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Abstract
The present study sought to examine the efficacy of an abbreviated version of the Bully Busters program (Newman, Horne, Bartolomucci, 2000). The Bully Busters program is a psychoeducationally-based intervention that was designed to aid middle school teachers in the development of knowledge and use of bullying intervention skills, teacher self-efficacy, and subsequently reduce students exposure to classroom bullying behaviors. The program was implemented at a suburban public middle school in the southeastern United States as part of a school administration initiated year-long bullying reduction campaign. The teacher-participants attended a series of seven small group sessions facilitated by masters and doctoral students familiar with the Bully Busters program. The teacher-participants then presented the Bully Buster content and in-class activities to the student-participants during a weekly 20 minute class period devoted to the bully reduction campaign. Teacher-participants (N=69) were sixth-, seventh-, and eight-grade middles school teachers; Student-participants (N=488) were sixth-, seventh-, and eight-grade students. The effectiveness of the abbreviated bully reduction program was assessed by comparing the pre- and post-test measurements from the following instruments: the Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES)(Tschaannen-Moan & Hoy, 2001), and several scales from the Multisite Violence Prevention Project (MVPP) survey (Dahlberg et al., 2005), including, the Teacher Expectation and Efficacy Scale (TEEM), the School Safety Problems - Teacher (SSP-T), the Teacher Classroom Climate (TCC), the Student Classroom Climate (SCC), and the Problem Behavior Frequency Scale (PBFS). A quasi-experimental pre-test/post-test design was utilized. Nine null hypotheses were tested by means of one-tailed t tests, to attempt to answer 3 research questions. Of the nine null hypotheses, 4 were rejected in favor of the abbreviated intervention (p<.05). These findings suggest that an abbreviated version of the Bully Busters program can have positive effect on teachers report of efficacy in intervening with bullying behaviors. Additionally, the program appears to increase students reports of aggressive behaviors in the classroom,