Effectiveness of the universal school based intervention Rock and Water in improving students' socio safety: Communication as indirect effect?

Rock and Water (R&W) is a widespread, but still poorly evaluated, school based prevention program that aims to improve students’ social safety. R&W applies a psychophysical approach, i.e., play and exercises are used to increase the strength of students, to teach them to make (physical) contact with others and to explore, respect and set own and other’s boundaries. A recurrent theme throughout the intervention is verbal and non-verbal communication. Communication is proposed to increase students’ feelings of social safety. Therefore, we will examine 1) the effectiveness of R&W in improving students’ social safety (i.e., perceived social security in the classroom, aggression, and bullying and victimization) and 2) communication as possible indirect effect of R&W on social safety. Six secondary prevocational schools are assigned to the R&W condition (N = 253) or control condition (Care as usual (CAU); i.e., current school policy to enhance students’ social safety; N = 378). Seventh Grade students participated in the study. Social safety is measured with questionnaires. Communication is assessed through video-observations in a random subsample of 65 dyads using an adapted version of the Peer Interaction Task. Same-sex dyads of classmates planned an activity together, as warm-up, and subsequently discussed three vignettes concerning daily school situations. Each of these four segments lasted 5 minutes. Interactions were coded for verbal and non-verbal communication. Deviant (e.g., “I would hit him”) and prosocial (e.g., “I would borrow him a pen”) communication were coded. Social safety and communication were measured prior and after R&W. Preliminary results of the total sample showed that R&W is more effective than CAU in decreasing conflicts in the class, in improving perceived social security in the classroom and in decreasing victimization. When analyzing part of the subsample that participated in the observation task (n dyads R&W = 7, n dyads CAU = 17) an indirect effect was found which indicated that R&W decreases victimization through increases in the reinforcement of prosocial utterances . These preliminary results indicate that R&W seems to be effective in improving students’ social safety. Additionally, it seems important that prevention programs aimed at bullying should focus on prosocial communication.