Synopsis
A study was conducted at two elementary schools to know how effective the Bullying Literature Project was on the social-emotional assets and behavior outcomes. The authors report students who have some type of involvement with bullying can affect student academically and can create potential effects like violent or criminal involvement later in life. The researchers sought to study the impact of the Bullying Literature Project on elementary school children’s social-emotional and behavioral functioning and students’ perception of classroom climate. They would like this study to contribute the knowledge of bullying prevention in schools.
The sample gathered was a random assignment that involved 168 students from 7 classrooms. Within the sample, 91 students were third graders and 77 fourth graders. The researchers gathered a non-probability, convenience sampling. The study was conducted in two schools from two school districts in Southern California. Parents from the school received consent forms for students to participate in the study.
A quasi-experiment pre-post research design with random assignments was used for this study. Before receiving the intervention, students completed a demographic survey and were assessed on bullying involvement, classroom climate perspective, and social-emotional assets. Teachers also rated the student’s prosocial behaviors before and after the intervention. Students also completed a self-report post-test.
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The independent variable of the study was the application of a five-session intervention to 4 classrooms. Bibliotherapy was the intervention used with an addition to explicit instruction, modeling, and role-playing. Three of the dependent variables are the following. The study used the Verbal and Physical Bullying Scale-Victimization and The Verbal and Physical Bullying Scale-Perpetration-Student Version (VPBS) that uses a five-point response scale on 11 items to assess physical and verbal/relational bullying or victimization. Another measure utilized was the Children’s Social Behavior Scale-Teacher Form CSBS-TF. The CSBS-TF is a five-point response scale teacher report on student’s prosocial behavior. The Social Emotional Assets and Resilience Scales-C SEARS-C was used to measure children’s general assessment of his or her own socio-emotional knowledge, interpersonal relationships, resiliency, use of coping skills and problem solving, and empathy on a four-point response scale for seven out of 12 items.
The results from the teacher-reported prosocial behavior measure showed there was a significant improvement with students that received the bibliotherapy intervention compared to the control group. Both groups did not vary on baseline social-emotional assets, but an increase in student bystander intervention occurred with intervention participants. Students who received the intervention reported improvement in social-emotional assets. Student’s views of friendship quality and experience of bullying did not change significantly after receiving the intervention.
The authors discussed the importance of improving social-emotional outcomes and well-being for students and how the Bullying Intervention Project can support it. This study was designed to be short-term, use minimal resources and could be easily implemented through the regular classroom curriculum. Even though the results for social-emotional assets was marginally significant, the authors argue that the program can still be effective.
Strengths and Limitations
The article presents bullying to be a problem in United States schools and how bullying can affect students that are involved. The authors explain well to the reader the significance of the problem through statistics and the effects it has on students through examples such as lower academic performance in students involved with bullying. They wanted to conduct further research on bullying prevention because of the lack of knowledge of bystander interventions when a bullying incident is occurring, and they also wanted more knowledge on the study of student emotional health and resilience in relation to intervention programs. It is clearly stated that the study focused on the effectiveness of the Bullying Literature Project on bullying involvement. This study can be applied to the social work field, specifically school social workers can implement similar programs for bullying prevention.
Generalizability for the study is fairly low due to the size of the sample. There were only 168 participants. Since the study was conducted at two different school sites, including school districts, it increases generalizability since it was not the same location. The students participating in the study were only in third and fourth grades; it would be interesting to know the effects of the intervention on younger or older grade levels, a broader population of students. Since the study was a convenience sampling, the sample in not random. One of the limitations the authors pointed out is that the study randomly assigned classrooms instead of students. The researchers were unable to assign participants into the experimental or control groups randomly; this means participants do not have the same chance of being in the control group or the group receiving the intervention. This could be a threat to internal validity. Another threat could include testing since the subjects took a pre-test. It could affect how the subjects perform with the intervention and outcomes since they were already exposed to the pre-test.
The authors report VPBS has a Cronbach’s alpha ranging from 0.74 to 0.79 to 0.85 for victimization scale. The perpetration scale has a Cronbach’s alpha ranging from 0.74 to 0.92. Both scales have high internal consistency. Another study using VPBS reported the victimization scale to have an internal consistency reliability of 0.82 and 0.78 for perpetration (Radliff, Wang, Swearer, 2015). Both reliability measures are good. The authors state the SEARS-C has a good alpha coefficient of 0.85 and good test-retest reliability 0.67 to 0.81. The authors also reported the CSBS-TF to have high reliability with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.93. It was also stated it had a high validity, but no measurement was given. No article online was found to find a value for validity. Parents were given consent forms in order for their student to participate, although it may make the non-participating students feel excluded. The study was somewhat-diverse; most of the students were Hispanic/Latino (63.3%). The rest of the students were African American (9.6%), White (9.0%), Asian (3.0%), and other (4.2%).
The authors included a table that contained the means and standard deviations of the dependent variables at pre and post-intervention. The table contained the data for both the intervention and control group. In the text, the authors share the most significant results of what they hoped to explore. This included the outcomes that did not differ from the pre-test to the post-test and between the control and intervention group. The authors concluded that the study was effective in improving student prosocial behavior and social-emotional assets. Although they noted that the treatment effect was marginal, they believe the study was promising. The authors also considered the study’s limitations. The classrooms were randomly assigned, not the students, and thus were not able to ensure that the two groups were equivalent in variables at baseline. Another limitation was that the intervention group had a lower baseline than the control group in prosocial behaviors. The authors noted that this could have affected the positive outcome. They suggest future studies should randomly assigned students to the intervention and control groups. Some of the outcomes had no significant changes. These results could be due to the sample size, the number of lessons given in a short period as well as the short term follow up.
The authors promote the study as a good contribution to the field. They believe the project was an excellent example of what school psychologists or school social workers could do to improve the obdurate mental health and well-being of students. They add bibliotherapy can be easily implemented in the school because it does not require many resources and can be added to the already used curriculum. It can also be used within a multitiered intervention model at a school-wide level to promote positive behaviors.
Recommendation
Bibliotherapy is a simple and effective tool in order to reduce bullying and improve prosocial behaviors. The Bullying Literature Project: Using children’s literature to promote prosocial behavior and social-emotional outcomes among elementary school students demonstrated that bibliotherapy could be useful, especially when combined with explicit instruction, modeling, and role-playing. Although the study did show only marginally significant results, the intervention in the study was short term. In turn, we can intensify the program to provide our clients with more than five-sessions and extend the time frame in order to increase comprehension on bullying involvement. In order for this program to be effective, we need to train our staff to serve as interventionists in order to provide this curriculum to our clients. By having more trained staff, all students across the schools will be receiving the same intervention and we could have better outcomes. This would be a great way and economic way to address bullying involvement in our agency.
References
Radliff, K. M., Wang, C., Swearer S. M., (2015). Bullying and Peer Victimization: An Examination of Cognitive and Psychosocial Constructs. Educational Pyschology and Publications, 31, 1983-2005. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260515572476
Wang, C., Couch, L., Rodriguez, G. R., & Lee, C. (2015). The Bullying Literature Project: Using children’s literature to promote prosocial behavior and social-emotional outcomes among elementary school students. Contemporary School Psychology, 19(4), 320-329. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40688-015-0064-8
2019-2-13-1550034183