MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W217511803

Why Psychology Is Failing to Solve the Problem of Bullying

2013· article· en· W217511803 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Israel C. Kalman

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational journal on world peace · 2013
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicBullying, Victimization, and Aggression
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLaw enforcementComplaintGovernment (linguistics)PopulationBureaucracyPsychologyCriminologyPolitical scienceSituational ethicsLawPublic relationsSociologyPolitics
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Reducing bullying among students has become a major goal of schools in modern world, yet little progress is being made and bullying is said to be a growing problem. Several metanalyses of research on school anti-bullying programs have shown that these programs have little benefit and often make problem worse. The purpose of this article is to explain reason for unimpressive results of our anti-bullying efforts: we have been taking a legal/law enforcement approach to problem rather than a scientific/psychological approach.April 20, 2013 marked 14th anniversary of Columbine shooting, event that woke our nation to problem of bullying. Since then, almost all of our 50 states have passed school anti-bullying laws, holding schools responsible for getting rid of bullying. The US Dept. of Education has declared that school funding will be cut for schools that don't address every complaint of bullying. This development has been a great boon for government bureaucracy, for purveyors of anti-bullying programs, as well as for school mental health professionals, whose positions are often first to be cut when school funds are limited. In order to comply with laws, schools need these services more than ever.School administrators have been as eager as rest of population to have anti-bullying laws enacted. However, these laws have put schools in a bind. How can they comply with requirement to eliminate bullying when research has been showing consistently that most highly regarded anti-bullying programs are not particularly effective? In Dec. 2004 issue of School Psychology Review, a team of researchers led by Canadian School Psychologist David Smith published a study on whole-school anti-bullying programs (Smith, J., Schneider, B, Smith, P., Ananiadou, K., 2004). They had conducted a metanalysis of published research on whole-school antibullying programs to see how they were working. They discovered that 86 percent of published studies showed that anti-bully programs had no benefit or made problem even worse. Only 14 percent of published studies showed that program produced a minor reduction in bullying. Not one program produced a major reduction. Subsequent metanalyses by Vreeman and Carroll (2007), Merrell and Isava (2008), and Ttofi, Farrington and Baldry (2008) have had similar lackluster findings. Oddly, when these researchers find that most intensive programs resulted in a reduction of 20-23 percent, they consider it a great success. The bar for success in bullying prevention is apparently very low.The most highly revered and widely used bullying prevention program is Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (OBPP), often referred to as the gold standard. This is a highly time-and-energy-intensive program that requires everyone in school community to be involved in combating bullying. The most massive study ever conducted on OBPP (or any bullying prevention program) was completed in December, 2011, at a cost of $19 million dollars and paid for by Highmark Foundation in Pennsylvania. After two years of rigorous implementation, results were a mere 12 percent reduction in number of students who said they were bullied twice or more per month (Schroeder, et.al, 2012). The study did not even report on children who are bullied daily, population that should be focus of concern, for these are kids who are truly suffering. Assuming, though, a 12 percent across-the-board reduction in number of children who are bullied, what do we tell parents of 88 percent of children who were not helped by world's most highly revered program?Some researchers have hailed as successful programs that resulted in an increase in bullying because there was a somewhat higher increase in bullying in control schools. One such study was of Positive Behaviors and Interventions (PBIS), conducted by Johns Hopkins University, at expense of $13 million (Grens, K. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.505
Threshold uncertainty score0.991

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0100.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.028
GPT teacher head0.346
Teacher spread0.318 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations8
Published2013
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueInternational journal on world peaceSame topicBullying, Victimization, and AggressionFrench-language works237,207