1090
Paper presentation
Meaningful Roles: Teaching popular bullies acceptable ways to achieve status (Symposium: AntiBullying Interventions 2.0: Tailored interventions to minimize bullying #2)
Julia Fischmann, Gerine Lodder, Jan Kornelis Dijkstra & René Veenstra
An important shortcoming of existing anti-bullying programs is their inability to prevent bullying by
highly popular bullies. This is striking, especially considering the close association between bullying
and popularity. Existing interventions’ limited success may be due to their focus on raising the costs
of bullying without considering its benefits. The aim of this project is to address this shortcoming by
implementing and testing the 'Meaningful Roles' intervention (Ellis et al, 2015). In accordance with an
evolutionary approach, bullying is seen as goal-directed behavior to achieve status. ‘Meaningful
Roles’ aims to teach bullies socially acceptable ways to gain and maintain their status. It constitutes a
school-wide ‘jobs-program’ where pupils can contribute to and shape their school in an active way by
taking on so-called ‘Meaningful Roles’ (e.g. ‘class greeter’ or ‘news reporter’). Although all students
take part in the program and can benefit from it, especially bullies are strategically placed in positions
where they can satisfy their need for status. The expectation that ‘Meaningful Roles’ is effective in
reducing bullying and victimization is tentatively supported by a study in the United States (Ellis et al,
2015). This effect is hypothesized to be stronger for high-status individuals and those who are
oriented toward status goals. Additionally, we expect secondary effects of the intervention with
respect to peer relations, internalizing and externalizing problem behavior, and school atmosphere
and motivation. We are preparing to test the intervention systematically and on a large scale in
elementary schools (pupils aged 8-12) in the Netherlands. We plan to do this by means of a
randomized control trial in a sample of 28 schools (N≈2,800), with follow-up assessments in 6-month
intervals up to 18 months after the intervention. If successful, ‘Meaningful Roles’ will be the first
intervention that is effective with highly popular bullies.