Youth Cognition Surrounding Bullying of Peers With Disabilities: Inclusion,Intervention,and the Role of the Group

Bias-Based Bullying

Involvement with bullying is also associated with long-term negative consequences such as increased difficulty in forming long-term relationships, assimilating within the workplace, and being economically self-sufficient (Lereya, Copeland, Costello, & Wolke, 2015; Wolke & Lereya, 2015). However, research documents that children and adolescents who experience bias-based bullying, which is bullying that is focused on one’s group membership or identity, for instance, bullying because of one’s disability, are at much greater risk for negative outcomes than those who experience bullying that is not based on group membership (Russell, Sinclair, Poteat, & Koenig, 2012). There are different patterns depending on the type of bias-based bullying experienced, and there is evidence that youth who experience more than one type of bias-based bullying experience more negative outcomes than those who report one type of bias-based bullying or general bullying that is not based on bias (Mulvey, Hoffman, Gönültaş, Hope, & Cooper, in press). Research indicates that bullying based on sexual orientation is associated with lower rates of school belonging and higher rates of suicidality (Poteat, Mereish, DiGiovanni, & Koenig, 2011). In addition, adolescents who are subject to race-based bullying and who report low rates of teacher involvement are more likely to begin smoking than those who are victimized but report high teacher involvement (Earnshaw et al., 2014). In terms of youth with disabilities, outcomes are particularly dire (Russell et al., 2012). Specifically, youth who report experiencing disability-related bullying have much higher odds of experiencing depression and struggling with issues related to substance use than those who do not report bullying based on disability (Russell et al., 2012). Moreover, those who report being bullied because of a disability, also report high rates of being threatened by a weapon, having their property damaged, and experiencing relationship violence (Russell et al., 2012). Most bullying takes place in and around schools, and students with disabilities are two to three times more likely to experience bullying than students without disabilities (Rose, Monda-Amaya, & Espelage, 2011). Thus, the aim of the current study was to examine attitudes, evaluations, and expected responses to bullying of youth with disabilities to better understand youth cognition surrounding this particularly pernicious form of bullying.

Bullying and Youth With Disabilities

Bullying of youth with disabilities is of particular concern as antibullying programs have marginal success within the United States (Evans, Fraser, & Cotter, 2014), and even less is understood about how to prevent bullying for students who have a disability (Rose et al., 2011). Another area of concern is for students as they transition from elementary school to middle school, as bullying behavior has been shown to increase during this time (Pellegrini, 2002; Rodkin, Ryan, Jamison, & Wilson, 2013). Thus, the focus of this study was to examine the attitudes, evaluations, and expectations of children in elementary and middle school regarding their inclusion of children with disabilities into their peer groups and their expected responses to observing bullying of children with disabilities.

Youth with disabilities are disproportionally targeted and affected by bullying behaviors (Farmer, Wike, Alexander, Rodkin, & Mehtaji, 2015). They are more likely to be bullied than their nondisabled peers (Rose et al., 2011; Schroeder, Cappadocia, Bebko, Pepler, & Weiss, 2014), and remain at an increased risk for victimization regardless of whether their disability is visible or not (Carter & Spencer, 2006). Students with disabilities often report lower peer acceptance, and fewer friends compared to their nondisabled peers (Bossaert, Colpin, Pijl, & Petry, 2013; Pijl, Frostad, & Flem, 2008). Moreover, students with disabilities who receive less social support from their peers are at increased risk of being a victimized (Humphrey & Symes, 2010). These adverse interactions often cause the students to have lower self-esteem (Taylor, Hume, & Welsh, 2010), and to experience increased rates of depression (Russell et al., 2012).

Children’s inclusion of peers with disabilities may, in part, be related to opportunities for interaction. Children want to include peers with disabilities, but are more likely to do so when the school creates opportunities for interaction such as by using inclusion practices for placement (Wendelborg & Kvello, 2010). Moreover, youth with more prior contact with peers with disabilities are more likely to be inclusive of youth with disabilities and to express greater sympathy when peers with disabilities are excluded (Gasser, Malti, & Buholzer, 2013). However, this same line of research also demonstrated that although children often judge exclusion of peers with disabilities to be wrong, there are contextual differences with children more likely to justify exclusion if inclusion may affect the group’s ability to function effectively (Gasser, Malti, & Buholzer, 2014). Finally, there have been recent calls for particular attention to the social context and social dynamics for youth with disabilities (Thomas et al., 2017).

