The Meaningful Roles Intervention: An Evolutionary Approach to Reducing Bullying and Increasing Prosocial Behavior

Bullying is a problem that affects adolescents worldwide. Efforts to prevent bullying have been moderately successful at best, or iatrogenic at worst. We offer an explanation for this limited success by employing an evolutionary‐psychological perspective to analyze antibullying interventions. We argue that bullying is a goal‐directed behavior that is sensitive to benefits as well as costs, and that interventions must address these benefits. This perspective led us to develop a novel antibullying intervention, Meaningful Roles, which offers bullies prosocial alternatives—meaningful roles and responsibilities implemented through a school jobs program and reinforced through peer‐to‐peer praise notes—that effectively meet the same status goals as bullying behavior. We describe this new intervention and how its theoretical evolutionary roots may be applicable to other intervention programs.     

A Quick Guide to Research Methods

In a hurry to understand that piece of research? Can't remember your undergraduate statistics lectures? Don't worry! Refer to this handy‐dandy quick reference for making sense of research design! Seriously. Too often when I am reading a research paper, terms are used which are either unfamiliar or ring only faint bells of recognition. I would like to have the capacity to remember everything I was taught, but apart from having a very bad memory, I am also beginning to suspect that it is actually better practice to check terms out even if I think that I remember what they mean.     

欧美国家以多元教育环境为基础的欺凌干预模型

欺凌是一种伤害或骚扰,包含了欺凌与被欺凌双方地位上的不平等,以及反复发生的行为。对国内外学者的研究进行整理分析后发现,青少年欺凌主要受到环境因素影响:同辈群体环境、校园环境以及家庭环境。对西方国家中较为成熟的青少年干预手段与模型进行梳理与分析,认为青少年欺凌干预不应单纯从个体入手,而应从宏观层面对青少年的成长环境进行综合监管与干预,并需要学校、家庭以及其他部门的协力合作。     

The Capacity to Intervene: Bullying,Social Pain,and Bystander Empathy

This article is an interdisciplinary exploration of social pain (rejection, exclusion, and humiliation) and its effect on bystanders. It dives deeply into social theory, only to surface and become expository around current neurological research on pain and mirror neurons. It seeks to broaden and advance scholarship around bullying dynamics in order to inform interventions that privilege bystander response. Significantly, the article grounds bullying in intersubjective dances of identity construction, launching it at the very edges of Goffman's social critique: the neuropsychological implications of failed impression management. Does witnessing social pain give rise to empathic responses? This central question leads to an explication of the functioning of mirror neurons as they relate to empathy. Understanding their working bridges to the theorizing of George Herbert Mead and raises the following sociological questions: (1) Do mirror neurons function on the level of Mead's “gestures”? (2) Do cultural realities—for example, social media and narcissism—impair a bystander's capacity to perceive pain/respond to it in others? Exploring the interface between cultural dynamics and neurological capacities paves the way for more effective responses to bullying. What can we expect of bystanders, and what it might take to prompt their intervention in socially aggressive situations?     

From River God to Research Grunt: Identity,Emotions, and the River Guide

Leisure identities and occupational identities are often assumed to be opposites. Drawing on two ethnographic studies, evidence is provided to illustrate how organizational contexts (or lack thereof) both interrupt and influence the social construction of identities. River running is but one activity that provides participants with opportunities to achieve a desired identity using situated emotion cues. In this study river guides are examined to highlight the negotiations they must employ as they attempt to establish a “river” identity in contexts that distinguish their work and leisure roles.     

Developing a Brief Suicide Prevention Intervention and Mobile Phone Application: A Qualitative Report

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among youth and has become a serious public health problem. There has been limited research on strategies to decrease the likelihood of reattempt in adolescents. As phase one of a treatment development study, clinicians, parents, and adolescents participated in qualitative interviews in order to gain new perspectives on developing a targeted intervention and a safety plan phone application for suicide prevention. Participants indicated that transition of care, specific treatment targets, and safety planning were important parts of treatment. In addition, all participants endorsed the use of a smartphone application for these purposes.     

Giving Victims of Bullying a Voice: A Qualitative Study of Post Bullying Reactions and Coping Strategies

Current research on how adolescents cope with bullying is primarily quantitative, examines youth in Grades 1 through 6, and neglects to specifically assess how victims of bullying cope with being bullied. The current qualitative study explored the coping strategies of 22 rural middle- and high-school youth victimized by bullying. Results indicated that youth report using an array of emotion focused coping strategies (an internal coping strategy that focuses on emotion regulation) and problem focused coping strategies (active behaviors that are aimed to decrease or eradicate the stressor). These coping strategies included help seeking, physical and verbal aggression, standing up for themselves, and prosocial bystander behavior. While the majority of coping strategies were similar between middle- and high-school participants, these groups reported utilizing verbal and physical aggression in different ways. Further, certain coping strategies, such as help seeking and lashing out with physical and verbal aggression, were utilized as both emotion- and problem-focused coping strategies. Implications are discussed.     

