NCT04681209

Increasing Children's Defending Behaviors: Using Deviance Regulation

Completed NA Last updated 23 December 2020

What this trial tests

NA trial testing DRT Condition in Bullying of Child in 1,564 participants. Completed in 30 July 2020.

Timeline

1 September 2017

Primary endpoint
30 May 2019

30 July 2020

Quick facts

Lead sponsor	Auburn University
Phase	NA
Status	Completed
Study type	INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation	randomized
Design	parallel
Masking	double
Primary purpose	basic science
Enrollment	1,564
Start date	1 September 2017
Primary completion	30 May 2019
Estimated completion	30 July 2020
Sites	1 location across United States

Drugs / interventions tested

• DRT Condition
• Empathy Condition

Conditions studied

• Bullying of Child — all drugs for Bullying of Child →

Sponsor

Auburn University

Who can join

Eligibility, any sex, with Bullying of Child. Patients with the condition only — healthy volunteers not accepted.

Sponsor's own description

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) has identified bullying as a significant public health concern. The research tests a novel approach to increase children's defending of victims of bullying. Previous research has shown that the presence of defenders leads to decreases in bullying. Thus, promoting defending has become a critical component of anti-bullying interventions. However, how to best motivate defending has been relatively unstudied. Deviance Regulation Theory (DRT) provides a theoretical basis for motivating positive health and social behaviors. This theory proposes that individuals are motivated to behave in ways that differentiate them from others in a positive manner. Accordingly, individuals will be motivated to engage in a behavior if they believe the behavior occurs infrequently and will be viewed positively by others. As children report that few of their peers defend victims of bullying, the goal of this study is to increase defending by communicating to children that defenders possess traits valued by their peers (e.g., being popular, kind). Children in 4th-grade and 5th-grade classrooms received a DRT-based anti-bullying intervention or an anti-bullying intervention focused on increasing empathy for victims and strategies for defending peers. Data collection occurred three times during the school year: a) at baseline, two weeks prior to the intervention; b) 3 months post-intervention; and c) 6 months post-intervention. Findings showed that compared to the traditional anti-bullying intervention, the DRT-based intervention resulted in larger, more sustained gains in teacher-reported defending, but not peer-reported or self-reported defending. Contrary to expectations, gains in teacher-reported defending were greatest for children who viewed defending to be normative amongst their classmates. Increases in defending were also greatest among those children least likely to defend (i.e., those low in popularity and prosocial behavior, and those often bullied by peer). These findings have implications for the development of anti-bullying interventions and more broadly for understanding how to encourage important behavioral changes in childhood and adolescence. However, more research is needed to understand why increases were limited to only defending behaviors observable to teachers.

Publications & conference data

No peer-reviewed publications indexed yet for this trial. Completed trials usually publish results within 12-18 months.