Faculty Spotlight: Bullying Interventions With Tracy Waasdorp, PhD, MEd

Editor’s Note: Meet the diverse, dedicated, and distinctive faculty who are discovering and developing pediatric life-changing solutions at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Research Institute, in our monthly Faculty Spotlight series. This year, we’re celebrating our internal grant recipients who are pursuing new avenues of research with this dedicated funding support. Although we cannot feature all the award recipients in this series, we congratulate their continued hard work and scientific contributions to pediatric research. In this Q&A, we meet Tracy Waasdorp, PhD, MEd, recipient of the Research Track Faculty Pilot Program. Stay tuned for more from our Faculty Spotlight series throughout the year.

How long have you been at CHOP, and can you tell us a little about your research specialty?

I have been at CHOP for 13 years, starting as a research scientist in 2010 before making the transition to faculty in 2021.

My research focuses on improving children’s social and emotional health, reducing bullying and aggression, and helping adults promote children’s positive peer relationships through several indicated and universal school-based interventions. As co-director of School-Based Bullying Prevention and Social Emotional Learning Research in the Center for Violence Prevention, I have developed and examined the efficacy of numerous school-based prevention and intervention programs for teachers, school counselors, and students in third through fifth grades. I am excited to apply this expertise at PolicyLab as a research faculty member.

My research focuses not only on physical behaviors, such as hitting, pushing, and fighting that are traditionally thought of as related to aggression and bullying, but also relational aggression including social exclusion and rumors, and cyber or online behaviors that also have been found to harm children’s social and emotional health. It also includes interventions that are both student- and teacher-facing.

Why did you choose to focus on that specialty?

In the early 2000s, I was examining qualitative survey responses of middle school students’ perceptions of bullying, and a theme emerged. Children who experienced exclusion, rumors, and other reputation-damaging aggression did not consider these to be ‘bullying’ behaviors, even though they were deeply harmed by them. In an interesting parallel, school personnel and parents reported that they either did not believe bullying behaviors warranted their intervention, or they reported not having the skills to appropriately intervene, despite how the harm being felt by these children made it clear the adults in their lives and communities needed to intervene. Additionally, relational harm is now being experienced through cyberbullying behaviors with social media and an ever-changing technological landscape as dominant forces in the lives of children and adolescents.

As an intervention researcher, I became acutely aware of the need for early, effective prevention and intervention efforts that address all forms of aggression and bullying to shift the negative trajectory associated with these behaviors. Further, schools and communities need to feel equipped to handle these behaviors through training and coaching to implement evidence-based programming.

These factors have been the driving force behind my focus on developing comprehensive aggression and bullying prevention programming that is effective and feasible to implement in schools. Fortunately, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now identifies bullying as a form of youth violence and as an adverse childhood experience that is traumatic with long-lasting negative impacts on a child’s trajectory. This has helped advance the field of intervention research and supports my important line of work.

What is a new avenue of research you’re able to explore as result of the Research Track Award?

My team and I are expanding our long-standing focus on supporting school staff and students in third through fifth grades by developing much-needed aggression prevention programming for children in the early elementary years (kindergarten through second grade).

Early elementary school is a pivotal developmental period where children can gain positive social and emotional skills and strategies to navigate peer conflict successfully. However, there are currently no social and emotional skill building or bullying and aggression reduction programs with documented success for students in kindergarten through second grade. 

Funding from the Research Track Award allows our team to develop the “Early Years” program to address this gap. In the first year of funding, we are using a community-based participatory research approach to gain the perspectives of our local Philadelphia school partners about the needs of this age group and how programming can be feasible and responsive to the needs of the community. In the second year of funding, we will pilot the developed program and meet with school partners to elicit feedback. 

Can you tell us about a current or recent research project that you are excited about?

I am very excited about a current National Institute of Child Health and Human Development R01 in its third year of funding. The project is a randomized controlled trial of a program developed in partnership with colleagues at Johns Hopkins University, called the Bullying Classroom Check-Up (BCCU). BCCU focuses on improving teachers’ classroom management practices and their ability to detect, prevent, and intervene with bullying behaviors in real time. The BCCU is the first program that incorporates social-emotional learning and bullying prevention into a one-on-one teacher training and coaching model, using guided practice in a novel mixed-reality simulator and motivational interviewing to improve staff buy-in and skill development. 

What are the long-term research questions you hope to answer? 

I hope that our programing to promote social-emotional skills and prevent bullying can be incorporated seamlessly into the culture of schools for both staff and students. It would be a goal to have programming across all stages of childhood and adolescence, from pre-school to high school. At the same time, I hope to demonstrate that parents can learn similar skills and strategies to provide the scaffolding necessary for children to have positive social relationships and reduced conflicts with peers. The relationships children form with the adults in their lives are critical for positive social and emotional development. It is my goal to develop and evaluate interventions that are effective in equipping adults with skills to prevent or respond to bullying and aggression among children.