Anti-Bullying Programs

Abstract

Bullying is a way of demonstrating aggressive attitude that is repeated over time in which one party shows its behavior intended to harm other party in physical, verbal and emotional way. It is important to analyze bullying in a psychological perspective to have better understanding as well as manage bullying behaviors. This paper aims to investigate the concept of bullying and examine various factors associated with it through mixed methods.

Anti-Bullying Programs

Introduction

Bullying is a major problem in schools today. Many states have made laws designed to protect students from being bullied and enabling them to punish students who are guilty of bullying their peers. Different schools have implemented different anti-bullying programs in order to stop bullying within their schools. There is a great deal of debate as to which of these programs are effective and which are ineffective and how to truly measure effectiveness. The Steps to Respect Bully Intervention program and the Safe School Ambassador Program are among the many programs that schools currently use to address the bullying epidemic (Dussich, 2007).

Discussion

Steps to Respect Bully Intervention Program are a school-based bully prevention program developed for grades 3-6. The goal of the program is to decrease school bullying problems by increasing staff awareness and responsiveness, fostering socially responsible beliefs, and teaching social-emotional skills to counter bullying and promote healthy relationships (Xin, 2001). The program aims to promote skills associated with general social competence. The program consists of 3 main components. The first component is a school-wide program guide which provides an overview of the curriculum content, the goals of the program, the research foundations behind the program, and a blueprint for developing school-wide policy and procedure. The second component of the program is staff training which focuses on effective discipline policies, improved monitoring of students, and effective intervention methods when a student is being bullied. The 3rd program component is a group of skill and literature-based lessons to present by teachers in the classroom. Students are taught to recognize bullying, how to be empathetic toward those who are being bullied, how to be assertive and learn strong communication skills. (Brown, 2011)

Outcomes From a School-Randomized Controlled Trial of Steps to Respect: A Bullying Prevention Program provides details of the study that was done to test the effectiveness of the Steps to Respect program in schools as well as the results of the study. The study was conducted during the 2008/ 2009 school year and took 33 California elementary schools (Xin, 2001). Randomly chosen schools were given pre test and post test questionnaires that measured student, classroom, and school-level effects. Many researchers provided the schools with precautions to respect materials, staff training and data collection reminders, but it could not be possible because they were involved in program implementation. The data was collected using a school environment survey, a teacher assessment of student behavior, and a student survey. The results of this study demonstrated significant intervention effects for the prevention of school bullying on 50% of all outcomes examined across the three sources ...