The ViSC Program: How Do Bullies,Victims,Bully-Victims,and Uninvolved Adolescents Perceive the Program Activities?

Abstract

This study examines how bullies, victims, bully-victims, and uninvolved adolescents perceive the activities of the class project of the ViSC social competence program. The ViSC program is a whole school socio-ecological anti-bullying program that was implemented in 43 classes, grade 7, 8, and 9, in three Cypriot schools. A sample of 778 adolescents (52% girls, Mage = 13.9, SD = 0.86) who participated in the ViSC class project, answered open-format questions concerning most-and least-liked class project activities. Applying normative cut-off scores, four groups of adolescents were identified: 47 (6%) bullies, 64 (8%) victims, 45 (6%) bully-victims, and 609 (80%) uninvolved. There were meaningful differences between these groups regarding their most and least liked program activities. While uninvolved adolescents liked the behavioural improvement and victims liked the knowledge improvement more than the other groups; bullies and bully-victims did not like anything about the program content more often compared to the other groups. The findings are discussed regarding their practical implications for program development to better serve the needs of different bully-victim groups.

Keywords

Social competence evidence-based prevention anti-bullying program person-oriented approach bullying

Adolescents who are involved in bullying – a subcategory of aggressive behaviour - are heterogeneous (Ettekal & Ladd, 2017; Yang & Salmivalli, 2013). To capture this heterogeneity, adolescents are usually grouped into bullies, the perpetrators of aggressive acts, victims, the targets of aggressive acts, bully-victims, who bully others but are also targets of bullying themselves, and uninvolved (Georgiou & Stavrinides, 2008). There is ample evidence that bullies, victims and bully-victims differ on many characteristics from each other and from uninvolved youth (Kljakovic & Hunt, 2016). Moreover, evidence suggests that youth belonging to different bully-victim groups do not profit equally from whole school anti-bullying programs (Farrell, Henry, & Bettencourt, 2013). What is not fully understood yet is which activities of whole school anti-bullying programs are most beneficial for each group. Such knowledge is important, however, because it would allow designing program activities that would better serve the needs of heterogeneous adolescents.

Applying a qualitative research design, adolescents who participated in the Viennese Social Competence (ViSC) program that was implemented in 43 classes located in three Cypriot schools were asked about their most and least liked program activities. Adolescents were grouped into bullies, victims, bully-victims, and uninvolved based on self-reports to examine whether they perceive and evaluate the program activities differently.

Social Competence among Adolescents from Different Bully-Victim Groups

It is important to differentiate adolescents depending on their involvement in bullying as they differ in many characteristics, especially regarding their social competence (Zych, Ttofi, & Farrington, 2017a). Social competence describes the ability of a person to achieve important goals by maintaining good social relationships (Rubin & Rose-Krasnor, 1992). Social competence is displayed in a specific context and covers thinking, feeling, and acting (Topping, Bremmer, & Holmes, 2000). Social competence is defined as a multidimensional concept including different dimensions such as prosocial behaviour, emotional skills, social efficacy, social adjustment among peers, and academic adjustment (Gómez-Ortiz, Romera, & Ortega-Ruiz, 2017). To better understand the psychosocial needs of bullies, victims, bully-victims, and uninvolved adolescents, results of selected studies are summarized below.

