Project Title: The Impact of Sources of Strength, a Primary Prevention Youth Suicide Program, on Sexual Violence Perpetration among Colorado High School Students
Funding Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Time Frame: Fall 2016 – Fall 2020
Summary:
Despite the importance of the public health problem of sexual violence against youth, its prevention has a limited evidence base. Equally challenging, most school-based anti-violence programs have focused on individual types of aggression, typically physical aggression occurring within relationships (Leff, Power, Manz, Costigan, & Nabors, 2001). At present few programs systematically address broader social-ecological factors such as school-wide norms and youth-adult connectedness that research identifies as major drivers of SV (Basile, Espelage, Rivers, McMahon, & Simon, 2009).
To address this gap, this project proposes a large-scale RCT evaluation of Sources of Strength to evaluate for sexual violence perpetration outcomes. Sources of Strength is an evidence based program for youth suicide that trains student key leaders to strengthen social connectedness and healthy norms school-wide (Wyman et al., 2010) and is listed on the National Registry of Evidence Based Programs and Practices (NREPP). This project will expand the existing evidence base by evaluating Sources of Strength for sexual violence outcomes, which has never been done before. Twenty-four high schools will be recruited and stratified (rural or urban) and randomly assigned to one of two conditions: (a) immediate Sources of Strength intervention, (b) wait-list for Sources of Strength Implementation after 16 months. A representative sample of each school (grades 9-11, in total n = 7200) will be enrolled for repeated longitudinal assessment to assess SoS impact as well as moderators and mediators of its efficacy. The intervention will be rolled out between spring 2017 and spring 2020 with cohorts receiving the intervention for 16 months and completing a total of four assessments
Project Title: Project SOAR: (Student Ownership, Accountability, and Responsibility for school safety)
Funding Source: National Institute of Justice
Time Frame: Spring 2016- Spring 2021
Summary:
Project SOARS will develop, field-test, and evaluate a comprehensive, student-centered, and technology-based school safety framework for high schools designed to increase students’ resilience to victimization.
Project Title: Committee for Children Project
Funding Source: Committee for Children
Time Frame: Fall 2014-Spring 2017
Summary:
The Second Step program aims to equip children of all ages with social-emotional skills that will benefit them their whole lives. Such skills include the ability to make friends, manage emotions, and problem-solve. The purpose of this study is to analyze the effects of the Second Step program among children from kindergarten to 5th grade in approximately 150 classrooms in Central Illinois. Funded by the Committee for Children, the study hopes to see improvements in children’s social-emotional development, as well as increases in academic success and decreases in bullying and victimization from those schools participating.
Activities range from brain-building games to working with friendly puppets. Second Step works at each grade level to enhance a number of skills for better learning and cooperation in schools. Teachers are specifically trained to effectively incorporate the Second Step program into their curriculum. There are also online resources available for teachers who are already a part of the program.
A variety of alternative Second Step programs that focus on different aspects of bullying and victimization are available and are presently being researched. However, this study examines the general effects of the original Second Step program.
Second Step has already experienced great success in schools across the country. We hope to see the same in the schools we are studying, who are now implementing the program throughout central Illinois.
Project Title: Preventing Youth Violence and Teen Dating Violence: Cluster Randomized Trial of a Gender Enhanced Middle School Violence Prevention Program
Funding Source: Centers for Disease Control
Time Frame: Fall 2013 to Spring 2017
Summary:
Bullying, sexual violence, and dating violence among adolescents are all major public health problems that occur at relatively high rates and demand attention to alleviate the considerable suffering they cause. These problems are associated with sexual harassment, gender-based harassment, and teen dating violence. (Basile et al., 2009; Espelage et al., 2012). Despite the costs of bullying, the impact of prevention programs in the US has been disappointing, especially in middle-schools.
Data suggests school-based bullying prevention programs increases effects by: 1) integrating evidence-based approaches that focus on different levels of influence, 2) focusing on gender-based harassment and violence and 3) addressing major drivers of bullying and gender-based harassment and violence.
This program proposes a large-scale RCT comparing the Second Step (CfC, 2008) program to a gender-enhanced Second Step program.
The gender-enhanced Second Step program addresses sexual harassment, gender-based harassment, and dating violence with school wide strategies to decrease these outcomes by highlighting the consequences of this behavior for perpetrators and by increasing faculty surveillance of unsupervised areas within the school.
In this study, thirty middle schools (grades 6 – 8) from four school districts in Illinois will be randomly assigned to either the Second Step only condition or the gender-enhanced Second Step condition. Two cohorts (6th and 7th graders) will complete baseline and follow-up surveys.
