A critical analysis of “Introducing and piloting the KiVa bullying prevention programme in the UK” by J. Hutchings and S. Clarkson 2015.

Introduction
The KiVa program was developed by Christina Salmivalli at the University of Turku in Finland, it was developed as a means to reduce and hopefully prevent bullying and victimization from happening in schools. KiVa is an abbreviation for “Kiusaamista Vastaan” which translates into “against bullying” which relates to the program’s intent to effect the bystanders of bullying as previous research showed that the actions of the bystanders effects the frequency of bullying (Salmivalli, Voeten & Poskiparta, 2011). Whereas other studies have shown that trying to change possible targets and individual bullies are not sufficient to stop bullying behavior (Salmivalli, Poskiparta, Ahtola & Haataja, 2013). The program includes lessons where students are asked/invited to partake in role-play, discussions and listening to stories told by previous bully victims and online games made to guide the students reflect over the matter. Another important aspect of the program is to improve students’ social skills (Hutchings & Clarkson, 2015), as this is an important aspect when making friends, which in return makes them more protected from bullying (Hanish, Ryan, Martin & Fabes, 2005). Being in a KiVa school is easily recognized, as there are posters displayed around the school and staff wearing yellow shirts to remind the students. The KiVa procedure after discovering an incident is to call the victim and bully into separate meetings with a member of the KiVa team, the victim is then asked to explain the situation and the bully is asked to help the victim in future. Follow-up meetings between bully and victim are then arranged later. At the end of the school year the students are asked to answer a survey regarding their own bullying behavior and victimization.

Summary
According to statistics, 11% of UK students and 10% of Welsh students are bullied on a regular basis (Currie, Zanotti, Morgan & Currie, 2012), and there has been several suicides related to bullying (Kim, Koh & Leventhal, 2005), and the long-term consequences of bullying has caused concern on a global level; this is what led Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) to perform a pilot study of the KiVa program due to the success it had in Finland. As the KiVa program is written in Finnish, only one of the three units had been translated into English at the time Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) starte their testing, however the unit used for this study (Unit 2, age 9-11) has proven to be the most successful (Kärna et al., 2011). A total of 17 primary schools were included in this study and taught the program by Salmivalli and her colleagues, unfortunately only 13 of the school provided sufficient post-test data to be included in the final sample. The data was collected through the Revised Olweus Bully/Victim Questionnaire (Olweus, 1996), which is a self-report online survey asking questions concerning whether the students identifies him or herself as a bully, non-bully, victim or non-victim. Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) expected that both bullying and victimization scores would decrease from the pre to the post test in accordance with the results from Finland (Salmivalli et al., 2013) after their trial. After running a t-test to compare the pre and post test data Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) found a statistically significant decrease for both victimization and bullying, and further analysis discovered the same significant results for girls however for boys there was no significant decrease for victimization.
Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) concluded that the KiVa program is a suitable tool to help prevent bullying in schools in the UK, however a lot of resources will be needed if the KiVa message is to be portrayed at all times in schools and costs are made to ensure that the KiVa program is properly taught to teachers and school staff.

Critical analysis
Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) have provided a large number of previous literature surrounding bullying starting with Olweus (1973) and working towards the KiVa program and its success. However Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) literature review lacks reviews of flaws from unsuccessful approaches and the reasons for why those approaches failed; although several studies could have been useful for Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) to argue their point, however they fail to compare failed cases with successful ones; such as zero-tolerance policies (Borgwald & Theixos, 2013), the WEE counseling program in Korea (Minhyo Cho & Park, 2015) and a study testing a confronting and a non-confronting approach (Garandeau, Poskiparta, & Salmivalli, 2014); studies like these can contribute to build new and more efficient anti-bullying programs. Although Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) do criticize the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (OBPP) (Olweus, Limber & Mihalic, 1999) for not being efficient enough which is contradictory with the highly significant results (p<0.0001) found when testing the OBPP (Olweus et al., 1999) amongst Iranian boys (Esteki Azad & Amiri, 2012). The article (Hutchings & Clarkson, 2015) fails to compare the studies mentioned and fails to explain the details of what and why they were not fit to be applied instead of the KiVa (e.g. OBPP, Sheffield Anti-bullying project).

