The Friendly Schools Friendly Families programme: Three-year bullying behaviour outcomes in primary school children

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Abstract

Purpose

This three-year group randomized controlled trial assessed whether a multi-age, multi-level bullying prevention and intervention with staff capacity building, can reduce bullying among primary school children.

Methods

This study comprised two intervention and one comparison conditions. Student self-report data were collected from 2552 Grades 4 and 6 students at baseline and three posttests.

Results

The high intervention was more effective than the moderate and low interventions, with significant positive effects for ‘being bullied’ in the Grades 4 and 6 cohorts, for ‘bullying others’ in the Grade 4 cohort and ‘telling if bullied’ in the Grade 6 cohort.

Conclusions

Comprehensive whole-school programmes that include capacity building and parental involvement appear to reduce bullying behaviour more than programmes without these components.

Highlights

► We conducted a three-year randomized controlled trial to reduce school bullying. ► We examine changes in primary school children's bullying behaviour. ► High intensity and capacity building interventions reduce bullying victimization. ► High intensity and capacity building interventions reduce bullying perpetration. ► Parent involvement also seems key to reducing bullying behaviours.

Introduction

Bullying is a malicious, intentional form of aggressive behaviour, perpetrated repeatedly by a more powerful (real or perceived) individual or group against someone who cannot easily defend themselves (Greene, 2006, Smith, 2004). There is growing evidence that those involved in bullying can be physically, psychologically, socially and academically harmed, and that this harm may persist throughout their lifespan (Forero et al., 1999, Glew et al., 2000, Olweus, 1993, Roberts, 2000).

Whilst some students develop the means to deal with bullying, others have greater difficulty (Juvonen et al., 2003, Rigby, 1997a). To support this latter group and to prevent future bullying, an increasing number of whole-school anti-bullying programmes have been developed and evaluated over the past two decades (Smith, Schneider, Smith, & Ananiadou, 2004). However, few evaluations use a controlled experimental design and random assignment to study condition. Moreover, positive findings are sporadic (Merrell et al., 2008, Smith et al., 2004, Smith et al., 2003, Vreeman and Carroll, 2007). Consequently, gaps remain in our collective understanding of the effectiveness of these programmes as a whole, and particularly the mechanisms by which their individual components contribute to positive change (Merrell et al., 2008, Smith et al., 2004, Smith et al., 2003). Nonetheless, the available evidence provides some support for the use of whole-school interventions to prevent or reduce the harm caused by systemic bullying (Vreeman & Carroll, 2007) and suggests these programmes are reasonably cost-effective (Smith et al., 2004).

Etiological theories have played a key role in identifying the salient proximal and distal determinants of children's bullying across settings (Kumpfer, 1997). Proximal etiological factors associated with bullying include the characteristics of those involved and behavioural determinants, such as non-aggressive and pro-victim attitudes, normative beliefs, attachment to school and friends, peer support, social competence, and perceived efficacy to deal with bullying. The more distal determinants that have been associated with bullying behaviour include school-wide organizational factors, school social climate, policy and practice, organization of the physical environment, and student, parent and school staff relationships and their responses to bullying (Booth & Samdal, 1997).

To date, anti-bullying intervention programmes have typically targeted proximal factors, mostly through classroom teaching, and to a lesser extent distal whole-school factors (Vreeman & Carroll, 2007). Whilst school-wide anti-bullying classroom teaching and learning is necessary to foster common understandings, positive attitudes and skills, it may be insufficient on its own to respond to the multi-level influences on student bullying (Smith et al., 2004, Vreeman and Carroll, 2007). To adequately develop and sustain positive behaviour change to a systemic problem, it is recommended the whole-school community (including students’ families) model, support and reinforce students’ newly developed positive behaviours, attitudes and understandings about bullying, and modify the environment to support these changes.

