Research Line: Safety and Resilience in Urban Environments
PhD research
Researcher: Karen Aduful
Start 2021

Contact: prof. dr. Arjan Bos

Children’s experiences of racism start early in life. At school they are confronted with the bullying of children because of their race, ethnicity of religious background. They see it happen and don’t know what to do or are too afraid to do something. The Gate-bull project developed a 4 week school-based Playground Heroes intervention, consisting of an online teacher training and a serious game with interactive classroom lesson plan for children. The intervention taught children to recognize racist bullying and how to react in a safe and constructive way. The results of the pilot evaluation in the Netherlands were promising

The current project aims to significantly develop the potential of the Gate-Bull pilot by redesigning and extending the intervention and evaluating it in a large-scale trial. For this, an interdisciplinary approach is crucial, integrating state of the art knowledge on the psychology of stigma reduction, educational sciences, and historical perspective taking. The project will provide new theoretical insights into the determinants of positive bystander behavior in racist-based bullying situations and on the working mechanisms and intervention effectiveness of the program. It will deliver a comprehensive intervention against racist-based bullying which will be made freely available for primary education to use. By pursuing this goal of developing children’s skills to implement positive bystander behavior in racist-bullying situations, we are one step further in
generating a safe and resilient society (Research Line 1).

Team

Faculty of Psychology: prof. dr. Arjan Bos, dr. Roy A. Willems, dr. Trijntje Völlink en dr. Francine Dehue
Faculty of Humanities: prof. dr. Gemma Blok, dr. Pieter de Bruijn
Faculty of Educational Sciences: Dr. Giel van Lankveld
School of Education and Social Sciences, University of the West of Scotland: Dr. Maria Sapouna.