Bullying in School Children: Implementation of an Anti-bullying Intervention

Abstract

Background: The present research aims to develop and test a short-term anti-bullying intervention plan to reduce and control bullying behaviors in Government school students. Method: Taking insight from the literature, an initial intervention plan was developed. Later on, the finalized intervention plan was analyzed through its implementation. For that purpose, teachers from one public sector boys school provided a pre-assessment of fifth graders on the Aggression scale (Orpians & Frankowski, 2001). The cutoff point was used to generate the experimental and control group. It was hypothesized that the experimental group is likely to have a lower score on bullying behavior as compared to the control group after intervention. The final sample consisted of 40 students (n =20 experimental group; n = 20 control group) who were selected from a government sector school in Lahore, Pakistan.

Result: The experimental group received three intervention sessions. Post-assessment was done by the teachers of the respective students. Mixed measure ANOVA revealed that post-assessment of the experimental group on aggression scale significantly decreased than the control group.

Conclusion: This research has important implications in the educational setting for the awareness of teachers to control bullying behavior and maintain discipline in schools.

Keywords: Intervention, bullying behavior, aggression, government school, students