Effectiveness and acceptability of a bully prevention program with and without video supplements

With a growing number of children affected by bullying and an increased public awareness of the issue in recent years, bullying prevention programs are becoming more widespread in school settings. Student involvement in multimedia and technology is also increasingly widespread. Therefore, the question is raised as to whether students would respond better to a bully prevention program with an audiovisual component than to a program with lessons taught solely from a manual presented by the classroom teacher. This study compared the effectiveness of presenting lessons from the Tough Kid Bully Blockers curriculum when using only the manual compared with when using the manual and an audiovisual component. A pretest-posttest design involving two groups was used to assess content knowledge acquisition by third-grade students. While assessing the effectiveness of the program, the study also addressed whether there were differences between the manual-only and manual+video groups in student and teacher acceptability ratings of the program. Acceptability was assessed by checklist using the Children's Intervention Rating Profile for the students and the Behavior Intervention Rating System for the teachers. A final element of the study focused on whether there were differences in treatment integrity between the manual-only and manual+video groups using checklists and observations. No differences were found between the manual-only and manual+video groups, although both groups showed significant gains from pretest to posttest in content knowledge acquisition. In addition, no differences were found between groups in overall acceptability ratings. Implications for future research and practice are included.