The Effectiveness of School-Based Bullying Prevention Programs: A Systematic Review

Background/Purpose: To combat the negative developmental outcomes associated with bullying, a variety of bullying prevention programs have been created for schools and school-related settings. In an assessment of these programs, Farrington and Ttofi (2009) conducted a meta-analysis of controlled trials of 44 bullying interventions delivered between 1983 and 2009. The purpose of the proposed presentation is to review controlled trials of bullying interventions conducted since Farrington and Ttofi’s report. This systematic review identified 32 studies that examined 24 bullying interventions published from June 2009 through April 2013. The core features of and findings from these studies will be described.

Method: Following A Measurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews (AMSTAR), our review was registered with PROSPERO, an international registry of systematic reviews in health care and social welfare. Using identical key words and pre-established inclusion and exclusion criteria, 2 researchers independently identified potential articles, book chapters, and dissertations by searching 12 databases. Grey literature was reviewed by requesting unpublished reports from 15 bullying scholars across the globe and by searching the first 250 results of a Google Scholar search using terms identical to those used in searching other databases.

Results: Of the 32 identified articles, 17 assessed both bullying and victimization, 10 assessed victimization only, and 5 assessed bullying only. Of 22 studies examining bullying perpetration, 11 studies (50%) observed significant effects. Of the 27 studies examining bullying victimization, 18 (67%) reported significant effects. No common features were observed across effective programs. However, consistent with previous findings, interventions implemented outside of the United States were more likely to be identified as effective. For example, of the 18 studies that reported significant effects on bullying victimization, 13 studies (72%) were conducted outside of the United States (e.g., Europe, Australia, Canada). Conversely, 6 of 8 studies with non-significant findings (75%) were conducted in the United States. A similar pattern was observed for bullying perpetration, indicating the stronger infrastructures in non-U.S. countries could be related to the success of bullying programs. Further, findings varied by race/ethnicity and, in general, significant effects were more likely to be observed in studies with racially/ethnically homogenous samples.

Conclusions/Implications: The findings indicate U.S. bullying prevention programs are not producing effects comparable with those observed in Europe and elsewhere. The data suggest it might be more challenging to design and deliver effective bullying prevention programs in the United States. U.S. schools face greater social and economic complexities, including greater income disparities and racial/ethnic heterogeneity. Furthermore, and from a research methods perspective, the measurement of bullying across most studies has unacceptably poor construct validity. For example, research in this area often uses one-item measures and measures that do not define bullying. Given the developmental outcomes associated with bully victimization, the paucity of significant effects in U.S. programs, and the poor state of measurement in the field, a major effort is needed to design and develop bullying-prevention interventions for the United States.