptoms (emotional problems, total difficulties, nonsuicidal self-injury, and suicidality) and health-related quality of life (HRQL) during the implementation of school-based bullying prevention. Data of 4,873 pupils (grades 5-13) were collected in 23 schools implementing the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (OBPP). Self-report questionnaires were administered at three annual assessment waves and individual codes enabled the association of repeated assessments to the same pupil. Latent growth curve models (LGCMs) were used to examine the relation among bullying status and mental health outcome with mixed-effects linear regressions estimating the association of changes in bullying with changes in continuous scores and mixed-effects logistic regressions for categorical variables. Latent growth curve models revealed an improvement of mental health and HRQL through the termination of bullying for every outcome variable of interest (all p < .001). Correspondingly, we found an explicit increase in psychopathology as well as decrease in HRQL within one year as a result of developing victimization (all p < .001). Interestingly, the growth of psychopathology associated with the onset of bullying was significantly steeper than its decline associated with the termination of bullying. The postulated cumulative effect of ongoing bullying for a further year could only be shown for HRQL (p = .025) and total difficulties (p = .034), but not for specific mental health problems (all p > .117). Latent growth curve models clearly showed that the adverse psychosocial consequences of bullying arise quickly but seem to reduce much slower and partly persist over time. Future long-term studies are necessary to clarify if mental health problems will return to baseline after several years or if residual symptoms will remain.

Perceptions of Bullying amongst Spanish Preschool and Primary Schoolchildren with the Use of Comic Strips: Practical and Theoretical Implications

Bullying research among preschoolers and the early grades of primary school is still scarce. With the aid of a set of cartoons representing prototypical bullying scenes, we interview 120 schoolchildren (50% girls) from kindergarten to third grade (age range: 5.44–9.58) from three mainstream public schools located in the eastern Community of Madrid, in order to analyse their perceptions regarding this phenomenon. Results show that 94.2% (n = 113) of schoolchildren are able to recognize when a partner is victimized. Nevertheless, significant differences were found by grade (p = 0.017), with kindergarteners giving more responses classified as one-off aggressions. Most students (n = 102) empathize with the victims´ emotions and condemn the bullies’ behavior, regardless of their gender (p = 0.637) or grade (p = 0.578). A total of 53.9% (n = 64) of students think these bullying situations are partly caused by previous conflicts; girls are inclined to think this more often than boys (p = 0.003). Furthermore, 53.8% (n = 64) of the students would request help from their schoolteachers if they were bullied, with no statistically significant differences by gender (p = 0.254) or by grade (p = 0.133). These results serve as a rationale to develop bullying prevention programs from a very early school age to provide information regarding its causation and coping strategies, among others.

Understanding Responses to Bullying From the Parent Perspective

Relatively little scholarly work addresses parental experiences with bullying in the United States. This lack of understanding about parental perceptions of bullying is a gap in both the scholarly research and the development of effective bullying prevention programming. This paper presents data from responses to a series of open-ended questions about perceptions of and experiences with bullying from 50 parents in a southeastern state. Parents self-reported their level of concern about bullying, their perceptions of why bullying occurs and the extent of bullying at their school, and their communication strategies with their children about bullying. Findings demonstrate that most parents 1) view bullying as problematic and are somewhat fearful of bullying affecting their child, 2) are confident their child is not telling them about all bullying situations they experience, and 3) are more than willing to approach school administrators when their children are victims of bullying. The findings suggest that parents remain concerned about bullying and its problematic nature, and efforts to encourage children to report bullying to adults are not entirely effective. Consequently, bullying prevention training will benefit from greater parental involvement with (and reinforcement of) bullying prevention strategies learned by children at school. Implications for policy and research are also discussed.

