Fighting the Bullying Epidemic: The Effects of an Intervention Strategy on School-Aged Children with Speech Disabilities

Overview

Objectives/Goals The objective of this study is to evaluate if speech-disabled children can identify positive traits in themselves and improve coping strategies with bullying. Methods/Materials Questionnaire, A Childrens book,The Stuttering Little Ballet Boy, written by Sohel Bagai, Human subjects medically diagnosed with speech disabilities. Ninety-two children with clinically diagnosed speech disabilities are given a baseline questionnaire asking to rate their experience of bullying. An intervention was done by reading a motivational book of a success story of a speech disabled child. The children are asked to identify something they thought they were really good at and asked to write this down. Then they were asked to think about their strength that they had written down at the next incidence of bullying that happened to them. One month later, they were asked to fill out the questionnaire again. No intervention with the book was done in the control group. Results I obtained the stress and coping scores of 92 students before the intervention and compared the same scores after the intervention using a paired "t-test". A comparison was also done in before and after studies in the control group. No significant difference was found in questions one through four on the experimental and control groups. A significant difference was found in the answers to the fifth question. The children felt less shy or nervous in talking to the other kids or adults after the intervention. Conclusions/Discussion I predicted that bullying will be less due to an increase in self-confidence. As a result of my research I could not conclude that bullying was less. The teachers reported that the children seemed to be more comfortable with talking about instances that happened and were having an open discussion with each other about it too. Identifying positive traits in ones own personality helps increase self-confidence and coping strategies with bullying.

Awards (1)

• Honorable Mention

Competition history

• CSEF 2018 Behavioral & Social Sciences · Entry S0402

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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