COLLEGE PARK, MD (December, 2016) – Cixin Wang, an assistant professor in the Department of Counseling, Higher Education, and Special Education, is the co-principal investigator of a grant from the American Psychological Association that will fund a resource guide for preventing bullying among Asian American children.
Dr. Wang is working on the project, funded by a $4,000 APA Public Interest Leadership Conference Health Equity Dissemination Award, with Sumie Okazaki, professor at New York University; Ulash Thakore-Dunlap, a faculty member at The Wright Institute; and Munyi Shea, associate professor at Seattle Pacific University. All four are members of the Asian American Psychological Association (AAPA).
Wang and her team will develop the resource guide on bullying prevention and disseminate it to parents and teachers through workshops, websites, and conferences, as well as through AAPA and other professional organizations. In addition to English, the anti-bullying resource will be translated in Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese.
The project’s leaders hope to raise awareness about the bullying risk factors among Asian American and Pacific Islander students, which are different from the student population at large, as well as provide a resource to immigrant parents who may not know how to respond to bullying. In addition, the resource guide will provide teachers with culturally responsive and evidence based bullying prevention strategies. The final product is expected to become available by October 2017.
“While bullying and its psychological impact have received a significant amount of scholarly and public attention recently,” Dr. Wang said, “teachers and parents (especially immigrant parents) have a difficult time selecting the evidence-based and culturally responsive interventions for their students and children. In addition, there is relatively little public awareness about how Asian American and Pacific Islander students are affected and how to respond appropriately to protect those students from bullying and create a safe school environment.”
In addition to the anti-bullying project, Dr. Wang has also co-authored multiple articles on bullying that have appeared in four academic journals in 2016.
“Bullying Prevention as a Social Justice Issue: Implications With Asian American Elementary School Students,”which appeared in the fall 2016 special issue of School Psychology Forum: Research Into Practice, and “Parents and Teachers’ Perspectives on School Bullying Among Elementary School-Aged Asian and Latino Immigrant Children,” which appeared in the Asian American Journal of Psychology in June 2016, both focus on bullying among Asian American children in elementary schools.
“Longitudinal Relationships between Bullying and Moral Disengagement among Adolescents,” which appeared in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence in October 2016, and “Adolescents’ Implicit Theories of Peer Relationships and Their School Adjustment” which appeared in AERA Open’sOctober-December 2016 issue, examine risk factors (e.g., moral disengagement) and protective factors (e.g., implicit theories) for bullying among middle school students.
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