The Potential of Anti-Bullying Efforts to Prevent Academic Failure and Youth Crime. A Case Using the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (OBPP)

The effectiveness of bullying prevention programs has led to expectations that these programs could have effects beyond their primary goals. By reducing the number of victims and perpetrators and the harm experienced by those affected, programs may have longer-term effects on individual school performance and prevent crime. In this paper, we use Norwegian register data to study the long-term impact of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (OBPP) on academic performance, high school dropout, and youth crime for the average student, which we call population-level effects. The OBPP program is widely acknowledged as one of the most successful programs reducing school-level bullying; yet, using a difference-in-difference design, no statistically significant population-level effects of the OBPP were found on any of the long-term outcomes in this study. When studied at the population level, as in the current project, the base rate prevalence of bullying is a major explanatory factor for these results. Earlier studies have shown that OBPP reduces bullying prevalence by 30–50%. This decrease translates into absolute reductions in bullying victimization and perpetration at the population level of “only” four and two percentage points, respectively. Our results suggest the average causal effects of school bullying involvement are too small to translate this reduction in bullying into a sizeable population-level impact on students’ long-term outcomes. However, a limited potential of anti-bullying programs to prevent population-level adversity can very well be compatible with substantial program effects for individual bullies and victims. Further, our results do not speak to the main objective of anti-bullying programs of limiting childhood abuse and safeguarding children’s human rights.

Individual Risk, Country-Level Social Support, and Bullying and Cyberbullying Victimization Among Youths: A Cross-national Study.

We first estimated logistic regression models that examined the relationships between indicators of physical health, risky/deviant lifestyle, and psychosocial adjustment using 23 distinct national samples. This analysis also allowed us to observe patterns of similarity and dissimilarity across countries regarding the correlates of for traditional bullying and cyberbullying victimization. Next, we estimated multilevel models of bullying victimization that combined data across 21 countries and estimated the effects of a country-level indicator of quality of human development (IHDI) in interaction with individual-level indicators of physical health, risky/deviant lifestyle, and psychosocial adjustment. There were both cross-country similarities and differences regarding the individual-level correlates of traditional bullying and cyberbullying victimization. Additionally, countries that had relatively greater quality of human development tended to exhibit lower prevalence of traditional and cyberbullying victimization. Finally, country-level quality of human development conditioned relationships between individual level factors and both traditional and cyberbullying victimization. Findings suggest that student-level bullying-prevention programs should address risk/protective factors across three student life domains, with some risk/protective factors seemingly universally relevant. Moreover, cross-level interactions suggest that enhancing country-level quality of human development can also play an important role in youth bullying prevention.

Correlates of bullying perpetration among Lebanese adolescents: a national study

BackgroundPresently, 1 in 4 Lebanese adolescents is involved in bullying, with 12% being perpetrators. In Lebanon, around 90% of bullying incidents occur in schools. Given the lack of studies tackling bullying perpetration in Lebanon, this study aims to identify and target risk factors of bullying perpetration among Lebanese adolescents, which would serve future prevention and intervention programs.MethodsThis cross-sectional study took place between January and May 2019 in a proportionate random sample of schools from all Lebanese districts. A total of 1810 (90.5%) out of 2000 students accepted to participate.ResultsResults showed that 831 (49.1%, CI: 0.46–0.51) participants had bullied other people. A stepwise linear regression, using as the dependent variable the bullying perpetration score, showed that higher psychological (β = 0.12; 95% CI 0.083–0.176), sexual (β = 0.26; 95% CI 0.128–0.411), neglect (β = 0.08; 95% CI 0.051–0.120), physical abuse (β = 0.13; 95% CI 0.036–0.235), higher internet addiction (β = 0.07; 95% CI 0.057–0.097), higher social fear (β = 0.10; 95% CI 0.075–0.140), and having separated parents (β = 1.60; 95% CI 0.561–2.650) were significantly associated with more bullying perpetration. Higher social avoidance (β = − 0.03; 95% CI -0.062- -0.003) was significantly associated with less bullying perpetration.ConclusionThe results revealed that bullying perpetration is significantly associated with parental status, child abuse, internet addiction, and social fear. Educational and relevant governmental institutions could use our findings to develop and implement efficient bullying prevention and intervention programs for all involved parties.

Evaluation of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program in US Urban Middle Schools Using a Multiple Baseline Experimental Design.

