Little is known about factors that predict or affect differences in teachers' and schools' implementation of school-based intervention or prevention programs. The main purpose of the present project was to study this important issue in a sample of 37 schools and 89 teachers who provided data at 2 points in time, separated by 6 months. All of the teachers used, to varying degrees, the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, which has been shown to reduce substantially bully/victim problems in school. Two measures of implementation were constructed, the Classroom Intervention Measures (CIM) and Individual Contact (with bullied/bullying students and/or their parents; IC). Generally, substantial amounts of variance in implementation could be predicted in multilevel models. In the 2 within-school models, 5 teacher-level factors predicted 53% (CIM) and 34% (IC) of the variance, respectively. Two of the predictors, Perceived Staff Importance and Perceived Level of Bullying (in own class), were common to both models. At the school level, only CIM showed systematic between-school variance; in the between-school model, 3 school-level predictors accounted for 50% of the variance. The school climate measures Openness in (Staff) Communication and School Attention to Bullying Problems were both important predictors. In summary, the meaningful results from our study indicate that teachers were the key agents of change with regard to adoption and implementation of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program in school. Generally, we think our study has shed light on several factors of importance and has contributed to a better understanding of the process of program implementation. The empirical results have also This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.suggested ways in which implementation of the program can be improved, and several of these amendments have already been incorporated in the program and its dissemination (Olweus, in press).This research was conducted as part of Jan Helge Kallestad's fulfillment of the requirements for a doctoral degree of philosophy at the University of Bergen, Norway, under the supervision of Dan Olweus.The research reported in this article was supported by grants from the Norwegian Research Council and from Rådet for psykisk helse to Dan Olweus Jan Helge Kallestad, grants to Dan Olweus from the Ministry of Children and Family Affairs and the Norwegian Public Health Association (Nasjonalforeningen for folkehelsen), and, in earlier phases, grants to Dan Olweus from the Ministry of Education, which is gratefully acknowledged.
In a previous report five school climate instruments were explored (1983 and 1985), and four scales were regarded as meaningful climate measures according to suggested criteria. These scales were re-inspected in the present study (1997 and 1998) by analyses of internal consistency, estimates of reliability (unit and aggregated reliability), and stability over time. A modified version of a communication scale was regarded as a meaningful climate measure, whereas two other scales concerning teacher collaboration were assessed more critically. Teachers' orientation to change and work autonomy were not found to be aspects of school climate in the present study, mainly because these scales did not distinguish between schools as required by the applied climate definition. It is suggested, however, that these scales could indicate features of the broader professional teacher community represented by the sample. The results show, in general, that schools have become more similar during the analyzed time period, and, in particular, that teachers have become more oriented to change and more open in their collegial communication.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.