Ch. Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.

The Podcast:

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Well, welcome again, everybody. Welcome to part 8 of Bullying Prevention! Myths, Truths and what to do! We’re going to talk about what to do today. I want to welcome Senior Master Laura Sanborn. And thank you for being here, ma’am.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Thank you, sir.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

We missed you at our last couple of them. And we’re going to talk about what to do when your kid’s being bullied or what to do ahead of time in case your kid’s getting bullied. And we’re going to really focus on some topics that are going to help your kid ahead of time before they get bullied.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So we’ve talked a lot about what to do if your kid’s being bullied and how to work with schools and what to do if your kid’s being bullied and what to do and how to help your kid. And we’ve covered that in great detail in other parts of our podcast and other parts of our book, but now we’re going to talk about what to do ahead of time and how to be proactive.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

And what we’ve talked about before is that there’s a lot of school-based programs. My favorite is the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program. That’s a fantastic program and has the best results of any school-based bullying prevention program. But there’s also some other wonderful programs that we have covered that work really well.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

And we’ve talked about some other programs that really don’t have any basis in research, don’t have any evidence basis for results in bullying prevention. So we really want your schools to have some, a program that works. And that’s something that you may or may not be able to control as a parent.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

What we do know you can control is what you do with your kids. So we’re going to go over this in a couple different ways. We’ll talk about first, what we know is the number one most effective program. So let’s talk about it. And of course, everybody that’s been reading about us and hearing us talking in the podcast knows we’re martial artists, and it may feel like we’re biased.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

And when we started this project that we’re going to talk about in a little bit, we have this idea that does martial arts help kids with bullying prevention. And does it help kids with really two things, number one question we were asking is, does it help kids keep from getting bullied?

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

And we think, or we thought that it did. We thought this probably helps them, mostly not because they would protect themselves in a fight or get in fights all the time and then show that they’re the strongest kid on the block.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

But mostly because we felt like it would build enough confidence so they wouldn’t be in the bullied group, that they wouldn’t be in the group that would be targeted for bullying, that they’d build enough confidence so they could stand up for themselves and so on.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So there’d be a lot of characteristics that martial arts would help them with that would keep them from being bullied. Number two, is that we wanted to see if this would prevent them from bullying other kids. And so we’re going to go over the research and what we found in martial arts in pretty extensive research that we were able to do and what the results were.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So let’s get to it. I’m going to share a different screen. And this came directly from some research that we did with Arizona State University, and it was in my doctoral program. So let’s get to that. Master Sanborn was part of it, and many schools across the country were. I’m really proud to say that they were part of the program and part of our process when we built this.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

And I’m going to skip around a little bit, because we’ve covered a lot of the details that were in the dissertation research. Because part of the dissertation research of course, is some of the work that we’ve done already, which is to summarize what’s going on in bullying prevention.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So the research was done in 2012 and it still holds up today in all the areas that are important. So again, our goals was to figure out whether martial arts had an effect on bullying, both in preventing bullying and in keeping kids from bullying other kids.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So we’re going to skip ahead because we’ve already covered a lot of this major topic. And really quickly to talk about what this procedure was during the bullying prevention project was we measured bullying behaviors in three different areas, so that we got a really good sample of what was happening in bullying.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

And this is called a quasi-experimental design because we didn’t have time to wait three or four or five years to test kids, start a group of kids and then wait five years to see what happened. We already had these kids that we measured what kind of bullying was going on with kids that just started martial arts.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Those were the beginners. And then we measured what was going on with the kids in the middle, the what we’d call yellow through red belts, the intermediate students. And then we measure what was happening with the black belts. They’d been with our in martial arts, not in our martial arts school, but in all kinds of martial arts schools all across the country.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

And they had been with us about three to five years, sometimes six, seven, eight years. So they had been at least a first degree black belt or higher. And the great part was this was in 17 different states at 22 different schools. We also did recruitment at large tournaments, big national tournaments.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So it was spread even further than that, 22 separate schools, plus a wide variety of just individual samples across the nation. So it was generally suburban middle class. So kind of middle of demographics, which is where we see most bullying. We also see it at very high socioeconomic status, and we see it at low socioeconomic status.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

It doesn’t seem to be more prevalent at low socioeconomic status. And we’ve gone over that data before, but we’ve kind of, this is the group that we got. So it was a very large sample of kids, which is what’s very important for data collection. If you have a very small sample, which most research in martial arts and most research in bullying are very, very small sample sizes.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

When you have small sample sizes to digress a little bit on statistics, then the data isn’t as relevant. It’s not as statistically significant. So you can do your own research on that if you want to spend a little more time on that, but we got quite a few samples. And we used the program, the Olweus bullying questionnaire, which asked quite a few questions on whether to the kids.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So they had to be at least in third grade. So this was third grade or higher, whether they had been bullied, how they were bullied, whether they bullied other kids. This wasn’t the parents telling us stuff, this was the kids telling us. And it asked questions in a lot of different ways.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

It’s been revised a lot of different times to get really, really good data. So we know whether or not-. Well, our ideas are whether that it gives us a really good representation of whether they’re being bullied. It also is validated by other observational studies.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