While this research examining social cognition surrounding exclusion is helpful, there is more still to know. For instance, much of the research that has been conducted thus far has focused narrowly on one or two types of disabilities. As an example, research demonstrates preschoolers were more likely to include peers with a physical disability when that disability did not affect the group activity (such as a student in a wheel chair being included for a drawing activity but not for kickball; Diamond & Tu, 2009; Diamond & Hong, 2010). While other findings have extended this research by focusing on children up to age 12 and examining both intellectual and physical disabilities (Gasser et al., 2013; Gasser et al., 2014), there is need for additional research aimed at understanding social cognition surrounding bullying and exclusion of youth with disabilities. Thus, the current study examines evaluations of exclusion of peers with the following types of disabilities: physical, learning, social impairment, and mental health impairment. Furthermore, it may be important to capture multiple perspectives on youth cognition surrounding bullying and exclusion of youth with disabilities.

Theoretical and Conceptual Framework

The current research is framed upon the social reasoning developmental (SRD) perspective (Rutland, Killen, & Abrams, 2010), which argues that children may struggle to integrate information about moral principles with the desire to show loyalty to their group. This perspective draws on social domain theory, which documents that individuals reason about social events by considering the moral domain (issues of justice, rights, fairness and welfare), the societal domain (group functioning, conventions, traditions and customs), and the psychological domain (personal choice and autonomy; Smetana, Jambon, & Ball, 2014). As children get older they are able to take multiple perspectives into account, and are more likely to base their reasoning for inclusion/exclusion on contextual factors and individual characteristics as well as to recognize multiple dimensions or domains that are relevant to a particular decisions (Gasser et al., 2014; Richardson, Mulvey, & Killen, 2012). For example, Gasser et al. (2014) found that older children expected the inclusion of children with physical disabilities more frequently in social contexts than in athletic context as compared to their younger counterparts. Peer influences and group norms also affect one’s perceptions of how to treat others fairly (Elenbaas & Killen, 2016; Killen & Malti, 2015). For instance, youth who are involved in groups which hold negative norms may be more likely to engage in antisocial behaviors (Piehler & Dishion, 2007). Furthermore, when groups hold norms involving exclusion this does lead to more exclusive behavior in ethnic intergroup contexts (Hitti & Killen, 2015; Nesdale, 2011) Finally, with age, youth are more likely to prioritize group loyalty and group functioning (Horn, 2003).

Often, however, youth are not actively engaged in the bullying or even part of the group that is bullying. Rather, the majority of students who are involved in bullying incidents (approximately 80%) are not the bully or a victim, but a bystander (Oh & Hazler, 2009). As so much bullying occurs within a social setting, bystanders can play a powerful role in either discouraging or perpetuating bullying within schools. Bystanders who are inactive have the capability to reinforce the aggressive behaviors and increase the likelihood for future bullying (Farmer, Lane, Lee, Hamm, & Lambert, 2012). When children support the bullying (either overtly or not), the bullying behavior increases, but when they actively defend the victim, bullying decreases (Salmivalli, Voeten, & Poskiparta, 2011). Furthermore, when bystanders do intervene to support the victim, the bullying ceases as quickly as within 10 s (Nansel et al., 2001). Bystanders can also provide support for victims of bullying. For instance, prior research has shown that when victims had at least one bystander intervene they felt less anxious and depressed as compared to victims who did not have someone intervene (Salmivalli, 2010).

