Increasing Children's Defending Behaviors: Using Deviance Regulation

Plain-language summary

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) has identified bullying as a significant public health concern. The research tests a novel approach to increase children's defending of victims of bullying. Previous research has shown that the presence of defenders leads to decreases in bullying. Thus, promoting defending has become a critical component of anti-bullying interventions. However, how to best motivate defending has been relatively unstudied. Deviance Regulation Theory (DRT) provides a theoretical basis for motivating positive health and social behaviors. This theory proposes that individuals are motivated to behave in ways that differentiate them from others in a positive manner. Accordingly, individuals will be motivated to engage in a behavior if they believe the behavior occurs infrequently and will be viewed positively by others. As children report that few of their peers defend victims of bullying, the goal of this study is to increase defending by communicating to children that defenders possess traits valued by their peers (e.g., being popular, kind). Children in 4th-grade and 5th-grade classrooms received a DRT-based anti-bullying intervention or an anti-bullying intervention focused on increasing empathy for victims and strategies for defending peers. Data collection occurred three times during the school year: a) at baseline, two weeks prior to the intervention; b) 3 months post-intervention; and c) 6 months post-intervention. Findings showed that compared to the traditional anti-bullying intervention, the DRT-based intervention resulted in larger, more sustained gains in teacher-reported defending, but not peer-reported or self-reported defending. Contrary to expectations, gains in teacher-reported defending were greatest for children who viewed defending to be normative amongst their classmates. Increases in defending were also greatest among those children least likely to defend (i.e., those low in popularity and prosocial behavior, and those often bullied by peer). These findings have implications for the development of anti-bullying interventions and more broadly for understanding how to encourage important behavioral changes in childhood and adolescence. However, more research is needed to understand why increases were limited to only defending behaviors observable to teachers.

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