Citation
The content featured in this video is based on the following publication:
Messman, E., Heinze, J., Hsieh, H., Hockley, N., Pomerantz, N., Grodzinski, A., Scott, B., Goldstein, N., & Zimmerman, M. (2022). Anonymous reporting systems for school-based violence prevention: A systematic review. Health Education & Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1177/10901981211073734
Transcript
Narrative: Many schools face the challenge of providing a safe environment for students to feel comfortable enough to report threats of violence, often keeping school personnel in the dark. Anonymous reporting systems are one strategy that may encourage students to come forward with information without fear of retaliation. Dr. Libby Messman is a research investigator for the University of Michigan School of Public Health. She and her co-authors conducted an in-depth review into anonymous reporting systems and their usage in schools and hopes to learn more about their application and effectiveness.
Dr. Libby Messman: Yeah, so an anonymous reporting system or ARS is something like a tip line or a hotline, some way that people can report tips, whether it’s about themselves, concerns about their own safety or if they hear a threat, and it’s also used for teachers and parents and families. It’s supposed to be like a whole community thing.
Narrative: Dr. Messman partnered with the Sandy Hook Promise Foundation to further her research into anonymous reporting systems and their effectiveness on school safety.
Dr. Messman: I noticed that there’s a lot of these systems that are used in schools, but there’s not a whole lot of evidence about them. So working with the Sandy Hook team, we decided that we needed to write a scoping review to see what the state of the research was, so that we could provide better recommendations for how they should be used.
Narrative: This systematic review goes into detail about the findings on ARSs, how they’re implemented into schools and how they’re used by the communities surrounding them.
Dr. Messman: In the studies that I looked into, there was a lot of variation in how the ARSs were implemented. Some of them were self-contained within a school. So if someone were to report tip, it would go directly to the principal or the administrator, then there’s other statewide systems such as in Colorado that are actually mandated through the law, and any tip actually goes to an external communication center, and then it’s triaged and managed that way. So the existing research about the use of ARSs suggest that a lot of students are using them to report about themselves, their own concerns about mental health or suicidal ideation or self-harm. The number of times that someone actually reports a violent threat against a school is pretty small, but one of the potentials of ARSs is that it gives administrators a snapshot into the school climate and how students are feeling. And if students are likely to report about their mental health or experiences with bullying, it allows those problems to be addressed before they would escalate into an instance of violence or a threat.
Narrative: One major finding Dr. Messman took away from the review is that more research is needed to fully understand the effects of anonymous reporting systems and how they can be better used to keep students safe.
Dr. Messman: Out of the literature search that we did, we only found four studies that were published on ARSs and none of them examined their effectiveness over time. So they were all cross-sectional studies that just looked at the association between having an ARS and instances of bullying or violence, not actually looking at whether the ARS improves student sense of safety over time. We need to have longitudinal studies on ARSs in schools and understand what the specific aspects of ARS that make them effective. These systems have a lot of potential, but there’s also a lot that we don’t know in terms of best practices, and there’s a lot of resources that go into implementing them. And we need to have more evidence for how and why they work before we have statewide mandates for them.