Supporting Victimized Students Through Rearrangement of Classroom Seats: A Field Experiment

• In Event: 3-247 - The Social Peer Ecology in Classrooms: The Role of Students, Teachers and School-Based Interventions

Integrative Statement

Recent studies have shown that on average 1 in 10 children in elementary education are severely bullied (Scholte et al., 2016). For these children, school can be a threatening environment in which they are confronted regularly with their bullies. To benefit the development of victimized students, it is critical to explore the ways in which teachers can ensure a supportive and safe environment. One way can be through seating arrangements. Seating arrangements determine how close victims are towards their friends as well as bullies during the school day. When friends are physically close, they can protect a victimized friend from harassment or provide support during or after such an event. Conversely, physical closeness provides bullies with opportunities to harass and threaten their targets. In the current field experiment, we examined the consequences of physical closeness to a best friend and a bully for the frequency and severity of victimization as well as for victims’ feelings of comfort in the classroom.

We conducted secondary analyses using data from a large intervention study (van den Berg & Stoltz, 2018). All students who were not a target of the original intervention were randomly assigned to a seat. As a result, some victimized students sat close to their best friend, some close to their bully, some close to their best friend and a bully, and some did not sit close to either a friend or a bully. These seating arrangements were implemented immediately after Fall vacation (pretest; October 2015) and kept the same until the after the Christmas holidays (posttest; January 2016).

Students reported on the frequency and severity of victimization. At pretest, 262 students (46.9% boys, Mage = 10.32) from 47 classrooms in 24 schools indicated that they were victimized at least once a week. Moreover, they indicated whom their best friends were and by whom they were bullied. They also rated how comfortable they felt in their classroom.
Repeated measures ANOVAs revealed a time by group interaction on feelings of comfort, F (2,207) = 5.338, p = .005, eta2 = .069 (Figure 1). Post hoc analyses indicated that victims who are no longer bullied increase over time and feel most comfortable (Mpost= 3.377), victims who do not have a bully close also feel a little more comfortable over time (Mpost= 2.864), yet those who have a bully close do not change over time and feel least comfortable (Mpost= 2.401). Differences in frequency and severity of victimization were not explained by closeness of best friends or closeness of bullies.

Although the seating arrangements did not have an impact on the frequency and severity of victimization, our findings indicated that teachers can create a more comfortable environment for victims by placing them away from their bullies. Having a best friend close does not necessarily result in increased feelings of comfort. Although more steps need to be taken to replicate and extend the current findings, this study does provide new insights and concrete guidelines for teachers to support victimized students.

Authors

• Yvonne van den Berg, Radboud University, Nijmegen
  Presenting Author

• William M. Bukowski, Concordia University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Scott D Gest, University of Virginia
  Non-Presenting Author

• Toon Cillessen, Radboud University
  Non-Presenting Author