The primary aim for these studies are: 1) to evaluate the differential efficacy of the Second Step versus a gender-enhanced Second Step program, 2) to assess the extent to which gender-enhanced Second Step versus Second Step results in greater increases in positive bystander intervention and 3) to test the extent to which the intervention impacts peer-level attitudes towards bullying, sexual harassment, homophobic name-calling, and teen dating violence through its effect on peer social dynamics.
This study is highly innovative and could have substantial public health impact by targeting bullying, dating violence, and sexual harassment.
Project Title: Effects of a Middle School Social-Emotional Learning Program On Teen Dating Violence, Sexual Violence, and Substance Use In High School
Funding Source: National Institute of Justice
Time Frame: Fall 2013 to Spring 2017
Summary:
The purpose of this research project is to follow an existing middle school sample (part of a bullying and sexual violence prevention RCT using the Second Step program) into 5 high schools in Illinois, allowing the assessment of correspondence between trajectories in youth aggression and substance use among teens. While research has documented that substance use is linked to other types of aggressive behavior, such as bullying, aggression, and sexual harassment, there remains a dearth of knowledge regarding the extent to which substance use facilitates or amplifies patterns of teen dating aggression. The proposed study will leverage an existing RCT of The Second Step anti-bullying program, which was implemented when the sample of students was in middle school, by measuring related aggressive behaviors (e.g., sexual aggression) during the high school years. Approximately 1,200 students from 5 high schools in Illinois (from 15 of the original 36 middle schools; approximately one third Hispanic, one fourth African American) will complete measures across the three year study. Specific aims are to determine whether students who were part of the intervention group in a randomized control trial of Second Step in middle school demonstrated reductions in youth aggression, sexual violence, and substance use, and teen dating violence when in high school; to evaluate Second Step program effects on (2a) trajectories of bullying, victimization, homophobic teasing, sexual harassment, and teen dating violence in high school, (2b) the relations among growth in aggression and substance use, and (2c) whether substance use moderates links in the Bully-Sexual Violence Pathway; to examine mediators of Second Step effects on reductions in aggression, bullying perpetration, victimization, sexual violence, dating violence and substance use. Hypotheses will be tested using nested random coefficients analysis (RCA).
Project Title: Multi-site Evaluation of Second Step: Student Success Through Prevention (Second Step – SSTP) in Preventing Bullying and Sexual Violence
Funding Source: Centers for Disease Control
Time Frame: Fall 2010 to Spring 2013
Summary :
This study represents a large-scale, randomized longitudinal evaluation of Second Step: Student Success Through Prevention (Second Step – SSTP). Second Step – SSTP is a middle school intervention, which targets the shared underlying risk and protective factors for bullying, sexual harassment, and dating aggression. Bullying, sexual violence, and dating aggression are all major public health problems that occur at relatively high rates and demand attention to alleviate the suffering they cause. These problems undoubtedly share developmental correlates and evidence is emerging that these problems co-occur among early adolescents. Research has demonstrated that problem behaviors, including bullying, tend to be connected, suggesting the need for prevention programs that implement a coordinated set of interventions to target and reduce overlapping risk factors rather than programs that focus on specific problems or separate disorders. Despite common underlying risk factors, the development of bullying and sexual violence programs has remained largely separated—creating more burden and cost for schools. Because this program is unique in its emphasis on the role of peer group norms, attitudes, and behavior in the initiation and maintenance of bullying and other forms of violence, this investigation involves a direct test via social network analysis. The study involves thirty-five schools drawn from four school districts in Illinois and one large district in Wichita, Kansas. Each school was randomly assigned to Second Step – SSTP or a control condition. The Second Step – SSTP program is modeled after the risk/protective factors model and social-cognitive theories of aggression. Its lessons focus on the outcomes of bullying, relational aggression, sexual harassment, dating relationships, and substance use. Certain risk factors targeted include inappropriate classroom behavior, favorable attitudes toward aggression, substance abuse, deviant peer affiliation, peer rejection, and impulsiveness. Targeted protective factors include empathy, problem-solving skills, school connectedness, assertiveness and adoption of conventional norms. A series of film-based education, called the P3R: Stories of Us- Bullying program, will be used in the control schools. We are following one group at each school through their three years of middle school.
Project Title: Bullying, Sexual, and Dating Violence Trajectories From Early to Late Adolescence
Funding Source: National Institute of Justice
Time Frame: Spring 2012 to Fall 2014
Summary:
This project will extend an ongoing comprehensive examination of the association among bullying experiences, sexual and dating violence during early- to- late adolescence. Approximately 1,200 students who were part of the University of Illinois Study of Bullying and Sexual Violence Study funded by the Centers for Disease Control will be further assessed by completing surveys as they progress into high school, along with additional questions on dating violence attitudes and behaviors.