Bullies engage in aggressive acts as a way to gain social power over peers to improve their self-image (Crick & Dodge, 1994). A subgroup of bullies do not have social but moral deficits, because they use their social skills to manipulate others (Sutton, Smith, & Swettenham, 1999). Bullies were found to have less affective empathy compared to uninvolved adolescents (Georgiou & Stavrinides, 2012; Solomontos-Kountouri, Tsagkaridis, Gradinger, & Strohmeier, 2017; Zych et al., 2017a). Gómez-Ortiz and colleagues (2017) found that bullies exhibited lower social adjustment, lower perceived efficacy in social relationships, and lower prosocial behaviour. Jenkins, Demaray, Fredrick, and Summers (2016) found that low self-control predicted bullying, and higher levels of assertiveness were related to higher levels of bullying. Bullying is negatively associated with cooperation (Jenkins et al., 2016), and bullies are actively hostile towards cooperative group work (Smith, Cowie, & Berdondini, 1994) indicating that they might view cooperative group work as a threat to their power. Power seems to matter a lot for bullies, as they score high when asked how important it is to be dominant (Salmivalli & Isaacs, 2005). Caravita and Cillessen (2012) showed that self-perceived popularity predicted more bullying, whereas peer-nominated popularity predicted less bullying. In another study, bullying was predicted by high perceived popularity and low acceptance (De Bruyn, Cillessen, & Wissink, 2010). Hence, bullying is a strategic behaviour (Sutton et al., 1999) that enables bullies to gain and maintain a dominant position within their peer group (Pellegrini & Bartini, 2000).

Victims lack both social competence and peer status (Cook, Williams, Guerra, Kim, & Sadek, 2010). Gómez-Ortiz et al. (2017) found that social adjustment and perceived efficacy in social relationships was lower in victims compared to uninvolved adolescents. Jenkins et al. (2016) showed that higher levels of cooperation, self-control, and assertion were associated with lower levels of victimization. Cooperative group work in classrooms is beneficial for victims (Smith et al., 1994). De Bruyn et al. (2010) found that victimization was predicted by low perceived popularity and low peer-nominated acceptance. Meta-analytic findings demonstrate that cognitive and affective empathy are not related to victimization (Zych, Toffi, & Farrigton, 2017b), but in a study with Cypriot adolescents, victims showed higher levels of affective empathy compared to their uninvolved peers (Solomontos-Kountouri et al., 2017). The plight of victims, as Juvonen and Graham (2014) put it, is characterized by a cyclical process of risk factors and negative consequences reinforcing each other. Unless this cyclical process is interrupted (i.e., by an intervention), the victims are trapped and manifest psychosocial difficulties.

Bully-victims have the most pathological psychosocial profile compared to any other group that is involved in bullying activities (Georgiou & Stavrinides, 2012). This is because they share some characteristics of victims but do not have the high social status of bullies (Juvonen & Graham, 2014). Bully-victims display less cognitive and affective empathy compared to uninvolved adolescents (Georgiou & Stavrinides, 2012; Zych et al., 2017b). They show lower levels of social adjustment, perceived efficacy, and prosocial behaviour compared to uninvolved adolescents (Gómez-Ortiz et al., 2017).

Uninvolved adolescents are the benchmark for comparing the level of social competences of the other three groups. The referred studies showed that bullies, victims, and bully-victims differ from uninvolved adolescents regarding their social competences. However, it is important to understand that bullying behaviour is often reinforced by “uninvolved” peers that make bullying acceptable and normative within the peer group. These peer norms, as well as the norms of the whole school, therefore, should be modified in order to stop and eliminate bullying behaviours (Kollerova, Mazzone, Yanagida, Soukup, & Strohmeier, 2018; Swearer, Espelage, Vaillancourt, & Hymel, 2010).

Because of these different psychosocial profiles of bullies, victims, bully-victims, and uninvolved adolescents, it is reasonable to assume that multi-level whole school anti-bullying programs have a differential impact on them. Indeed, there is some evidence that the effectiveness of multi-level whole school anti-bullying programs differs between bullies, victims, and bully-victims. Yang and Salmivalli (2015) demonstrated that the KIVA anti-bullying program was even more effective for the bully-victims compared to pure bullies and pure victims. Garandeau, Lee, and Salmivalli (2014) showed that the popularity of the bully matters by demonstrating that the KIVA program is effective for bullies whose popularity is low or average, but not for highly popular bullies. Juvonen, Schacter, Sainio, and Salmivalli (2016) showed that the program was especially effective for grade 6 adolescents, who are frequently victimized, in changing their perceptions on school climate as well as their levels of depression and self-esteem. A similar result was reported by Jenson, Brisson, Bender, and Williford (2013) who showed that the Youth Matters (YM) program is most effective for victims.