One important factor that determines if a bystander intervenes or not may be the norms of the potential bystander’s group or friends. Research has documented the powerful intersection between youth understanding of their group’s norms and their moral judgments and moral principles surrounding inter-individual treatment, including bullying (Rutland et al., 2010). As an example, while children and adolescents often recognize the harmful nature of social exclusion, they do at times prioritize group functioning or loyalty to the group over their understanding of the harm that exclusion inflicts (Killen & Rutland, 2011). This tension can prove challenging for youth when they are part of many different types of groups, including those organized around: gender (Malti, Killen, & Gasser, 2012; Mulvey & Killen, 2015), race and ethnicity (Hitti & Killen, 2015; Killen, Kelly, Richardson, Crystal, & Ruck, 2010), sexual orientation (Horn, 2007), mental health status (O’Driscoll, Heary, Hennessy, & McKeague, 2015), and disability status (Gasser et al., 2013; Gasser et al., 2014). Importantly, context matters and there are many instances in which youth will prioritize morality when making these decisions (Mulvey, 2016).

Research also indicates that there may be individual variation in how youth respond to bullying. For instance, when children and adolescents feel sorry for the victim and desire to help them they are more likely to intervene (Nickerson & Mele-Taylor, 2014). In addition, previous research has found that sympathy and empathy are associated with defending victims of bullying (Barchia & Bussey, 2011; Nickerson, Mele, & Princiotta, 2008). Furthermore, children and adolescents who have high empathy are more likely to display more prosocial behaviors (Findlay, Girardi, & Coplan, 2006). Students who display more prosocial behaviors are also more likely to intervene in a bullying situation (Nickerson & Mele-Taylor, 2014; Oh & Hazler, 2009). In terms of bystanders, higher levels of self-efficacy also influence a bystander’s likelihood for intervening in bullying, as children with higher levels of self-efficacy tend to intervene more and to believe that their efforts to intervene will be effective (Thornberg et al., 2012). Other possibilities for disengagement or lack of intervention have been attributed to diffusion of responsibility, and blaming the victim (Obermann, 2011). Children and adolescents who have low empathy have also been found to be more aggressive than their high-empathy peers (Robinson, Roberts, Strayer, & Koopman, 2007). In addition, stable temperamental traits such as negative affect or emotionality are related to greater likelihood of bullying involvement (Pellegrini & Bartini, 2000). What is still unknown, however, is how self-reported temperament is related to evaluations of and expected responses to bullying of peers with disabilities.

Current Study

The current study aimed to increase our understanding of youth cognition surrounding bullying of peers with disabilities. Drawing on the SDR perspective, which recognizes the tension that youth experience between moral principles, such as preventing harm to others and being inclusive, and their feelings of loyalty to their group (Rutland et al., 2010), our research questions were the following:

This study examines inclusion decisions, where participants were asked to choose between including a peer who attended their school and who had a disability or a peer who did not attend their school but had no disability. Participants provided both prescriptive (who should the group include) and descriptive (who will the group include) judgments of their own expected inclusion choice to allow us to understand the interplay between their understanding of moral principles and group behaviors. We expected that youth judgments of their group’s inclusivity (descriptive judgments) would predict their own prescriptive judgments for whom to include. This is based on prior research demonstrating that inclusion practices of individuals are often based on group norms (Gasser et al., 2013; Gasser et al., 2014; Hitti & Killen, 2015). In addition, given prior research that demonstrates that, in some contexts, girls are more inclusive than are boys (Killen, Lee-Kim, McGlothlin, & Stangor, 2002), we tested for gender differences in prescriptive judgments of inclusion with the expectation that girls may be more likely to advocate for inclusion of youth with disabilities.

In addition, participants were also asked to judge how acceptable it was to engage in bullying behaviors toward different peers with disabilities and to make judgments about if and how they might respond if they observed these types of bullying. We were interested in capturing not only participants’ explicit judgments, but also their reasoning supporting the decisions that they made as prior research demonstrates the complexity of children’s and adolescents’ social reasoning (Richardson et al., 2012). We expected differences regarding the likelihood of intervention, with those who perceived bullying as less acceptable being more likely to intervene. This is based on research demonstrating that children’s and adolescents’ decisions to intervene are increased when they hold higher levels of moral reasoning that bullying is wrong (Thornberg et al., 2012) and youths’ judgments surrounding the acceptability of bias-based group norms are related to intervention expectations (Mulvey, Palmer, & Abrams, 2016).

We asked participants to complete a self-report of their temperament by completing the Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire-Revised, Short Form (Capaldi & Rothbart, 1992) to better understand what factors relate to patterns of responses and evaluations of bullying of peers with disabilities. We expected that negative temperamental traits, especially frustration and aggression, would relate to lower levels of inclusion and intervention.

