What is it about?
Children's creative works can enhance the interview process helping researchers gain new insights into children's perspectives on sensitive topics, such as bullying. In our study, school children were offered a set of incomplete comic strips about bullying and cyber-bullying. Participants could write and/or draw anything to develop their own unique visual stories. The resultant creative works were then used as personalized interview prompts. This approach 1) helped children to deeply reflect on their experiences of witnessing and/or being involved in bullying and 2) made the interview process participant-led enabling children to focus on what was personally important to them.
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Why is it important?
Social desirability bias represents a serious challenge in research that relies on participants' self-reports. It becomes even a bigger problem when researchers deal with sensitive topics. For example, we know that school bullying is a prevalent problem, but far from all involved children can admit their part in this phenomenon. Finding new research methods and screening tools that could help detect school bullying is essential. One of the most important aspects that participants effectively communicated through their creative works was their uncensored perceptions of victims and the level of empathy towards them. Understanding how victims are perceived is a key factor to ensuring safe educational environments, while accurate assessments of children's empathy is crucial for developing better intervention programs.
Perspectives
One of the most important aspects of this study for me personally was the fact that we conducted this project at an international level involving two very different countries. This way we were able to see that the same comics worked very similarly across cultures. It is often a challenge in international research to translate participants' materials so that they are relevant in different contexts and communicate the same message. In this study, comics' visual components helped us minimize the reliance on text but still effectively delivered the intended message.
Daria Khanolainen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Self and others in school bullying and cyberbullying: Fine-tuning a new arts-based method to study sensitive topics., Qualitative Psychology, September 2022, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/qup0000236.
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