Promoting positive social relationships and youth development in school contexts

The sabbatical period will allow us to further develop the line of research on bullying at school. A first planned project application aims to contribute to the research and the scarce theory formation on teacher interventions in bullying, by extending the participant role theory on bullying to teachers. This theory considers bullying at school as a group process in which not only perpetrators and victims are involved, but in which other pupils (the ‘bystanders’) can also reinforce or discourage bullying in various ways (Salmivalli et al., 1996). However, the theory focuses only on pupils, while at school teachers are also an essential part of the group and can influence bullying through their behaviour. The application aims to map the different roles that teachers can take in the group process of bullying, to investigate their effects on bullying behaviour and cognitions in pupils, and ultimately to lead to an extension of the participant role theory. The second planned application focuses on defensive behavior of students in bullying. In many school anti-bullying programs, defensive behavior is encouraged based on the theoretical assumption that it will reduce bullying. In addition, research shows that victims find a passive attitude of bystanders even more hurtful than the bullying itself (Jones et al., 2015). Furthermore, defending others in need can be considered an important aspect of citizenship. However, recent research on the consequences of defensive behavior for victims and defenders does not show unambiguously positive and sometimes even negative consequences (Salmivalli et al., 2021). With this application, we aim to gain more insight into the factors that contribute to the effectiveness of defensive behavior for victims and defenders by zooming in on different types of defensive behavior, examining their differential effects on bullying behavior and well-being, and investigating which mechanisms moderate these effects.