In the current study, we sampled 9- to 10-year-olds as well as 11- to 12-year-olds. We focused on these developmental periods spanning middle-childhood to early adolescence as we expected that adolescents may place more of a focus on group-based concerns than would children. For instance, prior research has demonstrated that adolescents are more likely to reason about inclusion and exclusion by referencing group functioning (Horn, 2003; Killen, Rutland, Abrams, Mulvey, & Hitti, 2013) and that, with age, adolescents are less likely to expect bystander intervention in instances of bias-based bullying (Mulvey et al., 2016).

Method

Design and Procedures

Participants individually completed the survey online in a quiet room at their school, using school-provided computers. Participants were told that there are no right or wrong answers and reminded that all their responses were confidential. In addition, participants were told that their participation is voluntary and that they may choose to stop at any point. Participants were also given a warm-up task that involved completing practice items. Following the warm-up, all participants were introduced to the task. They were shown a drawing of a group of children reflecting their age range and were asked to choose a symbol, name, and special event for their group (see Mulvey, Hitti, Rutland, Abrams, & Killen, 2014). This introduction follows the same procedure as was used in prior research on inclusion and group dynamics (Killen et al., 2013; Mulvey et al., 2014) and draws on the minimal group paradigm, which has documented that individuals exhibit strong ingroup identification toward minimal groups after just a brief task that involves making choices about a novel group (Bourhis & Gagnon, 2001; Turner, 1978).

Evaluating Inclusion of Peers With Disabilities Task

After the introduction, participants completed the Evaluating Inclusion of Peers With Disabilities Task. All participants completed four scenarios. In each case, participants chose between two peers who matched their gender, one of whom attended their school, and had a disability and one of whom attended a different school, and did not have a disability. This forced choice inclusion measure is based upon prior research examining inclusion decisions and is designed to limit social desirability response patterns (Killen et al., 2013; Mulvey & Killen, 2017). Research demonstrates that forced choice inclusion in hypoethical scenarios such as this align with actual rates of inclusion in behavioral contexts (Mulvey, Boswell, & Niehaus, 2018). School attendance was chosen as the other variable in line with prior research (Killen et al., 2013; Mulvey & Killen, 2017) and because school group membership is considered meaningful for children and adolescents (Eccles & Roeser, 2013). Participants completed inclusion assessments for peers with the following different disabilities: (a) physical disability, (b) learning disability, (c) social impairment, and (d) mental health impairment (see Table 1 for details). Only four disabilities were chosen due to time constraints. These four were chosen to draw from a range of types of disabilities than impact different domains. Participants made (a) Descriptive Group Inclusion Judgment (Who do you think your group will invite?; dichotomous choice between the child with the disability or the child without a disability) and (b) Prescriptive Inclusion Judgments (Who do you think your group should invite?; dichotomous choice between the child with the disability or the child without a disability). Finally, they provided reasoning to support their judgment.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Inclusion Scenarios.

Disability	Description	Context
Physical	Has a physical disability and cannot run very fast	Playing soccer
Learning	Has a learning disability and has trouble concentrating	Science fair project
Social impairment	Has autism and has difficulty with social interactions	Attending a music concert
Mental health impairment	Has depression and often feels sad and is quiet	Attending a party

Responding to Bullying of Peers With Disabilities Task

Next, participants completed the Responding to Bullying of Peers With Disabilities Task. This task involved three scenarios involving bullying of peers with physical and learning disabilities and were all matched to the gender of the participant. One scenario involved exclusion (example scenario: “Let’s say a girl in your class has a serious learning disability and cannot do many of the tasks you do in school. You see some kids tell this classmate who has a serious learning disability that she cannot sit with them on the bus.”). One involved cyberbullying (example scenario: “Let’s say a boy in your class has a physical disability and cannot walk without assistance. You see some kids saying mean things using technology [for example on a website or using a cell phone] about this boy.”). One involved direct aggression (example scenario: “Let’s say a girl in your class has a serious learning disability and cannot do many of the tasks you do in school. You see some kids pushing around this girl.”). For this measure, participants first rated (a) Acceptability of the Act (How Okay or Not Okay is this?; 6-point Likert-type type scale from 1 = Really Not Okay to 6 = Really Okay); (b) Likelihood of Intervention (If you did see this, how likely would you be to do something about it?; 6-point Likert-type type scale from 1 = Definitely Would Not Do Something About It to 6 = Definitely Would Do Something About It); (c) Intervention Expectation (What would you do if you did do something?; open-ended reasoning) and (d) Justification for Intervention (Why would you do something or not do something?; open-ended reasoning).

