Translating an In-Person Brief, Bystander Bullying Intervention (STAC) to a Technology-Based - Phase II

While studies support the efficacy of comprehensive, school-wide interventions in reducing bullying, these
types of programs can require significant time and financial resources for implementation, resulting in barriers
to providing school-based bullying prevention, especially in low-income and rural communities. Additionally,
although training bystanders to act as “defenders” on behalf of targets of bullying is an important intervention
component, few programs include this as part of their comprehensive strategy. Brief programs that focus on
bystander training and require fewer resources are needed to reduce bullying and its negative consequences.
The PI (Dr. Midgett) developed STAC, a brief, stand-alone bullying bystander intervention for middle school
students, to reduce bullying and mental health risks for bystanders. Brief, in-person programs, however, still
pose implementation barrier such as training school personnel, providing external support, and not allowing for
large groups of students to be trained at the same time. For this project, we propose to develop a technology-
based STAC intervention (STAC-T) that will allow students to customize their experience by selecting avatars
and bullying scenarios based on our previous studies conducted in a range of middle schools, including those
in low-income and rural communities. We will also incorporate an assessment and personalized feedback
component to promote behavior change. The innovative, user-centered design proposed will be inherently
sensitive to cultural needs of students and identify personally-appropriate strategies. The specific aims of this
application include building the program leveraging our prior work and expertise of an external advisory board,
usability and effectiveness testing with middle school students and stakeholders to evaluate feasibility, and
testing the efficacy of the program with a randomized controlled trial. The technology-based platform will
increase the overall reach, impact, and sustainability of the STAC intervention for bullying prevention. It will
substantially reduce cost to increase reach and its interactivity and algorithms can tailor program content to
adapt it further for students attending low-income and rural schools. Thus, this low-cost, easy to disseminate
technology-based bullying bystander intervention has the potential to have a substantial impact on the problem
of bullying and the negative associated consequences for both students who are targets and bystanders in
middle school when the problem of bullying peaks. There is a large market for the STAC-T intervention with
approximately 100,000 public and private schools with middle-school grades in the United States. Globally, the
online education market is growing at 10% a year and the digital health market exceeds $220 billion annually.Project Narrative
School interventions to reduce bullying can be effective but also require substantial time and resources.
Online technologies have the potential to deliver effective bullying interventions to a large number of middle
school students for less cost. The feasibility of delivering the effective STAC bullying intervention through a
mobile web app will be tested using focus groups with middle school students and development and usability
testing and the efficacy of the program will be tested using a randomized controlled trial.