What makes anti bullying program effective ? A research protocol

Giving the serious short- and long-term consequences of school bullying on children's health, this phenomenon has retained attention from both researchers and school actors. To tackle it, several anti-bullying programs have been developed and evaluated across the world. Even if some of them have been considered effective, almost no research has studied the underlying mechanisms that lead to bullying reduction. In other words, we don’t know which factors decrease the rates of this kind of aggressive behavior. Among these mechanisms, empathy, anti-bullying attitudes and defender self-efficacy have been linked to bullying in many studies and used in anti-bullying programs. However, most of those studies use a cross-sectional design and give us no evidence if these factors predict bullying reduction. Moreover, most effective programs implicate the whole school staff to prevent bullying. Thus, we expect that norms towards bullying are modified by the intervention and then impact pupils’ behaviors. In this poster, we present our research protocol that will be used to test our theoretical model. Concretely, we’ll follow the implementation of KiVa in the French-speaking part of Belgium with a longitudinal design. For each student, we’ll measure bullying, victimization and defending behavior, the level of empathy, attitudes towards bullying, self-efficacy to defend, and the perception of the norms created by peers and the teacher. Implications for prevention programs will be discussed