Coding for intervention expectation

Participants’ justifications were coded by using coding categories drawn drawing on prior research (Mulvey et al., 2016). The coding system for intervention behaviors included the following categories: (a) not get involved, (b) confront the bully, (c) get help from a friend or adult, and (d) help the victim. Participant responses were coded as 1 = use of only this code, .5 = use of this code and one additional code, and 0 = no use of this code. For instance, if a participant indicated that they would confront the bully and get help from a friend, they would receive a .5 for “confront the bully” and a .5 for “get help from a friend or adult.” As another example, if a participant indicated that they would help the victim, they would receive a code of 1 for “help the victim.” Two coders coded the intervention behaviors and, on the basis of 25% of the interviews, Cohen’s κ = .93 for inter-rater reliability.

Coding for justification for inclusion decisions and intervention

For the response justifications, the coding system included the following codes, which are the focus of the analyses for the current study: (a) Other’s Welfare (Moral; example codes: “She will feel bad if she is left out” or “She can make sure they don’t hurt anyone”), (b) Fairness (Moral; example code: “It isn’t fair to treat him like that.”), (c) Prosocial (Moral; example code: “We can teach him to play with us.” “It is important to help her.”), (d) Group Functioning (Societal; example code: “They will think he won’t be able to help us.” or “They won’t like what she thinks”), and (e) Psychological Traits (Psychological; example code: “She would be a hard worker.” or “I don’t think he would like to play.”). Justification analyses were conducted using the most frequently used justifications, which were used more than 10%. Justifications were coded as 1 = use of only this code, .5 = use of this code and one additional code and 0 = no use of this code. Using a .5 for each of the double codes weighted those responses so that the total reasoning for that participant summed to 1. Less than 10% of participants provided two justifications. Coding was conducted by two coders and Cohen’s κ = . 92 for inter-rater reliability (25% double-coded).

Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire

Participants completed the Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire-Revised, Short Form (Capaldi & Rothbart, 1992). This includes 65 items measuring temperamental characteristics and demonstrates good reliability with αs ranging from .65 to .82. The scales that were of interest were (a) aggression (six items, α = .80, sample item: When I am angry, I throw or break things) and (b) frustration (seven items, α = .70, sample item: I get irritated when I have to stop doing something that I am enjoying).

Results

Discussion

Our novel findings indicate the complexity of children’s cognition surrounding bullying of children with disabilities. Our results document the important interplay between children’s expectations for their peers’ behavior and their own judgments of what they would do and reveal that children’s expectations for how their peers will respond relate to their expectations of their own responses. This indicates that children may be swayed to inaction because of their assumptions of how their peers may respond if they include children with disabilities in their activities. On the other hand, our results also document that children judge bullying of children with disabilities as unacceptable and that these judgments are associated with the likelihood that they would intervene if they observe bullying.

Thus, in line with theory from the SRD perspective (Rutland & Killen, 2015; Rutland et al., 2010), children recognize the importance of both moral principles and group loyalty in evaluating complex bullying scenarios. Our results document that the more likely children were to think that their peers would include children with disabilities, the more likely children were to say that peers with disabilities should be included. This demonstrates that prescriptive judgments are related to descriptive judgments. Prior research has demonstrated that, at times, children will distinguish between prescriptive and descriptive moral judgments. For instance, Keller, Lourenço, Malti, and Saalbach (2003) tested children’s descriptive judgments by asking them to infer the emotion a transgressor would feel following a transgression and also assessed prescriptive judgments by asking children to evaluate how right or wrong the transgressor was to feel that emotion, documenting that children frequently report that the transgressor would feel happy, but that this would be wrong. Our new findings demonstrate that descriptive judgments are related to prescriptive judgments, demonstrating the powerful effect that expectations about the group’s moral decisions can have on the cognitive processes of members of the group. Although some participants may have made choices to include the peer with the disability due to social desirability (or based on the school group membership and not disability status), given that participants’ group expectations were related to their own prescriptive judgments and their reasoning, social desirability does not seem to account for the pattern of findings. In other words, participants were not simply indicating inclusive patterns in order to appear socially desirable. However, it is a limitation of the current study that participants always evaluated targets who were members of their school group and had a disability. Future research should aim to test whether the same pattern is found if information about other types of group identity is not provided.