The ViSC Social Competence Program

The ViSC program is a socio-ecological, evidence-based program consisting of measures on the school, class, and individual level to foster social, emotional, and intercultural competences and to reduce bullying and victimization in schools (Strohmeier, Hoffmann, Schiller, Stefanek, & Spiel, 2012). The program is implemented as a school development project during one school year and it is designed for secondary schools. The main goal of ViSC program is to enable a school transformation process, in order to change the behaviour of the adolescents, and to foster knowledge and competences among teachers. The implementation process is based on a cascaded train-the-trainer model: scientists train multipliers, multipliers train teachers, and teachers train their students (Spiel & Strohmeier, 2011). This model ensures sustainable systemic change (Fixsen, Schultes, & Blase, 2016).

On the school level, teachers are trained to acquire basic knowledge on bully–victim behaviour and its development, on theoretical concepts of instrumental and reactive aggression (Card & Little, 2006) and on bullying as a group phenomenon (Salmivalli, 1999). In line with Social Learning Theory (Bandura, 1977), teachers work out a common understanding of the problem, agree on procedures on how to tackle serious bullying cases, implement preventive measures on the school and class level, and organise activities that include parents (Spiel & Strohmeier, 2011).

On the individual level, which is the intervention part of the program, teachers are trained on how to respond when aggressive behaviour or bullying has already been occurred in their schools (Roland & Vaaland, 2006; Strohmeier et al., 2012). The main goals of the intervention on the individual level are: (a) to support and empower victims, (b) to stop negative and reinforce positive behaviours on bullies, (c) to foster competences in emotional regulation among bully–victims, and (d) to stimulate parents to cooperate with the school in reducing bullying (Spiel & Strohmeier, 2011).

On the class level, a class project (consisting of seven units of two-hour lessons each) was implemented by teachers in their classes. The ViSC class project was developed on the recognition of the importance of the class context for the prevalence of bullying and victimization (Atria & Spiel, 2007). Further, it integrates the principal constructs behind social information-processing theory (Crick & Dodge, 1996), moral development (Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, & Pastorelli, 1996; Malti, Gasser, & Buchmann, 2009), and evidences for bullying as a group process (Salmivalli, 1999). The fully manualized class project is designed to foster exchange and discussions among the adolescents and consists of activities like interactive games, role-plays, discussion groups, cooperative learning, and other interactive pedagogical methods. The main aim of the class project is to train adolescents to become responsible and competent actors in real problem situations. Specifically, adolescents are trained in a broad spectrum of competencies such as perspective taking, empathy (cognitive and affective), responsibility (i.e., to feel responsible when something negative is going on and to react to improve the situation) and prosocial behaviour options (e.g., cooperation, anger management/self-control, respect, especially intercultural respect), etc., (Atria & Spiel, 2007; Spiel & Strohmeier, 2011).

The ViSC program has been implemented in Austria, Cyprus, Romania, and Turkey. In Austria, the effectiveness of the ViSC program has been demonstrated in various studies and it has been shown that the program is effective in reducing victimization, cyber-victimization, and cyberbullying (Gollwitzer, Banse, Eisenbach, & Naumann, 2007; Gollwitzer, Eisenbach, Atria, Strohmeier, & Banse, 2006; Gradinger, Yanagida, Strohmeier, & Spiel 2016; Yanagida, Strohmeier, & Spiel, 2016). In Cyprus, evaluation results revealed that grade 7 students profited more from the program compared to grade 8 students (Solomontos-Kountouri, Gradinger, Yanagida, & Strohmeier, 2016). In Romania, where only the class project was implemented by external research assistants and no teacher trainings were provided, no intervention effects on victimization and bullying were found, but changes regarding dysfunctional cognitions and emotions were observed (Trip et al., 2015). In Turkey, evaluation results demonstrated that perpetration and victimization increased in the intervention group compared to control group between pre-and post-test, but also decreased between post-test and follow-up, indicating a sensitizing effect of the program (Dogan et al., 2017).