Gendered Economic,Social, and Cultural Challenges to HIV/AIDS Prevention and Intervention for Chinese Women

ABSTRACT

China is experiencing the most rapidly expanding HIV prevalence in the world, with the percentage of Chinese women living with HIV/AIDS also increasing significantly. Chinese women's risk of HIV infection is heavily influenced by patriarchal cultural beliefs, Confucian doctrines, and rapid social and economic changes in China. Chinese women generally have a low level of awareness of HIV/AIDS. With inherent inferior social status and economic disadvantage, their vulnerability to HIV infection is heightened by adverse impacts of massive rural-to-urban migration, explosion of the commercial sex industry, and prevalence of gender-based violence. In order to target HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs for Chinese women, their specific needs and gendered obstacles must be addressed and tackled. These include strategies that aim to fight against poverty, improve education, enhance HIV/AIDS awareness, facilitate new life-skills acquisition and behavior change, make available woman-centered services for testing and treatment of HIV, and eradicate gender-based discrimination and violence. There is also an urgent need to further develop various public health infrastructure in China, especially in remote and rural areas. The pool of gender experts in China should also be expanded to conduct a thorough gender analysis and design a national response to address the evolving HIV/AIDS epidemic in Chinese women.     

Prevention and Intervention: Using Resiliency-Based Multi-Setting Approaches and a Process-Orientation

How to best help children grow up in the face of multiple risks is addressed. Two intervention approaches are presented. The first is a resiliency-based intervention approach focused on increasing protection and decreasing risks faced by children. The use of multi-setting resiliency-based interventions and the use of collaboration across schools, families and communities are discussed. The second approach focuses on using a process orientation in interventions with at-risk children and their families as a means of working with different cultural, family, and individual issues that affect childrens development and families goals. Successes of intervention approaches are discussed.     

Appendix B: A Guide to Staff Self-Awareness

SUMMARY

Norway has been a leading nation when it comes to lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) rights. With the majority of LGB people enjoying a high quality of life, Norway has turned its attention to a minority of the LGB population experiencing a clustering of chronic and other life cycle-related problems. A number of needs assessments have been initiated in order to determine how to meet these challenges. The needs assessments underscore the importance of social networks for health and well-being. An important action is, therefore, to provide arenas for network building. Partnerships between public, private, and voluntary sectors would facilitate these arenas. Existing health, social, and labor market public services need to be sensitized to LGB issues and particular challenges.     

Using Online Databases to Guide Practice and Research

Abstract

As tools for human service practitioners and researchers, online databases to locate evaluation literature are becoming increasingly useful. This article uses a clinical problem (concern about the effectiveness of electroconvuisive shock therapy for depressed persons), and a researcher's problem (planning a study to evaluate group treatment for child abusers), to illustrate logic of online searches for evaluation literature. New techniques for synthesizing many studies may require sweeping changes in how abstracts are formulated for bibliographic databases. Study synthesis techniques suggest ways to code studies to describe treatment method, client type, outcome measures, indices of study quality, and indices of treatment effect size. By replacing abstracts with such coded information, evaluation studies could be synthesized continuously for their program and policy implications.     

A Social Ecology of Bias-Based Bullying of Sexual and Gender Minority Youth: Toward a Conceptualization of Conversion Bullying

Homophobic bullying is pervasive and deleterious, and a source of extensive health and mental health disparities affecting sexual and gender minority youth (SGMY). Investigations conducted over the past two decades across the social ecology of SGMY indicate individual (e.g., gender), microsystem (e.g., schools), and exosystem level (e.g., community norms) factors associated with homophobic bullying. Emerging evidence at the macrosystem level demonstrates the powerful influence of laws, policies, and ideologies on the population health of sexual minority adults. Based on social ecological theory and emerging evidence at the macrosystem level, we advance a conceptualization of the religious social ecology of homophobic bullying and articulate the construct of conversion bullying, a form of bias-based bullying that may be unique to SGMY. Conversion bullying is manifested in the invocation of religious rhetoric and rationalizations in repeated acts of peer aggression against SGMY that cause harm, based on the premise that same-sex attractions and behaviors are immoral or unnatural and with implicit or explicit communication that one should change one's sexuality to conform to heteronormative ideals. We describe implications of conversion bullying for social work practice, education, social policy, and research.     

Methods for Development Work and Research: A New Guide for Practitioners

From the outset, Britha Mikkelsen is careful to identify thelimitations of this rather detailed and extensive book (345pages). We are appropriately cautioned that it does not tryto do everything: it is a ‘guide’ ‘to a varietyof field study methods from which the reader may combine her/hisown mixture to suit the problem, time and resources available’(p. 23); ‘it is not a cookbook for the study of all developmentissues’ (p. 28) and it can be read selectively; and ‘itdoes not replace more elaborate texts, but will serve as a supplementto the basic methodology texts of sociology, anthropology...’(p. 46). Despite these protestations, it is a     

Bullying in a caring profession: reasons, results, and recommendations

The theories of Florence Nightingale and Jean Watson provide a framework for the caring work of nurses. Ironically, this caring profession struggles with bullying. Bullying has both physiological and psychological ramifications for the person being bullied and a negative impact on the organization and patient care. Strategies to address bullying include education, developing codes of acceptable conduct for the workplace, and a zero-tolerance policy. Mental health nurses have a vital role in helping nurses return to roles of caring.     

A Human Rights Approach to Stopping Homophobic Bullying in Schools

SAMMARY

This article examines the development of Winnipeg School Division's groundbreaking program to oppose homophobic bullying by making that struggle synonymous with the defense of human rights. The analysis draws on interviews with key players in the development of the program, committee minutes, newspaper accounts, workshop evaluations and court rulings. The Division's approach involves a range of actions, the mainstay of which is compulsory workshops for all employees, and is supported by various initiatives undertaken by stakeholders outside the Division. The article assesses the strategic merits of the Division's human rights approach to stopping homophobic bullying and argues that curriculum development is still required to achieve the full potential of that approach.