Interestingly, we did not demonstrate differences based on the disability context. We tested a range of different types of disability, including physical disabilities, learning disabilities, social impairments, and mental health disabilities. Prior research on bias-based bullying has examined physical and mental disabilities, documenting that adolescents who report having experienced bullying based on disability are at greater risk of engaging in substance use and experiencing negative school outcomes such as low grades or truancy than are adolescents who do not experience disability-based bullying or harassment (Russell et al., 2012). Furthermore, prior research on rates of bullying of children with disabilities also groups different types of disabilities together (Hartley, Bauman, Nixon, & Davis, 2015), although some research has focused on particular disabilities. For instance, research has identified higher rates of victimization for children with emotional and behavioral disorders (Rose & Espelage, 2012) and with intellectual disabilities (Christensen, Fraynt, Neece, & Baker, 2012).

Some prior research on attitudes toward exclusion of youth with disabilities has documented differences between evaluations of youth with physical and intellectual disabilities (Gasser et al., 2013). Specifically, this research found that context mattered and that children (ages 9 and 12 years of age) were more likely to accept exclusion of a peer with a physical disability in an athletic context and more likely to accept exclusion of a peer with an intellectual disability in an academic context (Gasser et al., 2013; Gasser et al., 2014). In the current study, the inclusion scenarios were designed so that the context might prove challenging for the peer with disability, which may explain why we did not document similar differences. Our reasoning results support this, as participants justified their inclusion decisions most often by referencing the traits of the potential target when evaluating whether to include or exclude that person. Furthermore, our findings documented that participants who reported being more easily frustrated were less likely to include the peer with a disability into their group. This may also reflect an awareness that youth who experience high rates of frustration may be less likely to include others with disabilities because they may be bothered by the limitations experienced by their peers with disabilities or because they struggle to empathize with the peer with a disability. Future research should continue to assess moral judgments of bullying of youth with disabilities in different contexts to more provide a more complete picture of the role of the particular context in determining how inclusive peers may be.

Our findings in terms of age and gender were also novel. While prior research has often documented age-related differences in evaluations of inclusion and exclusion, with younger children demonstrating more inclusive attitudes than older children (Killen & Rutland, 2011), in the current study there were no differences based on participant age. Future research should also sample adolescents to document if differences emerge between younger and older youth. Research documents that youth (11-13 years of age) with more close friendships with peers with special educational needs had more inclusive attitudes (Grütter, Gasser, & Malti, 2017), which also suggests the importance of measuring cross-group friendships in future research. In terms of gender, female participants were more likely to include the peer with a disability than were male participants. This aligns with prior research on social exclusion that demonstrates that girls are, at times, more inclusive than are boys (Killen et al., 2002), and extends this prior research to a new context: evaluations of inclusion of youth with disabilities. Our design only included evaluations of same-gendered peers, however, and future research should also measure cross-gender evaluations to determine if there are gender of the target differences as well.

We also asked participants to evaluate how likely they would be to intervene if they observed peers with disabilities being victimized. This is an important question, as research demonstrates that bystander intervention plays a critical role in stopping bullying, with instances of bullying ceasing within 20 s of a bystander intervening (Nansel et al., 2001). Furthermore, research demonstrates that while bystander intervention is not all that common, in schools where it is practiced, bullying rates are significantly lower (Salmivalli et al., 2011). Importantly, our findings revealed that intervention likelihood was related to evaluations of the acceptability of the act of bullying. This reveals that children are more likely to intervene when they understand that the bullying is morally unacceptable. Furthermore, this finding extends prior research that demonstrated that adolescents were more likely to intervene in instances of race-based humor if they judged such humor to be wrong (Mulvey et al., 2016). Just as adolescents relied upon their moral judgments when deciding if they should intervene, so do children.

