Abstract
Bullying has become a pervasive threat for education, health, and policy. Inadequate professional development in bullying prevention and intervention has compounded this issue. Since teachers’ professional development is a critical aspect in shaping supportive, healthy, and safe learning environments as well as creating and maintaining high-quality education, the purpose of this study is to gain more insight into the motivational processes that contribute to teachers’ intention to participate in future anti-bullying professional development and intervene upon encountering school bullying. The study employed self-determination theory to examine associations between K-12 teachers’ (N = 414) autonomous (intrinsic and identified) and controlled (introjected and external) motivation for participating in anti-bullying training and their intention to (a) participate in future anti-bullying training and (b) intervene upon encountering school bullying. Structural equation modeling revealed that, unlike controlled motivation, teachers’ autonomous motivation for participating in anti-bullying training was positively related to their intention to participate in future training and intervene upon encountering school bullying, implying that school policy and professional development should foster autonomous motivation to increase intention to intervene upon encountering school bullying. Implications for professional development, educational practice, and future research are discussed.
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Notes
Participants were offered a $0.50 incentive to complete the online questionnaire via Qualtrics. To ensure data quality, inattention checks were implemented to detect inattentive respondents and study completion time in seconds were evaluated. Based on a general formula for predicting the time, it takes to complete survey items on MTurk (10.3 s per question), we anticipated this survey (which in its total comprised 38 questions) would take approximately 7 min (391 s) to complete. In total, 22 outliers were deleted (10 participants with less than 100 s and 2 participants with more than 1500 s). The average competition time of the remaining 414 participants was 400.25 s (SD = 246.65).
Including bullying, training recency was important since the benefits of training may diminish over time (Shtivelband et al., 2015).
Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in Mplus confirmed the four-item factor structure. Detailed results of the CFA can be found in the Supplement.
In the USA, bullying prevention laws, policies, and regulations are developed and adopted at the state level. While there are common components (e.g., prohibiting statements, district policy requirements, and consequences) agreed upon by the Department of Education for bullying prevention, states determine their compliance to these components. Regarding the component staff training for bullying prevention in schools, only 39 (78%) of the states have addressed professional development in their anti-bullying policies and regulations (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2019). However, bullying prevention training may be occurring among school personnel in the other 11 (22%) of the states, even though it is not required by the state or regulated by statute. Therefore, in an additional step, all states were coded as 1 if their state mandated professional development (i.e., component staff training for bullying prevention in schools) and 0 if their state did not mandate professional development. We then looked at whether teachers from states that mandate staff training for bullying prevention report higher levels of controlled forms of motivation and lower levels of autonomous motivation. There were no significant differences between the groups.
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Sutter, C.C., Haugen, J.S., Campbell, L.O. et al. Teachers’ Motivation to Participate in Anti-bullying Training and Their Intention to Intervene in School Bullying: a Self-determination Theory Perspective. Int Journal of Bullying Prevention 5, 1–12 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42380-021-00108-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42380-021-00108-4