Bystander Program Effectiveness to Reduce Violence Acceptance: RCT in High Schools

Abstract

Bystander-based violence prevention interventions have shown efficacy to reduce dating violence and sexual violence acceptance at the individual level yet no large randomized controlled trial (RCT) has evaluated this effect at the high-school level and over time. This rigorous cluster-randomized controlled trial addresses this gap by evaluating intervention effectiveness at both school and individual levels. Kentucky high schools were randomized to intervention or control conditions. In intervention schools educators provided school-wide ‘Green Dot’ presentations and bystander training with student popular opinion leaders. Each spring from 2010 to 2014; 73,044 students completed anonymous surveys with no missing data on relevant outcomes. Dating violence and sexual violence acceptance were the primary outcomes for this analysis. At the school level, slopes from linear mixed models using averaged school-level dating violence acceptance (condition–time, p < 0.001) and sexual violence acceptance (condition–time interaction, p < 0.001) differed indicating a significant reduction in the violence acceptance in the intervention relative to control schools over time and specifically in years 3 and 4 when ‘Green Dot’ was fully implemented. Analyses based on student’s self-reported receipt of ‘Green Dot’ training by condition confirmed the school level finding of significant reductions in both dating violence and sexual violence acceptance in years 3 and 4 for both males and females. In this RCT we find evidence that the bystander-based violence prevention intervention ‘Green Dot’ works, as hypothesized and as implemented, to reduce acceptance of dating violence and sexual violence at the school and individual levels.

Efficacy of a bystander intervention for preventing dating violence in Brazilian adolescents: short-term evaluation

“…Third, it could be supposed that even having had an appropriate design and implementation, limitations in its evaluation might have existed, for example the sample size being too small to possess sufficient statistical power to identify changes which did occur, and an excessively short evaluation time for detecting results. This last hypothesis, related to the evaluation timing, finds support in evidence from the longitudinal analyses of a dating violence bystander intervention which showed more salient effects later (Coker et al, 2017;Coker et al, 2018), although the outcomes under consideration in these studies were distinct from the present one.…”

“…Including follow-up evaluations is elemental for assessing the medium-and long-term effects and to identify changing patterns in the outcomes over time, such as strengthening or weakening of changes and the moment at which a change occurs. This gains relevance upon considering that the outcomes could require more than two and a half months to manifest (Coker et al, 2017;Coker et al, 2018).…”

“…Evidence indicates the efficacy of bystander intervention to prevent dating violence via increasing the recognition of violence (Miller et al, 2012), the intention to help (Amar et al, 2015;Miller et al, 2012;Peterson et al, 2018), the perception of responsibility to help, the ability to offer help as bystanders (Amar et al, 2015), and helpful behaviors (Coker et al, 2011;Miller et al, 2012). Beyond this, the findings of these studies reveal a reduction in norms of acceptance of violence (Amar et al, 2015;Coker et al, 2011;Coker et al, 2018;Palm Reed et al, 2014;Peterson et al, 2018), interpersonal violence victimization and perpetration (Coker et al, 2015;Coker et al, 2016), sexual coercion, sexual harassment, stalking, and psychological dating violence victimization and perpetration (Coker et al, 2016). In addition to such effects at the individual level, changes at the community level are equally found, with reductions in the acceptance of dating and sexual violence in the school setting (Coker et al, 2018), dating violence victimization and perpetration, victimization and perpetration of sexual violence, sexual harassment, and stalking over the 5-year implementation of the preventive program in high schools (Coker et al, 2017).…”

“…Although theoretical models centered on spectator help have long been available and practical applications in various contexts have been developed (Fischer et al, 2011), interventions based on the bystander approach for preventing violence in affective-sexual relationships remain of very recent vintage (Amar et al, 2015;Borsky, Mcdonnell, Turner, & Rimal, 2018;Coker et al, 2011;Coker et al, 2016;Coker, Bush, Brancato, Clear, & Recktenwald, 2018;Jaime et al, 2018;Miller et al, 2012;Palm Reed at al., 2015;Peterson et al, 2018). A systematic review of the literature (Storer, Casey, & Herrenkohl, 2016) identified nine programs with this purpose, and of them, only three sought to prevent dating violence, while the others focused exclusively on sexual violence not associated with dating.…”

Rethinking the Bystander Effect in Violence Reduction Training Programs

“…For example, the gap between the delivery of intervention initiatives and the recording of incidents of sexual assaults allows for correlational rather than causal conclusions (Jouriles et al., ). At the same time, conditions of anonymity and confidentiality during data collection mean that it is often not possible to follow the same individuals through repeated data collection points (e.g., Coker, Bush, Brancato, Clear, & Recktenwald, ). This means that it is often not possible to see changes in individuals exposed to treatments, and only cohort effects are available for analysis (Coker et al., , ).…”