We also documented differences based on participants’ self-reported levels of aggression. Children who reported higher levels of aggression were less likely to intervene. Prior research has demonstrated that youth reactive aggression is related to expected ease in enacting aggression (Arsenio, Adams, & Gold, 2009). The current findings extend this research by demonstrating that self-reported aggression is also related to the likelihood of intervening when observing others’ being victimized. This finding reveals the importance of examining individual variation in intervention expectations. For instance, while the current study measured just aggression in general, future research should examine proactive and reactive aggression separately. In addition, future research might examine other possible predictors of intervention expectations, such as empathy (Abbott & Cameron, 2014). Furthermore, the current study did not assess participants’ own disability status, yet prior research has demonstrated that individual factors, such as aggression and depression predict different patterns of engagement in bullying instances for youth with disabilities. Future research should examine likelihood of bystander intervention among youth with disabilities with different temperamental profiles.

Our reasoning results clarified that participants were focused on moral reasons when thinking about the likelihood that they might intervene, with reasoning reflecting prosocial reasoning, fairness, and other’s welfare. This suggests that children are aware of the potential for bystander intervention to prevent harm to others and to ensure that others are treated in morally acceptable ways. In terms of the actual intervention behaviors our participants expected to undertake, there was a great deal of variation. Very few participants reported that they would choose to not get involved. However, participants did report expecting to confront the bully, help the victim, and seek out help from others. There were no significant differences in their rates of reporting that they expected to engage in these different forms of bystander intervention. This finding suggests that children consider a range of different ways that they might intervene.

Prior research demonstrates that bullying intervention programs, in particular, the KiVa program, are effective in encouraging bystander intervention among youth (Yang & Salmivalli, 2015). However, different forms of intervention may lead to different outcomes. For instance, confronting the bully may be a riskier form of intervention, as it may lead to the bullying being re-directed to the individual who intervenes. Therefore, future research should examine what methods of bystander intervention are particularly effective in contexts of bullying of children with disabilities, in particular. In addition, the current study only measured expectations about intervention in instances of bullying of children with disabilities. Future research should use additional methods, for instance naturalistic observation or peer nominations, to obtain a more complete picture of how often and under what circumstances youth do intervene if they observe youth with disabilities being victimized. The current study also focused on specific types of disabilities, however, not all forms of disabilities were tested and disabilities were tested separately, although up to 2% of youth experience multiple disabilities or cooccurence of different disabilities (National Center for Education Statistics, 2017). Future research should examine additional disabilities and should examine whether response patterns differ when evaluating bullying of youth with cooccurence of more than one type of disability. This is especially important as research indicates that bias-based bullying that targets more than one form of bias (for instance race and gender) is associated with more negative outcomes than bias-based bullying targeting one category or social identity (Mulvey et al., in press).

Our findings reveal that youth are invested in supporting youth with disabilities who are being bullied and excluded. However, the results also demonstrate the powerful pull of expectations of how peers may respond and the importance of helping youth recognize the harmful nature of the bullying in order to encourage intervention. The results echo recent calls in the literature for school districts and school personnel to implement policies and procedures that support attention to issues surrounding bullying of children with disabilities (Yell, Katsiyannis, Rose, & Houchins, 2016). Parents and teachers should encourage children to be active bystanders and to include, support and befriend youth with disabilities who are often subject to bullying and aggression from their peers. The implications of this research are that youth should be empowered to speak up on behalf of youth with disabilities.

In summary, the current study provides important new insight into children’s moral judgments surrounding social decisions involving peers with disabilities. Our focus was twofold: (a) evaluating inclusion of peers with disabilities and (b) evaluating likelihood of bystander intervention in instances of bullying of peers with disabilities. By examining both active behaviors of inclusion as well as resistance to bullying of peers with disabilities, the current study provides a multi-faceted examination of how children expect to respond in complex situations involving peers with disabilities. Our findings reveal a sophisticated balance between an awareness of the harmful nature of bullying and exclusion on one hand, and a sense of the power of the peer group and the influence of peers, on the other.