Abstract
The present study aims to explore if students who voluntarily decide to become peer educators in an anti-bullying program differ from their classmates who don’t take on this role. 524 Italian students (age 13–18; males = 57%), completed self-report questionnaires at the pre-test measure of the NoTrap! anti-bullying program. In a following step, 118 of them voluntarily decided to become peer educators. Probit regression separate for gender, showed that male peer educators have a higher level of victimization, perceived support from friends and prosocial behaviour. On the other hand, female peer educators are characterized by a higher level of defending behaviours. These findings may guide further investigation about the role of peer educator in regards to bullying and cyberbullying prevention and intervention programs.
Acknowledgment
The authors are grateful to all of the students, teachers, schools, and to the Province of Lucca for their collaboration in the study.
Notes
1 Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) were conducted with Mplus 7.0 (Muthén & Muthén, 1998–2015) using missing data MLR estimator to obtain robust estimates given the non-normality of the items’ distribution. All of the models were evaluated by means of the following overall indices: the χ2 statistic, the root-mean-squared error of approximation (RMSEA), and the comparative fit index (CFI). Recommended cut-off points for these measures are .05 for RMSEA (Browne & Cudeck, Citation1993) and .90 or .95 for CFI (Hu & Bentler, Citation1999).