Deconstructing Prosocial Bullying Bystander Actions

The primary purpose of this project was to explore how individual (i.e., gender of the intervener) and contextual (i.e., type of bullying and whether the target is a friend) factors influence the use and type of prosocial bystander intervention. This necessitated the development and validation of a survey that deconstructs prosocial bystander interventions. To accomplish this, two studies were conducted. In Study 1, data were collected from 484 middle school students, and an exploratory factor analysis was performed on a new survey, the Forms of Bullying Bystander Actions (FBBA). Adjustments were made to the FBBA items, and data were collected from 252 middle and high school students in Study 2. Initial evidence suggests that the FBBA has a 4-factor structure (emotional intervention, direct intervention, reporting intervention, and ignore) and can measure bystander intervention in bullying in a scenario-based format. In relation to the primary aim of the study, whether the victim is known seems to play a major role in whether youth intervene in bullying. The use of different prosocial interventions varied in frequency depending on the type of bullying and whether the victim was a friend or not, but there were no gender differences in the overall frequency of prosocial interventions.