Effectiveness of the KiVa Antibullying Program: Grades 1–3 and 7–9.

Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 105(2) of Journal of Educational Psychology (see record 2012-35221-001). The article “Effectiveness of the KiVa Antibullying Program: Grades 1–3 and 7–9,” by Antti Karna, Marinus Voeten, Todd D. Little, Erkki Alanen, Elisa Poskiparta, and Christina Salmivalli (Journal of Educational Psychology, Advance online publication. October 22, 2012. doi: 10.1037/a0030417) omitted some wording in the text. The sentence in the first paragraph below Table 5 beginning with, “More specifically, the model . . . .” should have read “More specifically, the model was defined as follows: Ŷtijk is the predicted value, t is used to indicate time points, i is used for individual students, j is used to denote classrooms, and k to denote schools:” This study investigated the effectiveness of the KiVa Antibullying Program in two samples of students, one from Grades 1–3 (7–9 years old, N = 6,927) and the other from Grades 7–9 (13–15 years old, N = 16, 503). The Grades 1–3 students were located in 74 schools and Grades 7–9 students in 73 schools that were randomly assigned to intervention and control conditions. Multilevel regression analyses revealed that after 9 months of implementation, the intervention had beneficial effects in Grades 1–3 on self-reported victimization and bullying (odds ratios ≈ 1.5), with some differential effects by gender. In Grades 7–9, statistically significant positive results were obtained on 5 of 7 criterion variables, but results often depended on gender and sometimes age. The effects were largest for boys' peer reports: bullying, assisting the bully, and reinforcing the bully (Cohen's ds 0.11–0.19). Overall, the findings from the present study and from a previous study for Grades 4–6 (Karna, Voeten, Little, Poskiparta, Kaljonen, et al., 2011) indicate that the KiVa program is effective in reducing bullying and victimization in Grades 1–6, but the results are more mixed in Grades 7–9.