McKeown Jones and her colleagues developed and tested SPELL, a scientifically-driven anti-bullying intervention based on the Harry Potter novels. The main goal of this intervention was to foster children and adolescents’ willingness to intervene in response to bullying episodes. Participants were middle-school students in Italy, who engaged in four sessions designed to raise awareness about bullying, including its forms, roles of the different bullying actors, its consequences, and ways to address it. Results revealed that the intervention, when compared to a control condition, was successful in fostering intentions to counteract bullying, with greater empathy and lower moral disengagement being the psychological processes underlying this effect; evidence for self-efficacy was weaker. Their findings suggest that engaging with narratives from the Harry Potter series may help to empower children and adolescents to act against bullying.
Many anti-bullying programs include a high number of sessions targeting multiple actors (e.g., teachers, parents), while SPELL (Shielding Pupils from Early BuLLing), uses a rather short intervention (4 sessions) targeting children. Although wider programs have greater chances of obtaining broader effects, it is important to test the effectiveness of shorter interventions, which may be more easily adopted by schools (which often suffer of organisational and temporal constraints).
SPELL focuses on two main goals:
- Raising awareness: helping students understand what bullying is, who is involved, how it happens, its consequences, and how to stop it.
- Building key skills: targeting three key psychological processes involved in bullying: self-efficacy, that is the belief in one’s ability to stop bullying or help a victim; moral disengagement, that is the strategies we use to mentally “justify” immoral actions; empathy, that is the ability to resonate with others’ perspectives and emotions.
Our research shows that stories like Harry Potter can do more than entertain—they can help students better understand bullying and encourage them to take action when they see it happening. Of course, this is just one study in a specific context, but the findings are encouraging. They suggest that using popular stories in the classroom, while directly addressing key psychological processes, could be a creative way to build empathy and promote positive action among young people. (Shelley McKeown Jones)
The effectiveness of the intervention was tested within a sample of 343 children and adolescents from two middle schools in Italy. Compared to those who did not participate, those who completed SPELL reported:
- stronger intentions to intervene and stop bullying
- fewer moral disengagement strategies
- greater empathy toward victims
- a tendency to report higher self-efficacy
SPELL uses the power of literary fiction in an engaging set of activities that teachers and educators can implement to encourage awareness of middle-school students on the topic of bullying, by leveraging key psychological processes (empathy, reduction of moral disengagement, and self-efficacy). Interventions such as SPELL may be included in school curricula, and motivate students to read while also producing effects like those demonstrated in the study. In other words, popular fiction can serve multiple purposes: encouraging school motivation and achieving social educational goals, e.g. counteracting bullying or reducing prejudice.
(Image: Cristian Escobar via Unsplash)