We evaluated the impact of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (OBPP) in an 8-year study in urban middle schools that served primarily African American students living in low-income areas. Participants included 2755 students and 242 teachers. We evaluated the OBPP with a multiple-baseline experimental design where the order and intervention start time was randomly assigned for each school. We assessed the frequency of bullying behaviors and experiences including physical, relational, and verbal aggression and victimization using teacher ratings of student behavior and student-reported data, as well as cyber aggression and victimization and school climate measures using student-reported data. For teacher ratings of student behavior, we found significant main effects across all subtypes of aggression and victimization, with some variability in the timing of effects. The pattern of findings showed delayed intervention effects for boys and a weaker impact of the OBPP on 6th graders. We found main effects for student-reported cyber aggression and victimization, relational aggression, and a composite of physical, verbal, and relational victimization. Decreases in victimization emerged in the 1st or 2nd year of intervention, and reductions in aggression emerged during the 3rd year. Across all findings, once intervention effects emerged, they remained significant in subsequent intervention years. The OBPP resulted in significant decreases in student- and teacher-reported aggression and victimization. However, this intervention had limited impact on general areas of school climate including teacher support, positive peer interactions, and school safety. Overall, the findings offer important prevention and research implications.

Preventing cyberbullying through ICT-centric education: a case study

ABSTRACT Numerous studies have examined the phenomenon of bullying. The development of information and communications technology (ICT) has enabled an emerging form of bullying known as cyberbullying. This article presents a case study of an Internet-focused bullying prevention programme in a Spanish secondary school with 627 students, from a non-experimental, qualitative perspective. The data collected show an ICT-centric institutional framework that supports bullying prevention programmes. The results also indicate an institutional culture highly adapted to ICT based on teleological, psycho-pedagogical, administrative and community dimensions. This culture has favoured the development of the cyberbullying prevention programme studied in this article.

Online and offline victimisation: a cluster analysis of adolescent victims of bullying and cyber-bullying in Chile

ABSTRACT Bullying and cyberbullying victimisation are serious problems worldwide, especially among children and adolescents. However, there is much research on risk factors, the evidence about victim typologies that combine online and offline bullying with the specific nature of the victimisation episodes and other sociodemographic and individual features is still scarce. This study contributes by combining the poly-victim framework with the cyberbullying and online risk approaches. We used data from the Kids Online survey conducted in 2016 and analysed a national sample of 1,000 Internet users in Chile between 9 and 17 years old. The aim was to classify youth based on their cyber and traditional bullying experiences and examine the clusters’ features based on age, sex, socioeconomic status, technology use and skills, risky offline behaviours and well-being. A two-step cluster analysis identified three groups: poly-victims (23%), occasional digital victims (30%), and frequent offline victims (41%). These groups significantly differed by age, sex, Internet use, digital skills, risky offline behaviours and psychological characteristics. These results highlight the heterogeneity and complexity of both traditional and cyberbullying and the need to tailor interventions for diverse types of victims. IMPACT SUMMARY a. Prior State of Knowledge: Bullying is a serious problem both in its traditional and cyber-forms. Both share commonalities and present divergences regarding risk factors and psychological consequences associated. Whereas they can be distinct types of victimisation, a significant percentage of victims suffer both. b. Novel Contributions: Frequent offline bullying, occasional digital victimisation, and poly-victimisation should be considered three victimisation forms. These three experiences differ significantly in their age and sex composition, Internet use, digital skills, risky offline behaviours and psychological characteristics. c. Practical Implications: Identification of victim groups is critical to developing a more tailored approach to support different victims and reduce various forms of harassment. Moreso, because the current impacts of bullying-prevention programs are relatively small.

Evaluation of the effectiveness and satisfaction of the Learning to Forgive Program for the prevention of bullying

Introduction. Two pioneering studies in Spain are presented on the Learning to Forgive program inspired by the research of Robert Enright and his team, pioneers in the education of forgiveness. Study 1 aims to analyze whether teacher training in the Learning to Forgive Program increases their knowledge of forgiveness and Study 2 evaluates the satisfaction of the program for teenagers. Method. In Study 1, the sample consisted of 88 primary and secondary school teachers, distributed in an experimental group (n = 63) and a control group (n = 25), belonging to 11 educational centers, and in Study 2 the sample consisted of 153 students belonging to 4 educational centers. Results. In Study 1, statistically significant improvements were found in the forgiveness group regarding their knowledge of forgiveness and marginally significant in emotional forgiveness compared to the control group. In Study 2 participants noted, among other data, high satisfaction with the program and that it had helped them forgive in a remarkable way. Discussion and Conclusion. In line with other studies, it is recommended to incorporate education in forgiveness into bullying prevention programs.