This project examines risk and protective factors at the individual, familial, peer and community level, which additively and synergistically increment/decrease risk for sexual and teen dating violence based on bullying experiences in early adolescence during a time when these behaviors are being laid down and elaborated. This dataset includes over 32 scales of risk and protective factors that have been identified as important in predicting bullying, sexual violence, and dating violence, including child maltreatment, attitudes toward aggression, witnessing domestic violence, and masculinity attitudes. This study will also include an examination of these factors and outcomes across the transition from middle to high school. At a very concrete level, this study will provide school-based rape prevention educators in the US information about how to supplement and enhance their current practices. Ultimately, these findings will also identify early precursors to late adolescent sexual violence and dating violence. This project represents a unique opportunity to simultaneously evaluate bullying, sexual violence, and dating violence perpetration with ecologically-driven set of variables across early through late adolescence that are not available in any other U.S. studies.
Project Title: Groupscope: Instrumenting Research on Interaction Networks in Complex Social Contexts (Playground Observation Study)
Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Time Frame: Fall 2009 to Spring 2015
Summary :
In this study, participants will be recruited from one local elementary school in early Fall 2011. There are two parts to the research; a questionnaire-based study filled out by children and observations of children on the playground. In the study of children, bullying and group aggression are recognized as important and problematic phenomena that have serious effects on children’s educational experience. A majority of the attention has been paid to the role of peer effects in encouraging bullying and aggression. The majority of the developmental and sociological work on peer effects has relied on assessing children’s social context through surveys in which kids are nominated as taking on certain roles in aggressive acts, such as bully, victim, bystander, reinforcer etc. Consequently, there exists a significant need for assessment tools that capture kids in their natural environments, such as playgrounds, to assess how they affect the initiation and continuation of aggressive acts and how victims or targets of aggression react in ways that could exacerbate the aggression. Thus, there is a need to develop observational techniques that do not rely on human observers, that can collect different types of observational data at a time (e.g., audio, video), and that can collect data in a format that is accessible to be analyzed without hundreds of hours of transcription and coding. Our study involves faculty and graduate students from sociology, engineering, computer science, and educational psychology. Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) is NSF’s bold five-year initiative to create revolutionary science and engineering research outcomes made possible by innovations and advances in computational thinking. Computational thinking is defined comprehensively to encompass computational concepts, methods, models, algorithms, and tools. Applied in challenging science and engineering research and education contexts, computational thinking promises a profound impact on the Nation’s ability to generate and apply new knowledge. Collectively, CDI research outcomes are expected to produce paradigm shifts in our understanding of a wide range of science and engineering phenomena and socio-technical innovations that create new wealth and enhance the national quality of life.
Project Title: Peer Group Bully Participant Roles: Implications for Collaborative Computer Group-work
Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Time Frame: Fall 2010 to Spring 2011
Summary:
Bullying and victimization among young students can interfere with students’ ability to interact effectively in group activities. As teachers move more to computer-based instruction, it is important to understand how relations among students within the classroom influence computer-based group work. Funded by the National Science Foundation, this pilot study was the first in the US to examine how students within the classroom (bully, victim, bystander, caring) interact with one another when presented with a collaborative group computer-based task. This pilot study will help us develop computer tools that teachers can use to promote collaborative relations among their students.
Project Title: Overlap Between Bullying & Sexual Violence Among Middle School Students: Do They Share Risk & Protective Factors?
Funding Source: Centers for Disease Control
Time Frame: Fall 2007 to Spring 2010
Summary:
This study represented the first systematic study to examine the connection between bullying perpetration and sexual violence perpetration. The study was performed on a sample of middle school students. A common assumption held by many is that when bullying prevention programs with some minor discussion of sexual violence are implemented in schools, addressing risk and protective factors associated with bullying perpetration might reduce sexual violence perpetration over time. This assumption is based on the idea that bullying perpetration and sexual violence perpetration can be explained by similar protective factors. This study was the most comprehensive to date on whether risk factors (e.g. anger, family violence composer) and protective factors (e.g. empathy, school connectedness) equally explain these two behaviors. Our results suggest that certain factors, like anger, family violence, sibling aggression, delinquent behavior, and to a lesser extent alcohol and drug use are shared risk factors of both phenomenon. However, it appears that these variables do a better job of predicting bullying then they do predicting sexual violence perpetration. Pornography consumption and dismissive attitudes toward sexual harassment are two of the unique predictors of sexual violence perpetration we found in this study. This fact that these predictors are unique to sexual violence suggests that continuing to implement bullying prevention grams that do not address sexual harassment will not be effective in stopping sexual harassment perpetration. Lastly, our study shows that bullying prevention programs need to add discussion around sexual orientation and homophobia.