The Present Study

The main goal of the present study is to examine how bullies, victims, bully-victims, and uninvolved adolescents perceive and evaluate the activities of the class project of the ViSC social competence program. Taking into account that different groups of adolescents involved in bullying have different levels of social competences, our main hypothesis is that bullies, victims, bully-victims, and uninvolved adolescents perceive and evaluate the activities of the program differently. To examine this hypothesis, a person-oriented approach was used to identify bullies, victims, bully-victims, and uninvolved adolescents, and a qualitative approach was used to identify the preferred activities. More specifically, we formulated the following four hypotheses: (1) Uninvolved adolescents would like all program activities, especially those fostering behavioural improvement; (2) Victims would like all activities that help them overcoming their plight (e.g., knowledge improvement) and that foster social cohesion (e.g., cooperation) to help them getting better integrated in their peer-group; (3) Bullies might perceive activities that foster their peer status (e.g., games) as more beneficial compared with the other groups, because these activities respond to their need of power and dominance; (4) Bully-victims are expected to show low preference to most of the activities, especially to academic oriented activities.

Method

Study Design and Procedure

For the present study, the wave 2 cross-sectional intervention group data, collected immediately after the program implementation, was taken from a larger three-wave longitudinal control group study that was reported in Solomontos-Kountouri et al. (2016). Data were collected from three gymnasiums and 43 classrooms, in April and May, 2013. These three schools were located in three provinces (Nicosia, Larnaka, and Pafos) of Cyprus and were chosen by the Secondary School Directory based on convenience (which school collaborate better with the external experts), demand (which school had a need for an intervention program in bullying) and equivalency (similar status schools were matched according to Directory criteria). The Centre of Educational Research and Evaluation in Cyprus gave its consent for the data collection, and active consent was granted by 86% of parents. Students were assured that their participation was voluntary and that their answers would be kept confidential. Few students (2%, n = 17) refused to participate, 3% (n = 31) were absent at the day of data collection and 1% (n = 12) of the questionnaires were invalid. Therefore, 80% of the eligible students (N = 788) provided data for the present study. Data was collected with paper and pencil, during regular school hours (45 min) by the first author and a group of research assistants with the help of the class teachers.

Participants

The sample consists of 778 secondary school (Gymnasium) students, grade 7, 8, and 9 (52% girls) nested in 43 classrooms and three schools. The students are on average 13.9 years old (SD = 0.86). The majority of students are Greek-Cypriots (87%) and 13% are first generation immigrants who migrated to Cyprus from 25 different countries. Concerning SES, 13.5% (n = 105) of the students were coming from low SES families, 74.2% (n = 576) were coming from medium SES families, and 12.3% (n = 95) were coming from high SES families.

Measures

Demographic Information

Gender, year and country of birth, and socioeconomic status (SES) were measured. SES was originally assessed with five options regarding the perceived household economy that were later combined into three categories: low SES (household economy being “bad” or “very bad”), medium SES (household economy being “neither good nor bad” or “good”), and high SES (household economy being “very good”).

Bullying and Victimization

Each construct was measured with fifteen items. The term “bullying” was not used and no definition of bullying was provided. Both scales contain one global and fourteen specific items related to physical, relational, and verbal harassments. The items ask how often specific behaviours took place during the last two months and were parallel for all forms of bullying and victimization; to give an example, the global victimization item reads as follows: How often have other students insulted or hurt you during the last two months? An example of a specific bullying item reads as follows: How often have you insulted or hurt other students by verbally harassing them during the last two months? Answers to all questions were given on a five-point Likert scale ranging from (0) never, over (1) once or twice, and (2) two or three times a month, and (3) once a week, to (4) nearly every day. Cronbach’s α was 0.90 for the bullying scale and 0.89 for the victimization scale. The items can be found in Yanagida, Gradinger et al. (2016), Yanagida et al. (2016) and in Strohmeier, Aoyama, Gradinger, and Toda (2013).