A second flaw is the irrelevant information Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) has included in the introduction, the long-term effects of bullying behavior and victimization (e.g. anti-social behavior, mental health issues) are mentioned but not discussed in later sections of the study nor being tested. And there is a lack of literary summary at the end of the introduction and fails to mention their hypothesis as well.

A sample of Welsh and Cheshire primary school students were collected for the study from 17 schools, however only data was collected from 13 of the schools due to failure of completing post-test data by the schools. A total of 748 students received the program, however no control group was acquired for the experiment, which affects the reliability of the study; without a control group it would be impossible for Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) to draw accurate and reliable conclusions based on their data. Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) claim that a change in those behaviors would be unlikely without the intervention; unfortunately they do not have the data to back this up.

The KiVa program has some very specific instructions, and an accurate procedure is crucial for a study to be replicated in the future. In the description of the actions taken by the school under the KiVa program includes the yellow vests and posters, however Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) have not mentioned whether the school staff wore the vests or if the posters were hanging on the walls. This suggests that either the schools Hutchings and Clarkson’s (2015) used in the pilot study did not wear the vests and there were no posters in the schools, or that they have forgotten to include it in their procedure. Whether the vests and posters had been decided to be omitted for the pilot study, there is no mentioning as to why in this article.

Another important component missing is the ethical concerns within the study, especially when using children as participants the ethical issues are important, as children are more vulnerable. Also Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) mention the concern regarding the costs of the program, however there no actual figures or approximate figures were given.

A comparison between the KiVa pre and post tests showed that classes with a higher proportion of boys displayed a larger effect by the KiVa intervention (Kärnä, Voeten, Little, Poskiparta, Kaljonen, & Salmivalli, 2011), which is also mentioned by Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) in the introduction. However they neglected to include the separate numbers for female and male participants within each school code which could have explained why some schools show a more dramatic decrease than other schools. The justification as to which analysis used, Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) has omitted this piece of information.

An error from the results section is the lack of explanation of what the tables included mean, the tables used by Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) contain a large number of information, however the vague explanation makes them difficult to understand. Table 1 shows that the majority of schools had a decrease in both bullying and victimization, however for some of the schools the percentage of victimization are unchanged and even increased in one of the schools according to the pre and post test results. Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) have not addressed or discussed the data from those particular schools. Even though as mentioned above the gender split of classes has shown to have an effect of the efficiency of the KiVa program (Kärnä et al., 2011). Also studies have shown that popular bullies are less likely to be affected by KiVa anti-bullying interventions (Garandeau, Lee & Salmivalli, 2014) than unpopular bullies, which could possibly be an explanation for the unchanging reports.

In the second table Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) show the results from the same schools but divided into gender groups, for the girls some of the schools have unchanged results for victimization which again Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) fail to mention, which is the same for the boys. However the 38 percentage increase in victimization for one of the school was also left uncommented although this large increase suggests that an error must have been made somewhere in the process and it affected the experiment. Another finding left out was that for some of the boys’ data it showed that the bullying behavior did not change from pre to post test and one school even had an increase in percentage of bullying for boys, although Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) had statistically significant numbers for that specific condition.

As mentioned earlier Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) criticized the OBPP (Olweus et al, 1999) for not being as efficient in other countries than in Norway; however this pilot study was performed hoping to obtain an equally or more successful prevention of bullying behavior and victimization as the original KiVa in Finland. Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) have not given the percentage of decrease after the intervention for their own findings nor included the approximate decrease found in Finland (Kärna et al., 2011; Salmivalli et al., 2013) to compare and evaluate whether running the program in the United Kingdom is as efficient as in Finland.

Conclusion
Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) fail to include literature explaining past failures and the consequences of these failures for new research. The lack of a control group questions the reliability of the study and prevents Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) from having data that can be generalized onto the other primary school students in the UK. The significant levels are included however Hutchings and Clarkson (2015) do not discuss own findings with the existing ones in any detail, neither did they mention the lack of change in some of the schools and the possible causes for it. And the information surrounding the possible ethical issues has been omitted, which is an important part of information when using children as the participants of your study. However the positive outcomes and the background information has been provided, and some of the limitations in the study, one of those is the cost of spreading the program across the UK, although no figures of costs have been given.

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