However, the effectiveness of whole-school interventions has often been limited by programme failures related to programme implementation and maintenance (Levenson Gingiss, 1992, McBride et al., 1995, Merrell et al., 2008, Salmivalli et al., 2005). These failures can include insufficient resources such as school funding, staff and time resources; a lack of support for training and administration support; and competing demands on teacher time and energy (Butler, 1993, Resnicow et al., 1993, St Leger, 1999). Capacity building can enhance a school's ability to successfully implement more complex multi-component programmes, by developing sustainable skills, organizational structures, resources and commitment to enhance and sustain positive outcomes (Hawe, Noort, King, & Jordens, 1997). Consequently, whilst it is important to develop and test programmes that effectively target the appropriate determinants of bullying, educators and other practitioners also need to consider building school capacity to increase the likelihood of these programmes being implemented successfully and to reduce the likelihood of a Type III error (Salmivalli et al., 2005).

The Friendly Schools Friendly Families (FSFF) conceptual framework shown in Fig. 1 draws on early formative research (Cross, Pintabona, Hall, Hamilton, & Erceg, 2004) as well as outcome and process data collected as part of the Friendly Schools (FS) project conducted between 2000 and 2002 (Cross et al., 2011, Cross et al., 2004). These data suggested that schools required more specific capacity building to successfully implement and sustain the complexities of a whole-school approach to bullying prevention and management. The findings also indicated that intervention at the family level required greater cooperation with the school to assist parents to help their children to deal with bullying. Despite the fact that parents are an essential component of effective school-based bullying intervention programmes, this partnership is often poorly addressed by schools (Georgiou, 2008, Rigby, 1994, Rigby, 1999, Ross, 1997).

In this paper we hypothesize that, following one and two years of the FSFF intervention, differences would be evident in the prevalence of bullying behaviour reported by the Grade 4 (8–9-year old) and Grade 6 (10–11-year old) cohorts in the three intervention groups, with higher levels of intervention being associated with less bullying behaviour. The main outcome measures were students’ reports of ‘being bullied’, ‘bullying others’ and ‘telling if they were bullied’.

Section snippets

Sample

The FSFF project was a prospective group randomized controlled trial conducted in Perth, Western Australia. This complex design followed three different age cohorts of students recruited from 20 randomly selected Government primary schools. At baseline, three age cohorts of students were eligible to participate in the study; those aged 6–7 years (Grade 2 cohort), 8–9 years (Grade 4 cohort) and 10–11 years (Grade 6 cohort). The latter two cohorts are the focus of this paper. Prior to

Results

Baseline data were collected from 2552 (98%) Grades 4 (n = 1295) and 6 (n = 1257) students. Ninety two percent (n = 2343) of these students responded at posttest 1 and 81% (n = 2070) at posttest 2. The Grade 4 cohort was followed to posttest 3 (Grade 6), where 741 (57%) responded. Relatively more of the low intervention students were lost-to-follow-up at posttest 2 and posttest 3 than in the other study conditions (see Table 4). Missing data were due to student absenteeism and movement to other

Discussion

Overall, the three-year results from the FSFF group randomized trial suggest the high intensity intervention (whole-school, capacity building support and active parent involvement) is somewhat more effective than the moderate intensity intervention which comprised whole-school and capacity building support only, and substantially more effective than the low intensity intervention (the standard school programme with no capacity support).

The effectiveness of the high intervention was evident

Conclusion

Notwithstanding these limitations, this research adds to the growing evidence for policy-makers and practitioners that carefully designed whole-school (universal) interventions appear to be able to reduce student bullying victimization and perpetration. It also suggests that interventions that target students in their social context, including their home and school, are more likely to produce positive change than classroom-only approaches. Few previous anti-bullying studies, as reported by

Acknowledgements

This paper reports on research conducted by the Western Australian Centre for Health Promotion Research at the Curtin University of Technology. The authors thank the following people for their valuable contribution to this project: Leanne Lester, Coosje Griffiths, Anne Valenti, Joanne Graham-Smith, Laura Thomas and Helen Monks. Thanks also to Greg Maguire for his editing of this paper. The participation of 20 study schools and three pilot schools, their staff, parents and students is gratefully

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