An evaluation of police officers in schools as a bullying intervention

Deanna N. Devlin, Mateus Rennó Santos and Denise C. Gottfredson

Evaluation and Program Planning, 2018, vol. 71, issue C, 12-21

Abstract: Despite existing efforts to prevent bullying, research suggests that bullying remains a serious and common problem across the United States. Therefore, researchers should continuously propose and evaluate alternative policies that may mitigate bullying as a social issue. One such strategy that has been proposed is the use of police officers in schools, best known as School Resource Officers (SROs). The current study evaluated the efficacy of SROs as an intervention against bullying in schools in the United States. Using a longitudinal sample consisting of three years of data from the School Survey on Crime and Safety (n = 480), schools that initiated, discontinued, and continued their use of SROs from one time point to another were compared to a control group of schools. The findings indicate that SROs do not have an effect on bullying in schools. Policy implications of these findings suggest that programs that focus on components such as teaching social and emotional competency skills, improving relationships between students and adults, and creating a positive school environment may be more effective in reducing bullying than a security procedure such as the use of SROs. Alternative programs should be explored to mitigate bullying and improve the well-being of students.

Keywords: Bullying; School resource officers; Police officers; School climate; School (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149718917301118
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:epplan:v:71:y:2018:i:c:p:12-21

DOI: 10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2018.07.004

Access Statistics for this article

Evaluation and Program Planning is currently edited by Jonathan A. Morell

More articles in Evaluation and Program Planning from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().