UC Riverside

Previous research has suggested that moral disengagement is strongly associated with bullying. The current study evaluated the effectiveness of a five-week class-wide bullying intervention, The Bullying Literature Project - Moral Disengagement Version (BLP-MD), on moral disengagement and bullying among elementary school students. This intervention is developed to be incorporated into a general language arts curriculum and uses bibliotherapy (i.e., reading children’s books on topics related to bullying), writing, and role-playing activities to teach students social skills and promote moral reasoning and positive bystanding. A quasi-experimental design using mixed ANOVA was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the BLP-MD. A sample of 84 grade students from four classrooms and their teachers participated in this study. The results revealed significant time by treatment interactions for decreasing both victimization and moral disengagement in treatment classrooms compared to wait-list control classrooms. That is, the combination of the between-subjects factor (BLP-MD versus control) and within-subjects factor (time) influenced these dependent variables. The program also resulted in improved perception of peer friendships and was rated as having high social validity for both students and their teachers.