Increasing Children’s Self-­‐regulation in the Prevention of Traditional and Cyberbullying: What Do Children Think?

Part of the EMSOC project (User Empowerment in a Social Media Culture), that investigates the influence of social media on the (dis)empowerment of vulnerable individuals and groups, has focussed on ‘child empowerment’ in the context of bullying. The goal of this research was to explore new ways to increase children’s self-­regulation in the prevention of traditional and cyber-­bullying, resulting in a set of recommendations. As such, empowering the class as a ‘social group’ is believed to revert exclusion due to bullying. In a first step of this research, experts and teachers were involved in the identification of the pre-­conditions for improving children’s self-­regulation in combatting bullying and resulted in suggestions for how to create such preconditions. Since these preconditions were based on the opinions of adults only, children were actively involved as ‘design partners’ in the following phase of the research. This deliverable first briefly presents the roadmap for a bottom-­up oriented approach to prevent bullying based on insights from experts and teachers. Next, the involvement of children as ‘design partners’ is described and their ideas and values on how to improve the social class climate to prevent bullying are discussed. Finally, a set of recommendations is presented that should be taken into account when designing ‘tools’ to increase children’s self-­regulation in the prevention of bullying. These recommendations are especially useful for school staff and interaction designers.