Most Liked and Least Liked Program Activities

After completing the class project, the groups were asked what they liked best (“What did you like best about the ViSC Program?”) and what they liked least (“What did you not like about the ViSC Program?”). It was possible to nominate up to three elements of the ViSC program in three lines provided after these two questions.

Results

Identifying Bullies, Victims, Bully-Victims, and Uninvolved Adolescents

In order to create the four groups of interest, a person-oriented approach and the 30 items of bullying and victimization were used. Adolescents were grouped into bullies, victims, and bully-victims based on the procedure described in Georgiou and Stavrinides (2008). The mean scores of the 15 bullying and 15 victimization items were created. Adolescents whose bullying mean score was 1 SD above the sample mean but their victimization mean score 1 SD below the sample mean were labelled “bullies.” Adolescents whose bullying mean score was 1 SD below the sample mean but their victimization mean score 1 SD above the sample mean were labelled “victims.” Adolescents whose bullying and victimization mean scores were 1 SD above the sample mean were labelled “bully-victims.” Adolescents whose bullying and victimization mean scores were 1 SD below the sample mean were labelled “uninvolved.” Thus, students were assigned to the four groups of interest as follows: Bullies = 47 (6%), victims = 64 (8%), bully-victims = 45 (6%), and uninvolved = 609 (80%). The profiles of the four groups are displayed in Table 1.

Table 1

Profiles of Bullies, Victims, Bully-Victims, and Uninvolved Adolescents

Variables	Uninvolved (n = 609)	Bullies (n = 47)	Victims (n = 64)	Bully-Victims (n = 45)
Bullying Scale	M = 0.25	M = 1.67	M = 0.45	M = 1.80
Bullying Scale	SD = 0.25	SD = 0.59	SD = 0.30	SD = 0.63
Victimization Scale	M = 0.24	M = 0.36	M = 1.53	M = 1.72
Victimization Scale	SD = 0.25	SD = 0.28	SD = 0.45	SD = 0.54

Preferences of the Program Activities

The open answers of the qualitative questions about most and least liked program activities were coded to identify more and less preferred program activities. We used two steps of an inductive coding method: In the first step, we generated initial codes from the short answers; and in the second step, we identified broad categories and grouped the codes into these categories. Adolescents gave either short or bullet point answers. The most liked codes were grouped into eight meaningful and discrete categories, which are referred to specific activities of the program (e.g., cooperation, games, discussions, role-play, see Table 2), and to the products of the program (e.g., knowledge improvement, behavioural improvement, empathy, attitude improvement, see Table 2). The least liked codes were grouped into six meaningful and discrete categories, which are referred to specific elements of the program (e.g., some materials of the program, some activities of the program and writing) or to administrative issues (e.g., non-cooperation, boring lessons, time-problem, see Table 3). Inter-rater reliability was calculated based on the percentage of the agreements of two independent coders. A random sample of 100 open answers per item were coded by these two independent raters and showed >95% agreement. Then the first, second, and third nomination of adolescents were aggregated into the eight most liked and six least liked broad categories. Three additional categories from both the most liked and the least liked activities that are not directly meaningful for program evaluation are the ‘everything,’ the ‘nothing, and ‘losing lesson’ categories. Table 2 and Table 3 show the percentage of nominations of each category for uninvolved, bullies, victims, and bully-victims.

