Bullying and cyberbullying in Belgian primary schools: The evaluation of an anti-bullying program

Olivier, Elizabeth Bebiroglu Abiven, Neda [UCL] Galand, Benoît [UCL]

Background. Bullying and cyberbullying are increasingly being recognized as important problems affecting children’s well-being and social functioning (Kowalski et al., 2014). As a consequence, multiple school-wide intervention programs have been developed to reduce bullying in schools (for review, Farrington & Ttofi, 2007). Purpose. Despite the existence of numerous anti-bullying trainings and programs in the French speaking part of Belgium, none has yet been identified as evidence-based. The Ministry of Education has thus funded the evaluation of an existing anti-bullying program. Our goal was to evaluate the effectiveness of this program. Program description. This anti-bullying program, developed by the University of Mons, has three main components: the regulation of the school playground by creating different zones, peer mediation, and rule-enforcement committee, which involves parents, teachers, and/or school directors. The program aims at reducing bullying and victimization by conflict management and violence prevention. Sample. We obtained data from 2,353 primary school children (47.8% female, mean age = 10.16 years, SD = 1.07). Twenty-two schools from a geographically representative sample were assigned in either the intervention or the control group. All children filled an online questionnaire in their school’s computer lab. Design and methods. We used a pre-test/post-test design. The pre-test data were collected in December 2015. The intervention took place during the second half of the school year. We collected data on bullying, cyberbullying, victimization, cybervictimization, perceived violence, peer rejection, and negative affect. The first post-test was executed at the end of the same school year, in June 2016. The second post-test data will be collected in December 2016. Results. A 2 (Time) X 2 (Group) multivariate analysis of variance yielded a main effect of Time, (F (1, 2563) = 17.80, p <.001 and Group, F (1, 2563) = 3.00, p <.01. The Group X Time interaction was not significant. At Time 2, regardless of their groups, students reported significantly lower rates of bullying and victimization but higher rates of perceived violence and peer rejection. Students in the intervention group reported perceiving violence at significantly lower rates than their peers in the control group at both times, F (1, 2563) = 16.08, p <.001. Conclusion. Our findings so far suggest this anti-bullying program may not be effective in reducing bullying or cyberbullying in schools. In fact, some schools in the control group also actively tried to reduce bullying through more informal practices such as inviting experts to discuss how to prevent bullying at school. Although further analyses are needed, our results show this anti-bullying program may not be more effective than some of these practices. We will present the results from the second post-test and discuss research and policy implications.