TPC-Journal-V5-Issue4

The Professional Counselor /Volume 5, Issue 4 497 Students might be hesitant to turn away from their peer group and ask an adult for help instead. Regarding the smaller effect sizes for two of the confidence items, it is possible that confidence in one’s skills as an advocate may be more difficult to change than knowledge. Because skill acquisition for children is largely related to practice (Diamond & Lee, 2011), greater changes in confidence are likely to be reported after students have an opportunity to use the STAC strategies over time. Results of this study provide preliminary support for the use of STAC as a brief, stand-alone bystander psychoeducational program. This is consistent with prior research on brief, stand-alone programs designed to change bystander behavior and reduce participation in bullying (Evers et al., 2007) and change attitudes and increase efficacy and rate of intervening (Andreou et al., 2008). Taken together, these finding are important because although comprehensive, school-wide programs are considered the standard for practice (Bradshaw, 2015), they place high demands on schools in terms of time allocation and resources. In contrast, brief, stand-alone bystander interventions can provide easy to implement, cost-effective alternatives to school-wide programs. Limitations and Directions for Future Research While this study contributes to our understanding of how to equip student bystanders to be advocates to stop bullying at school, certain limitations should be considered. First, students were from predominantly Caucasian Northwest schools, thus limiting the generalizability of the results. Additionally, the sample size was relatively small, further limiting the generalizability of our findings. Thus, it is important for future research to be conducted with a larger and more diverse sample. Further, information was obtained through self-report. Self-report can potentially lead to biased or distorted reporting, including social desirability, resulting in students rating items higher after the training, particularly due to the recent exposure of the training. Self-report, however, is a common practice in counseling research and provides useful information in learning more about programs designed to address bullying in schools. Additionally, participants were not randomly selected; instead, school counselors invited students to participate based on student attributes that were deemed appropriate for becoming peer advocates. Further, Hispanic students were underrepresented. Thus, selection procedures and the resulting sample also limit the generalizability of the study results. Another limitation is that the study design did not include a control group. Thus, it is not clear if study outcomes were related to selection variable, the STAC training or unmeasured variables. Future research using random assignment and a randomized controlled design in which students are randomly assigned to a STAC training group or a wait-list control group would improve the validity of the study. Finally, the questionnaire used in this study was designed to measure outcomes specifically for STAC training. We used procedures to establish content validity for the questionnaire. Content validity, however, is not as strong as establishing criterion-related or construct validity, which was beyond the scope of this study. Future studies using questionnaires with established psychometric properties would strengthen the research examining the effectiveness of the STAC training. Although the current study represents an important first step in evaluating the effectiveness of a brief, stand-alone training, this study was limited to examining changes in ability to identify what bullying looks like, knowledge of the STAC strategies and confidence intervening when bullying is observed. We did not examine (1) student retention of the STAC training information by administering a second post-test to students later in the semester (2) whether students used the STAC strategies learned during the training, (3) social and emotional outcomes for students trained