Determinants of bystander behaviour during school bullying:The role of moral disengagement, personality, and friendship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
School bullying is a prevalent problem in Canadian schools and is associated with multiple negative outcomes. Students are often present during bullying incidents as natural observers, or bystanders, who may take on various participant roles that either aggravate or improve the plight of victims. The overarching objective of the current three-part study was to identify predictors of bystander behaviour during bullying situations in order to guide interventions aimed at recruiting children to defend their victimized peers. This goal was achieved by designing a three-wave longitudinal study that spanned 4 months and that sampled 130 Canadian early adolescents (68 boys, 62 girls; Mean age= 11.36 years) . Participants completed computerized questionnaires assessing self-reported moral disengagement, self- and peer-reported bullying-related behaviours, friendship using a sociometric nomination procedure, and personality operationalized as BIS-BAS sensitivity using a cognitive task. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling in MPlus. In the first study, the over-time interplay between moral disengagement and both defending and passive bystanding behaviours was investigated, resulting in an overall pattern that was consistent with Bandura’s (1999) socio-cognitive theory of moral agency. Findings also revealed important sex differences and methodological issues, particularly with regard to the use of peer-report versus self-report tools. Study 2 examined concurrent associations among moral disengagement, personality, and multiple peer-reported bystander behaviours, including defending, passive bystanding, and bully reinforcing. Study 2 provided partial support for the postulates of both Bandura’s (1999) theory and Gray and McNaughton’s (2000) reinforcement sensitivity theory by highlighting the moderating effect of the BIS and the BAS on the association between moral disengagement and bystander behaviours. Study 3 moved beyond the individual in order to investigate the contextual nature of morality and defending behaviour. As expected, the association between moral disengagement and defending became more positive as a function of the victimization level of one’s best friend. Taken as a whole, findings provide support for the role of personality, morality and friendship in influencing bystander behaviours during bullying situations. Several directions for future research are proposed in order to better inform youth-led interventions against school bullying.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".