The overall aim of the STEMM Bullying and Harassment Intervention Project is to develop a Bullying and Harassment intervention from the ground up and pilot it in the partner organisations.
Summary
Phase 2 – Delivery and Evaluation – takes place between January 2026 to July 2027. In this phase, the BaH programme designed in Phase 1 will be piloted and evaluated. It will be further refined following a mixed-method evaluation to support its evolution into sector-wide resources along with evaluation tools to support the programme in the longer-term.
Phase 1 uses an innovative methodological approach to build the BaH intervention/training programme from the ground up. Students and relevant stakeholders will be invited to participate in a successive series of integrated methods within an overall research design based on Group Concept Mapping methodology (for further information on this methodology, click here). By ‘successive’ we mean each of the research steps takes place after the previous step rather than occurring in parallel. By ‘integrated’, we mean each of these steps builds upon the previous.
Overall, our approach is a co-creation framework. We will enable students and relevant stakeholders to brainstorm and conceive what form the BaH intervention/training programme should take, how it should be delivered and what issues need to be considered in the design and delivery of the programme.
Overall Approach
Phase 1 in detail
Step 1: Explore
1) the forms or bullying and/or harassment experienced and/or witnessed by students
2) their responses to these experiences
3) the support they drew (or did not draw) upon
4) the impact of BaH on them
5) their ideas around what should be included in a BaH intervention/training programme
These interviews will also inform the next steps of the projects in two ways:
First, case vignettes of key examples and scenarios of BaH raised in the interviews will be developed to inform step 2, where we will use (where necessary) these vignettes to facilitate students to brainstorm ideas on how these scenarios could have been addressed through a BaH intervention/training programme.
Second, the themes and specific issues raised in these interviews will help with step 7 (INTERPRETATION) and will help the research team to design and develop the BaH intervention/training programme for its piloted delivery.
Step 2: Brainstorm
Case vignettes of BaH scenarios developed from the interviews in step 1 along with insights from the research literature will be used where necessary to facilitate the brainstorming process.
Step 3: Synthesize
It is estimated that hundreds of ideas will be developed through step 1 and step 2, but will result in a final list of an estimated 75-150 ideas.
Step 4: Organise
Whatever way participants choose to complete this survey activity, the data will be inputted into the GroupWisdom™ software. GroupWisdom™ is a specialised software to conduct Group Concept Mapping, the methodology used to capture participants opinions about what form the BaH programme should take.
Step 5: Define
1) the ‘importance’ of each idea
2) the ‘current presence’ of each idea (i.e., the extent to which each idea already exists within their institutions)
3) the extent to which each idea is ‘challenging to implement’
Participants will also be invited to complete an optional demographic sheet to capture a multiplicity of demographic and other characteristics to explore important points of comparison and areas of interest relevant to the development of the BaH intervention/training programme.
Each of these surveys will be conducted through the specialised software GroupWisdom™.
Step 6: Outcome
Bivariate analysis of key demographic variables and other characteristics will be conducted to highlight specific areas of the BaH programme that need to be considered to ensure it constitutes a holistic programme that can address a diversity of BaH contexts.
Step 7: Interpretation
Step 8: Solution
