Personality and Social Sciences Adolescents’ own suggestions for bullying interventions at age 13 and 16 ANN FRISE ´ N and KRISTINA HOLMQVIST University of Gothenburg, Sweden Frise ´n, A. & Holmqvist, K. (2010). Adolescents’ own suggestions for bullying interventions at age 13 and 16. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology , 51, 123–131. In this study we examined adolescents’ perspectives on what interventions they consider to be effective in order to stop the bullying of a student. The adolescents’ suggestions were reviewed at two time points, age 13 and 16. Participants were 474 girls and 403 boys at the first point of examination, and 429 girls and 332 boys at the second point of examination. The participants’ suggestions were divided into categories based on some of the anti-bullying strategies commonly presented by researchers. Results showed that some anti-bullying strategies were more salient than others in the adolescents’ suggestions, and that their suggestions differed as a function of age, sex and to some extent, current experience of victimization. Having serious talks with the students involved was among the most common suggestions at both ages. However, girls were more likely than boys, and non-victims were more likely than victims, to suggest this particular strategy. Key words: Bullying, bullying interventions, age differences, sex differences. Kristina Holmqvist, University of Gothenburg, Box 500, 405 30 Go ¨teborg, Sweden. Tel: +46 31 786 4263; e-mail: kristina.holmqvist@psy.gu.se INTRODUCTION Bullying is a serious problem with severe and long-term negative consequences in terms of the mental and physical health of the children involved (Hawker & Boulton, 2000; Lunde, Frise ´n & Hwang, 2007; Rigby, 2003; Smith, Ananiadou & Cowie, 2003; Stassen Berger, 2007). Given that most children who attend school are in some way involved in bullying – as victims, bullies or in other participating roles (Salmivalli, 1999) – it is essential that powerful efforts are made towards its prevention and counteraction. The question is: How can bullying be stopped? For the last twenty years, researchers have attempted to answer this important and complex question. Anti-bullying programs have been developed for schools to implement and there are certainly schools that are seriously addressing the bullying issue. However, some of the approaches used by schools appear to be ill-conceived or maybe even counter-productive (Olweus, 2004). Indeed, the results of the intervention programmes have not been overwhelmingly promising, which indicates that there is still much to learn when it comes to the different approaches utilized to stop bullying (Pepler, Smith & Rigby, 2004; Stassen Berger, 2007). In the present study, the main goal was to examine some of these approaches from the perspective of a group of people who have a close-up view of the bullying problem: the students. Which interventions do they consider effective in order to stop bullying? There are several reasons why examining the students’ suggestions for how to stop bullying may be rewarding for research on anti-bullying interventions. First of all, students are part of the social setting where the bullying occurs, and simply by going to school these children absorb detailed experience of various bullying situations, what is being done to stop them and how effective different anti-bullying strategies are. These are important observations which may contribute to a fuller understanding of the problem. Moreover, the students are the only ones present throughout the majority of the bullying situations, since most bullying occurs when school staff and other adults are not around (Rigby, 1996). Asking the students about how to stop bullying is also important because it tells us which anti-bullying interventions about which they are most optimistic. According to Rigby (1996), optimism regarding the possibility of reducing the problem is one of the main condi- tions for tackling the bullying problem. Furthermore, Elliott and colleagues (1986) pointed out that although children are rarely involved in the selection and evaluation of psychological interventions that concern them, it is both ethically and prag- matically beneficial that they participate in making decisions of this type on a level matching their maturational status. Thus, this study was aimed at investigating students’ own suggestions for how to stop bullying. Recent studies have examined students’ perceptions of how victims should cope with bullying situations (Kanetsuna, Smith & Morita, 2006; Kristensen & Smith, 2003; Smith, Mahdavi, Carvalho, Fisher, Russell & Tippett, 2008; Smith, Talamelli, Cowie, Naylor & Chauhan, 2004) but to our knowledge, students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of different bullying interventions (with victims’ coping strategies being just one of them) have only been examined once before. In that particular study, Crothers, Kolbert and Barker (2006) examined middle school students’ preferences for anti-bullying interventions, asking participants to rate fifteen anti-bullying strategies Ó 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation Ó 2009 The Scandinavian Psychological Associations. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. ISSN 0036-5564. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 2010, 51, 123–131 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9450.2009.00733.x