Bystander intervention among secondary school pupils: Testing an augmented Prototype Willingness Model

Abstract

This study augmented the Prototype Willingness Model (PWM) to assess reactive and deliberative decision-making underpinning bystander intervention in gender-based violence contexts. There were 2079 participants (50% male, 49% female, and 1% unreported), aged 11-15 years old (M = 12.32, SD = 0.91), attending 19 secondary schools across Scotland. Participants self-reported the augmented PWM variables, then their intervention behaviour approximately 1 month later. Path analyses mostly supported the predicted relationships between positive and negative bidimensional attitudes, subjective norms, prototype perceptions, perceived behavioural control, and self-efficacy on intentions and willingness. Willingness predicted positive (speaking with a teacher) and negative (doing nothing) intervention in less serious violence. Self-efficacy predicted negative intervention in more serious violence. Subjective norms positively moderated the attitudes-intentions relationship. Overall, the results suggested that reactive (willingness) more so than deliberative (intention) decisionmaking account for intervention when young people witness gender-based violence. Additionally, the findings highlight the complexity of bystander intervention decisionmaking, where adding control perceptions, bidimensional attitudes, and moderators have independent contributions.

Evaluating the Mentors in Violence Prevention Program: A Process Examination of How Implementation Can Affect Gender-Based Violence Outcomes

“…Additional, exploratory, analyses examined implementation (dosage, fidelity, and adaptation) effects on improvements in perceived behavioral control (the amount of control a bystander perceives over whether they can intervene), intentions to intervene in instances of gender-based violence, and willingness to intervene in more serious gender-based violence. These variables were not significant predictors of bystander decision-making in Pagani et al (2022a) . However, they do predict bystander behavior elsewhere in the literature (e.g., Rosval, 2013).…”

“…These examples included a balanced range of emotional, verbal, physical, and sexual gender-based violence. The factorial structures of the measures follow Pagani et al (2022a) . Measures were subjected to factor analyses to test whether they comprised a single factor (violence) or two factor (more serious and less serious violence) structure(s).…”

“…How willing would you be to do something?” (“not at all willing” = 1 to “extremely willing” = 9). This measure constituted two components: willingness to intervene in “less serious” and “more serious” gender-based violence ( Pagani et al, 2022a ). Higher factor scores indicated greater willingness to intervene in both cases.…”

“…For each one they had witnessed, they reported how they intervened by ticking box(es), aligning with Miller et al.’s (2012) two negative (e.g., “I didn’t do/say anything”), and four positive (e.g., “I told the person in public that acting like that was not ok”) responses. This measure also contained more serious and less serious components of gender-based violence (see Pagani et al, 2022a ), enabling four measures of intervention behavior to be calculated: the proportion of times the mentees intervened positively in less serious situations (positive intervention LessSerious ), the proportion of times they intervened positively in more serious situations (positive intervention MoreSerious ), the proportion of times they intervened negatively in less serious situations (negative intervention LessSerious ), and the proportion of times they intervened negatively in more serious situations (negative intervention MoreSerious ).…”

“…This study examines the effects of three execution components of the implementation process (dosage, fidelity, and adaptation) on anticipated outcomes of MVP, drawn from both theoretical ( Damschroder et al., 2009 ) and empirical ( Durlak & DuPre, 2008 ) work. As preregistered, 1 confirmatory analyses were conducted to test the hypothesis that higher levels of fidelity and dosage will lead to significant T1 (pre-MVP exposure) to T2 (post-MVP exposure) improvements in positive (e.g., speaking with an adult) and negative (e.g., doing nothing) intervention behavior, as well as in improvements across the following constructs, which were found to predict intervention behavior in a recent large-scale study of MVP ( Pagani et al., 2022a ): positive attitudes (positive evaluations of intervening), negative attitudes (negative evaluations of intervening), self-efficacy (beliefs in one’s own capabilities to intervene), subjective norms (perceptions of others’ intervention behavior), prototype perceptions (perceptions of similarity to the typical, regularly intervening bystander), moral disengagement (extent to which bystander justifies gender-based violence as right or wrong), willingness to intervene in less serious gender-based violence. It was also hypothesized that higher levels of adaptation will lead to significant T1 to T2 improvements in the above outcome variables when fidelity is high (above 60%).…”