Outcomes from a School-Randomized Controlled Trial of Steps to Respect®: A Bullying Prevention Program

Background & Purpose: Bullying is recognized as one of the most significant public health concerns facing children in the United States today and may be the most prevalent type of school violence.  Yet there are few rigorously evaluated bullying prevention programs in the United States.  Steps to RespectÒ: A Bullying Prevention Program (STR) is a school-based prevention program that is aligned with the social-ecological model of bullying, which views youth behavior as shaped by multiple factors within nested contextual systems (Committee for Children, 2011). Steps to Respect is a school-based bullying prevention program with three main goals: (1) reducing bullying and victimization; (2) increasing positive bystander behaviors and prosocial beliefs related to bullying; and (3) increasing social-emotional skills.  This study reports the outcomes of a randomized controlled trial of Steps to RespectÒ: A Bullying Prevention Program.

Method: Participants for this trial were drawn from 33 schools in the State of California. Twenty-five percent of the schools were from rural areas, 10% were from small towns, 50% were from suburban areas, and 15% were located in midsized cities. Schools had a mean of 40% of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch (SD = 29%, range = 0 to 99%). The mean number of students per school was 479 (SD = 177, range = 77 to 749 students) and the mean number of teachers per school was 24. Schools were matched on school demographic characteristics and assigned randomly to intervention or waitlisted control conditions. Outcome measures were obtained from (a) all school staff, (b) a randomly selected subset of 3rd-, 4th-, and 5th-grade teachers in each school, and (c) all students in classrooms of selected teachers. Analyses consisted of mixed-model analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), implemented as a hierarchical linear model for continuous outcomes or as a hierarchical generalized linear model for binary, count, and ordered categorical outcomes.

Results: Multilevel analyses indicated significant (p < .05) positive effects of the program on a range of outcomes including: improved student climate, lower levels of physical bullying perpetration, less school bullying-related problems and students more willing to intervene in bullying behaviors.

Conclusions & Implications: Results of this study support the program as an efficacious intervention for the prevention of bullying in schools and support the importance school psychologists, teachers, and other school staff to work together in a coordinated fashion, across multiple levels of the school environment, to addresses school bullying.