Teaching problem-solving, leadership to young African-American girls lowers relational aggression

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-11/chop-tpl112315.php

Public Release: 23-Nov-2015
Teaching problem-solving, leadership to young African-American girls lowers relational aggression
CHOP study demonstrates continued effects one year later
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

A new study from the Violence Prevention Initiative at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) suggests that educators, particularly in urban schools, should teach elementary school-aged girls problem-solving skills and provide them leadership opportunities as a way to reduce their relational aggression. Relational aggression includes using gossip and social exclusion to harm others, which is the most common form of aggression among girls.

Published in the journal Psychology of Violence, the study was a randomized control trial with third- to fifth-grade urban African-American girls to evaluate the effectiveness of the Friend to Friend (F2F) aggression prevention program.

F2F is the first and only relational aggression intervention to demonstrate a decrease in relationally aggressive behaviors among urban minority girls that continued at least a year after the conclusion of the program. Specifically, it improved the girls' social problem-solving knowledge and decreased their levels of relational aggression.

"Including this type of positive skill development in urban school curricula is important because children attending inner-city, under-resourced schools are at high risk for emotional and behavioral problems," says psychologist Stephen Leff, PhD, the study's lead author, and co-director of the Violence Prevention Initiative (VPI). "There is evidence that having these skills and positive leadership opportunities increases the students' resilience and leads to better future social interactions.

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"Teachers were vital implementation partners for us, particularly in reinforcing newly learned pro-social skills and strategies outside of the structured sessions," says Leff. "Having their buy-in and support was essential."

The study group found significant improvements on self-report and teacher-report measures completed before and after implementing the program. In a one year follow-up, the participants' new teachers completed the same measures about the students' social behaviors as their previous teachers the year before. Notably, the new teachers were unaware of the girls' aggressive and intervention status, a fact that helped to strengthen the validity of the findings.

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