And sometimes people do criticize this in other areas. It doesn’t give a lot of questions about cyber bullying. The revised version that we did give them does include cyber bullying. So that does get included in what we were testing at that time, even though it was a few years ago when we did this. And we also asked parents questions.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So we asked them 18 additional questions that we came up with about their feelings about martial arts and whether their kids have been bullied. This is really important for our information later. And we’re going to be summarizing this quite a bit for our time that we have available today. We want to skip ahead a little bit with what the analysis was.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

You guys probably don’t care a lot about the data. But the martial arts program that we did study specifically. So one thing that’s kind of important is, was a little bit restricted to an American Taekwondo association karate for kids program. So this program was specifically designed for kids and it had a lot of life skills built into it.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So one thing to remember is if you’re a parent looking for something to help your kids, you want to look for a program that does have a life skill curriculum built into it that’s very serious. That’s not just a couple signs on the wall, that’s part of the ongoing curriculum. Our programs in all the schools that we did work with do have some consistency in what they do and they have consistency in the type of martial arts.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Now there’s lots of other schools that are not part of the same association that do a fantastic job, but just be a little under, have a little bit of an understanding that the programs that we did test this under to get our research data, do have a full and robust life skill curriculum along with the martial arts program so the kids learn when they do martial arts, there’s some honor and value and some character development along with it. Master Sanborn, I’ve been talking a lot. Do you have anything else to add there?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

No, sir. Not at the moment.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Okay. I’m putting you on the spot a little bit as we go in. Please interject anytime you need. So let’s look at the data that we got. I think this is really important to go through. And some of it shows some-. This is very interesting. I think parents, very important for you to look at and for really anybody, any educators or professionals that work with kids, this is a way to understand how this, the results that we got matter.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So first of all, 227 kids returned the questionnaire. So we sent out way more than this, and we had a pretty good distribution of beginners, intermediates and adults. The mean age was 11. And quite a few boys, quite a few girls. This is pretty typical in inter martial arts program, about 35% girls and 65% boys. You can see the median household income there as well.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

And again, this, I gave you a quick summary of it. There’s a formal research question, do kids who take martial arts get bullied less than children who just got started? So we were measuring kids on entry. Now it’s really important for the question that we’re going to talk about later.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

We weren’t measuring kids who in the general population, we were measuring against kids who got started with martial arts. That’s an important question, important for our data that we’re going to look at a little bit later. It was kids who got started, white belts.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Call them white belts, if you’re not familiar with martial arts. Versus kids who were black belts, who’d been doing it for a while. And our guess was is that they wouldn’t get bullied as much. Okay. And one thing important to remember is when we’re talking about bullying, we’re not talking about being bullied once in the last year.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

It’s two to three times or more in the past couple of months, two to three times or more. So it’s happening pretty regularly. That’s the minimum that they would’ve answered the question, “Yes, I’m being bullied.” If they’ve been bullied less, they wouldn’t have answered the question. This is question four on this questionnaire.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

They’re being bullied. It’s not just somebody looked at them funny. It’s not just that it happened one time. It’s being bullied regularly on a regular basis. If you remember our definition of bullying, it’s intentional, intended to hurt, there’s an imbalance of power and it’s repeated. This is repeated bullying.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So I want to make sure that’s emphasized even later, even though you guys have heard about that in our prior podcast. So here’s our results. Okay? If you look at it here, you can see that a lot of people haven’t, a lot of the kids haven’t been bullied. That’s true. Quite a few one to two times, but a good bit of them have been bullied two to three times a week.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

And what’s important here is the difference between these. And we’ll illustrate this a little bit later, as we look through the slides. This doesn’t show the data quite as much as this little description here. So what this means is the beginners, the intermediate and the advanced.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

If you look at the difference between the beginners, beginners are being bullied two to three times a month or more. 27% of the beginners are bullied two to three times a month or more. Now if you remember from our prior talks, the average was 14% for the general population.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So this was an important discovery that we made that kids who come to martial arts are being bullied twice as much as the general population. So for our martial artists that are listening, or for parents that their kids want to do martial arts, this is a pretty revealing thing, that about twice as many kids are getting bullied as a general population.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Now let me give you a little bit of a spoiler. When we asked parents the question of whether their kids are being bullied, they answered about… We’ll have to look at the data, from my memory here, about the same as the general population. So parents didn’t think their kids were getting bullied this much.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Parents were unaware that this was happening, but kids in their own reports were getting bullied about twice as much as the general population. Now, if you look at the advanced group, the black belts, they were getting bullied about 10% of the time.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So this comparison was 64% less. Now again, spoiler alert, we’re going to go through this, but the best bullying prevention program that we know of, and that’s the Olweus Program and the best study in the best circumstances that they had, where they implemented the program really well, that reduced bullying about 60%.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So this program across the data that we gathered was better than the best school based bullying prevention program. Putting your kids into martial arts was better than the best school based bullying prevention program. It reduced bullying more than any other thing that we’ve measured. Anything to add there, Master Sanborn?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

