Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ProBACT (Standing up for Refugee Peers: Promoting Youth's Prosocial Bystander Responses to Intergroup Bullying)
Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2024-08-31
The current project (Promoting Prosocial Bystander Actions; ProBACT) aimed to understand the correlates o Turkish youth’s bystander responses to intergroup bullying of Syrian youth and ultimately to increase Turkish youth’s motivation to intervene and to upstand against bullying of Syrian refugee peers in the intergroup context in Türkiye. Considering the widespread and long-lasting effects of intergroup bullying on both refugee youth and non-refugee youth (psychological well-being, physical health, educational attainment), the current project provided important insight into pathways to promote anti-bullying intervention programs to promote inclusive schools in Türkiye. The results of the study showed that Turkish children and adolescents with higher empathy towards refugees, theory of mind towards refugees (ability to attribute mental state to refugees), justice sensitivity, positive attitudes towards refugees reported higher likelihood intervening responses when they witness the intergroup bullying of their Syrian refugee peers. Further, findings documented that when children and adolescents were surrounded by peers who were exclusive for their refugee peers, they would be less likely to intervene in intergroup bullying of their Syrian refugee peers. Altogether the results documented the dynamic relationship between social-cognitive skills and intergroup-related factors in understanding mechanism behind prosocial bystander responses to intergroup bullying. The current study provided a first step towards developing future intervention programs that can be tailored to another intergroup context to create welcoming and safe social environments for all children and adolescents. Overall, the current project is significant and innovative because of its focus on the factors involving in prosocial bystander responses to intergroup bullying through an interdisciplinary lens, its application of social and developmental theory to anti-bullying intervention programs, and its incorporation of an understudied intergroup context. As also noted by the European Commission, diversity, equity, and inclusion should be an important part of societies fundamental mission. Overall, this project helped us to identify the factors that can provide answers to the question of “What could be the glue that holds society together?”.
Within the scope of the current project (Promoting Prosocial Bystander Actions; ProBACT) the data was collected from 510 children and adolescents in schools. Before data collection, hypothetical bullying scenarios and survey measures were prepared with the consultation of project advisors, pilot study participants and research assistants in the lab. The stories and other survey measures were presented to lab members several times. After finalizing the hypothetical stories and full survey measures, the research applied to the ethical approval at Bilkent University. To collect data from schools, the researcher collaborated with the Ministry of Education in Türkiye. After getting ethical approval from Bilkent University and Ministry of Education the researcher communicated with schools and parents. After getting consent forms from parents, the researcher collected data from children and adolescents in their schools. After data collection, the researcher worked on the data to cleaning and analysis. The researcher also coded children’s and adolescents’ responses to open-ended questions to understand their reasoning about facilitators and barriers in intervening to bullying of their Syrian refugees. After data collection the researcher provided a debrief about the project to students, parents and schools to explain the aim of the project. Then, the researcher gave several seminars and workshops to students who participated to the study in their schools after the project. These seminars and workshops were about increasing respect for diversity, awareness of social inequality experiences of their refugee peers, empathic concerns related to injustice, helping to their refugee peers. The researcher also prepared a report for the Ministry of Education to share the results of the project and to provide implications of the study results for the education policy about reducing intergroup bullying and integration of Syrian refugees to the school system in Türkiye. The researcher also gave several scientific seminars to the Psychology department at Bilkent University. Further, the results of the study were presented at several international and national conferences.
The results of the study (Promoting Prosocial Bystander Actions; ProBACT) provided evidence for the importance of social-cognitive skills and intergroup-related factors in promoting Turkish children’s and adolescent’s prosocial bystander responses to intergroup bullying of Syrian refugee peers. More specifically, Turkish children and adolescents with higher empathy towards refugees, theory of mind towards refugees (ability to attribute mental state to refugees), justice sensitivity, positive attitudes towards refugees reported higher likelihood intervening responses when they witness the intergroup bullying of their Syrian refugee peers. Further, findings documented that when children and adolescents were surrounded by peers who were inclusive for their refugee peers, they would be more likely to stop intergroup bullying of their Syrian refugee peers. Hence, the findings of the current study generated new knowledge for future research to examine the interplay between group processes and social cognition to empower active actions towards racism and discriminatory act by bridging developmental and intergroup processes. The findings of the current study provided important insight into factors to make children and adolescents to stand up against intergroup bullying of refugees. This can reduce the bullying rates of Syrian refugee peers, and this can help Syrian refugee youth to progress in their educational paths to be better equipped for their futures to become independent individuals in the economic system. Currently, the integration of Syrian children and youth in the educational system in Turkey is a critical issue. Thus, addressing intergroup bullying should be both a societal obligation and economic responsibility for a better future for every youth. Further, anti-refugee sentiments are expected to be on the rise especially considering the current political climate. Hence, it is critical to address such anti-refugee sentiments, hate crime, and bias-based treatment by educating children and adolescents who can raise their voice to racism and can be responsible adults for the social issues impacting marginalized populations. Moreover, Turkey is one of the countries that will continue to face refuge influx evidenced by the fact that thousands of people from other countries had to flee due to the escalating war/conflict contexts in many countries. Although the current project mainly aimed to address intergroup bullying of Syrian refugees, the methodology of the project allows to adapt it to different intergroup contexts easily (e.g. intergroup bullying of Afghan youth). This also provided global implications to address bias-based treatment of refugee youth in other countries across the Europe.