Bullying has been directly correlated to lower attendance rates, increased high school drop out rates, lower college enrollment rates, and in some horrific instances, suicide. Nearly every school has adopted a no tolerance bullying policy and instituted intervention programs for victims. Dr. Leslie Echols, assistant professor of psychology at Missouri State University, believes that victims need a more personal response and is working on a research project entitled “Are fast friends slow to bully?” that could serve as a preventative measure if instituted widely.
“We know in middle school, bullying and victimization are at their peak,” said Echols. “Kids are very prone to putting others into social categories because their social status is so important during that time. They are trying to figure out where they—and everyone else—belong.”
What are fast friends?
According to Echols, in typical social psychology experiments, the fast friends procedure pairs strangers together in a lab setting and gives each pair a series of questions to ask each other. The cards begin with innocuous questions and grow increasingly personal.
For the study that she conducted in a Los Angeles middle school, Echols and her team of researchers asked sixth graders who they knew best out of their class – then strategically paired them with people they didn’t know as well for the exercise. She gave them 15 minutes with a series of flashcards with specific questions (that had been adapted for age appropriateness), and she was excited by the observations.
“When we would call the partners to work together, we’d often hear, ‘I can’t believe I have to work with him.’ But by the end, many of the partners were laughing and talking about things that were not on the cards,” she said.
The researchers did post-evaluations with the children who participated and asked whether they felt more or less likely to bully or get picked on by their partner and if they felt like they knew their partner better. If the study is extended into the future, Echols like to increase the number of partners each child has the opportunity to work with and examine whether fast friends can increase student’s sense of belonging at school.
Why it works
“People who don’t know each other can build a friendship that extends beyond the laboratory because they’ve just disclosed all of this personal information and it has this really nice side effect of reducing stereotypes between racial and ethnic groups,” said Echols. “It’s a unique approach…and it’s giving the bullies an opportunity to see these victims as real people.”
For more information, contact Echols at (417) 836-4160.
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