Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: Social exclusion has a myriad of negative effects on students’ psychological and social well-being. One way to combat such negative effects is to raise awareness about social exclusion in schools. Here, we describe and evaluate a training program that was carried out across schools in the Netherlands. The program relies on basic experiential learning principles and a well-established social exclusion paradigm to make participants experience and discuss social exclusion. We had three goals in the current paper: (1) discussing previous work supporting the feasibility of such programs, (2) presenting a secondary analysis of the data generated by the program, and finally (3) testing a core assumption of Temporal Need-threat Model of Ostracism (Williams, 2009). The analyses are based on 14,065 participants (ages 12 to 19) and a subset of those who evaluated the program later (n = 386). Our review of the literature supports the feasibility of the program in raising awareness about social exclusion. The results of the secondary data analyses further corroborate this finding and, importantly, offer preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of the program. Lastly, stressing a core assumption of the ostracism model, the results indicated that the experience of ostracism was not substantially altered by the characteristics of the participants such as age and gender.
Source: Social Psychology of Education
Authors: Erdem O. Meral, Ilja van Beest, Cana Karaduman
Institution: Tilburg University
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4313434106