Practicing defending in virtual reality: A feasibility study among primary school children

Abstract

Most children say they want to help peers who are bullied, but in real bullying situations, they often remain passive bystanders. Existing anti‑bullying programs have led to modest improvements in defending, but they typically provide limited opportunities for children to practice defending in realistic, emotionally charged bullying situations. Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) may offer a promising tool to let children rehearse defending in controlled ways in such scenarios. This practice might be particularly helpful for children who experience stronger inhibitions to defend because they are shy. This feasibility study examined whether a brief VR-based training could strengthen defending behavior and defending self-efficacy in bullying situations, and explored whether children who are more shy would benefit in particular. Participants were 22 children aged 6 - 10 years (M_age = 8.41, SD = 0.96; 77.3% boys), from two Dutch primary schools and an after-school care. In a within-subjects pre-post design, children completed two VR bullying scenarios with individualized coaching in between. Observed defending behavior in VR was coded, and children reported defender self-efficacy, tension, VR experience, shyness, and perceived bullying in their classroom. Children showed a substantial increase in observed defending from pre- to post-training, alongside a significant increase in defending self-efficacy, while reported tension remained stable. Shyness did not moderate observed defending at baseline, nor defending improvements. However, more shy children showed a larger gain in defender self-efficacy than their less shy peers. These findings, obtained in a small, age-heterogeneous sample, suggest that immersive VR can be used to elicit measurable changes in defending behavior and perceived defending ability among young children, and that children with higher levels of shyness may be especially responsive in terms of self-efficacy, but they require replication in larger, age-stratified samples. The study, thus, initially illustrates the potential of VR as a tool to study how bystander defending develops and how children’s defending behavior in perceived socially risky situations can be supported.