Table 2

Most Liked Activities amongst Bullies, Victims, Bully-Victims, and Uninvolved Adolescents

Most Liked Activities	Uninvolved (n= 609)	Bullies (n= 47)	Victims (n = 64)	Bully-Victims (n = 45)	χ ²
Cooperation	31% (189)	28% (13)	30% (19)	20% (9)	2.57
Games	27% (165)	32% (15)	17% (11)	24% (11)	3.77
Knowledge improvement	19% (118)	6% (3)	30% (19)	11% (5)	11.5*
Behavioural improvement	26% (159)	8% (4)	17% (11)	2% (1)	21.16**
Discussion	8% (51)	6% (3)	14% (9)	7% (3)	4.95
Empathy	10% (59)	2% (1)	11% (7)	7% (3)	3.58
Role play	8% (41)	9% (4)	3% (2)	4% (2)	1.86
Attitude improvement	7% (44)	4 % (2)	12% (8)	2% (1)	4.97
Liked everything	4% (22)	–	–	2% (1)	–
Did not like anything	11% (69)	23% (11)	12% (8)	27% (12)	13.38*
Losing lesson	8% (51)	28% (13)	14% (9)	18% (8)	20.89**

*p < 0.01. **p < 0.001. The number of students is displayed in parentheses.

Table 3

Least Liked Activities amongst Bullies, Victims, Bully-Victims, and Uninvolved Adolescents

Least Liked Activities	Uninvolved (n = 609)	Bullies (n = 47)	Victims (n = 64)	Bully-Victims (n = 45)	χ ²
Non-cooperation	15% (91)	13% (6)	19% (12)	18% (8)	1.09
Some materials	13% (80)	11% (5)	11% (7)	9% (4)	1.05
Boring	12% (76)	17% (8)	12% (8)	2% (1)	5.26
Specific activities	11% (66)	2% (1)	6% (4)	11% (5)	4.79
Writing	6% (35)	4% (2)	3% (2)	4% (2)	0.99
Time problems	5% (31)	11% (5)	5% (3)	7% (3)	3.12
Nothing as least liked	32% (195)	28% (13)	34% (22)	33% (15)	0.61
Everything as least liked	5% (33)	13% (6)	6% (4)	15% (7)	10.23*
Losing a lesson	6% (39)	2% (1)	6% (4)	7% (3)	1.4

*p < 0.05. The number of students is displayed in parentheses.

Results confirm our main hypothesis. There were statistically significant associations between the four groups of adolescents and 8 most liked elements of the program (χ² = 32, 64, df = 21, p < 0.05) and 6 least liked elements of the program (χ2 = 14, 41, df = 15, p < 0.05); showing that bullies, victims, bully-victims, and uninvolved adolescents perceive the activities of the class project differently.

Univariate analyses revealed statistically significant associations between the four groups of adolescents and the following liked most categories: behavioural improvement, knowledge improvement, losing a lesson, and did not like anything. As shown in Table 2, uninvolved adolescents more often nominated behavioural improvement (26%) as the most liked activity compared to the other groups (2–17%). Victims are more likely prefer the knowledge improvement activities (30%) compared to the other groups (6–19%). Bullies like to lose a regular lesson and, in its place, to have a ViSC lesson (28%) more often than the other groups (8–18%). Bully-victims said that that they did not liked anything of the ViSC program (27%) more often than uninvolved (11%) and victims (12%).

As shown in Table 3, few differences between the four groups were found regarding the least liked program elements. Bully-victims (15%) and bullies (13%) more often declared that they disliked everything compared to the other two groups (5–6%).

It is worth mentioning that the social skill of cooperation was mentioned by around 29% of all adolescents. Adding three of the other activities of the program that request cooperation, namely the games, the discussions, and the role-plays, there is another 41% preference on activities that require cooperation. On the other hand, 16% of adolescents complained for the non-cooperation on the part of some others during the ViSC lessons.

Discussion

In the last decades, several multi-level whole school bullying prevention programs have been developed, implemented, and evaluated in several countries (Farrington, Gaffney, Lösel, & Ttofi, 2017; Ttofi & Farrington, 2011; Bull, Schultze, & Scheithauer, 2009). The limited available evidence clearly indicates that multi-level whole school bullying prevention programs are not equally effective for different bully-victim groups (Garandeau et al., 2014; Jenson et al., 2013; Juvonen et al., 2016; Yang & Salmivalli, 2015). To better tailor whole school bullying prevention programs to the needs of these heterogeneous adolescents, it is important to find out how bullies, victims, bully-victims, and uninvolved adolescents perceive and evaluate different program activities. This was the main goal of the present study.

It was hypothesised that bullies, victims, bully-victims, and uninvolved adolescents will perceive the activities of the class project differently and it was expected that not all the activities are equally beneficial for all of the groups. Our data revealed that each group showed distinct preferences for some program activities and similar preferences for other program activities. Victims showed a clear preference for activities fostering knowledge improvement. This is a very important result, as victims demonstrate with this answer their need to learn more about the non-acceptable bullying behaviours. Victims also demonstrated their need to foster social cohesion, because they also nominated cooperation and discussion as important program activities, although there were no statistically significant differences in these activities between the four groups. In line with the theorizing of Juvonen and Graham (2014), social cohesion might be one mechanism that is able to interrupt the negative cyclical process of their plight. Bullies liked to lose a regular lesson more often than the other groups, moreover they often nominated games as their most liked activities, which are not academically oriented, but involve action and leadership. Their preference can be explained by their need for popularity and dominance (Caravita & Cillessen, 2012; De Bruyn et al., 2010; Salmivalli & Isaacs, 2005). Bully-victims show less interest in most of the program elements, and even are more likely to declare that they do not like anything from the program, apart from the games, which they probably liked because of the same reasons as bullies. As Juvonen and Graham (2014) explain bully-victims share some of the plight of victims, but not any of the social benefits associated with the high social status of bullies. Uninvolved adolescents showed a good amount of interest in all the elements of the program. Compared to the other three groups, they showed significantly more interest in behavioural improvement, which can be considered a necessary requirement for changing the norms of bystanders who witness bullying (Salmivalli, 1999; Swearer et al., 2010). It is worth mentioning that cooperation, the ability to collaborate with others, and to support and help them (Gresham & Elliott, 1990) was mentioned equally by all groups of adolescents. This is a good result, because Jenkins, and colleagues (2016) demonstrated that higher levels of cooperation are associated with lower levels of bullying behaviours and victimization, but with higher levels of defending.

Limitations

There are noteworthy limitations that should be considered as future research in this area is needed, e.g. to create bully-victim groups based on self-reports and with a normative cut-off score is a limitation and thus to use multiple informants and statistical methods (e.g., latent class analysis) to identify groups of adolescents is certainly worthwhile. Another limitation could be seen in the absence of a definition before presenting the behavioural items. However, whether a definition is the best (and only) method to disentangle bullying from aggressive behaviour remains a matter of debate (Vaillancourt et al., 2008). Moreover, the present study did not differentiate between traditional and cyber bully-victim groups that could be considered in future studies. Although we were able to use data from a large number of classes, the classes were clustered in only three schools that might limit the generalizability of the present findings.

Practical Implications and Suggestions for Future Research

There are important implications that follow from the present study. To begin with, it is a very valuable information that bullies, victims, and bully-victims showed preferences for activities matching their profiles and their needs. Therefore, the indicated measures of whole school programs (i.e., the class project of the ViSC program), should be enriched with a larger variety of individual activities for bullies, victims, and bully-victims. A larger portfolio of activities would give the teachers the possibility to better tailor the intervention to their students’ needs. If bullies are able to understand that bullying is not acceptable and at the same time they are able satisfy their need for a high status via pro-social means, it is likely that bullying will decrease. On the other hand, our results show that activities fostering knowledge, behavioural and attitudinal improvement are not only perceived as beneficial for uninvolved students but also for victims. Therefore, it is important to include a variety of such measures in future anti-bullying prevention programs. Finally, yet importantly, instead of investigating the preference of program activities with a qualitative approach, future studies could also examine the effectiveness program activities using a much stronger experimental design. Certainly, the realization of such a research design is challenging because bullies, victims, bully-victims, and uninvolved youth would need to be randomly assigned to different program activities during program implementation. Such a study could probably be realized with the help of adaptive online-tool kids and would certainly allow much stronger inferences regarding the effectiveness of certain program activities than the present study.

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