No. I just remember being surprised at how many parents had no idea they were bringing their kids into martial arts. And from doing a lot of martial arts and being here for so long, I felt like the parents were bringing the kids in because of bullying, but the data shows that the parents didn’t even know that the kids were being bullied.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Yes, that’s an important point. And it’s an important point for our discussion. We would notice that because about 14%, isn’t a small number. So that means about one to two every 10 parents would say, “My kid’s getting bullied. We want some help with that.” That’s pretty big.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

I mean, that’s not small, one out two, one to two every 10 kids would, or parents would say, “We need some help for this particular problem at school.” And for us, that would be a very significant thing. And we’d want to help them a lot because we care.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

And that’s a major issue that we’d want to help them with. And based on this data, it’s probably more severe if the parents are noticing it. So it’s a more severe case, it’s a more severe situation. But about twice as many times, about two to one, when every time you hear one of those stories, there’s another kid that’s not telling their parents about it, that the parents are unaware that this is going on.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

That’s food for thought as we think about it. And for all of us that are listening, for parents that are listening, for educators that are listening, for people that are in fields that work with kids like martial arts, like dance, like gymnastics, anybody that you’re working with kids, you’re not, you’re likely not going to hear about the bullying situation unless you do something more serious like one of these questionnaires where it’s pretty anonymous.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

In this case, it was anonymous whether or not they were getting bullied. We coded the questionnaires. This is important information so that we’d know which parent matched which kid, but the parent and the kid didn’t know that. And we didn’t know which kid was with which. So it was blind in that way, but we could tie the surveys together.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

All right. So this is what you see. This is the 27%, this is the 14%, and it helps you see that graphically. All right. So again, this is 64% less than beginning students. And we’ll talk about the data later. I think this data analysis, all these numbers probably aren’t that interesting to everybody.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

We won’t go through all the statistical significance level. And there may be some alternate explanations. Is the age of… There were some for any criticism that somebody might have, would it be the age or grade? I mean, the kids are getting older. If they move up to black belt, is that a better explanation?

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

We found that based on our data, that wasn’t a significant explanation. We can look at the data and reanalyze the data as if that was our… And we can ask the data, is that a better explanation of our results? The answer’s, no. Is the parent education level a better explanation of our data? Are the parents that are smarter having their kids being… Are their kids getting bullied less?

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

The answer is, no. Is the household income level, are the richer families getting bullied less? The answer is, no. These numbers, we call them P values and F values. You don’t need to know too much about them, but those numbers are showing that the answer is, no. So these were not better explanations of our data.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

The best explanation of our data was that martial arts, doing martial arts till black belt, was the best explanation of the reduction in bullying. And we’re going to go through this a few more minutes, then we’ll follow up next time. All right. So our summary is that formally we can accept the answer, the hypothesis that kids who participate in martial arts will not get bullied as much as kids who are beginners, who started martial arts.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Now we aren’t answering the question of every kid. They have to be, it is true that maybe only certain kinds of kids start martial arts. We wouldn’t be able to filter that out because we don’t know, are there certain kinds of kids that don’t start martial arts that maybe this wouldn’t work for.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

But we can have a pretty good idea that this is effective for the kids that do start martial arts. And all of our data, and all of our [inaudible 00:20:42] or post analysis would say that the effect of reduction in bullying is based likely on martial arts training.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Now, this is really groundbreaking in a couple ways, because most martial arts research in formal academic settings and a lot of bullying prevention research, this isn’t completely true, because there’s a lot of really great bullying prevention research is often just survey research or very simple research where the data is not interpreted in our pre and post.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

This is a roughly pre and post type of test. So this is groundbreaking in the sense that we can attribute and effect the reduction in bullying to a treatment doing martial arts. So we can give a pretty good idea that doing martial arts will have this kind of effect and is a dramatic effect significant compared to all these other bullying prevention programs, even the best ones that are out there.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So one answer we can give is parents, if you want your kids or educators or other people that work with kids, if you want the kids to be safer from bullying, dramatically safer, have them do martial arts long enough that they get their black belt. They need to do it for a significant amount of time. And of course, we believe there’s other benefits to doing martial arts as well.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Now we would probably want to do other research. It would make sense to do other research where kids are getting other character building training and other types of things to see if those also are factors that would help kids reduce bullying effects as well. Now there’s another piece and this also summarizes it.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

Beginners are bullied 27% of the time compared to 16.9. I said 14% before. We’ll have to update that in our writing, our write up for this. It’s 16.9%. I gave the other, the wrong number there, 16.9%. So it’s roughly about two to one.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

So we’re going to talk our next time we get together on research question number two, do children who take martial arts bully less than kids who just got started. So we’re going to cover that next time we get together and follow up with our research synopsis as well in our podcast on this is Bullying Prevention? And Bullying- Myths, Truths and What To Do about it number eight. We’re going to do that when we get together for number nine. All right. Master Sanborn, anything to add to finish up?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

No, sir.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Chief Master Instructor:

All right. Well, thank you very much, ma’am, for being here. I appreciate the time today and the work that you do with all the kids. And you’re the big part of why they’re not getting bullied and why they’re having success in the rest of their lives as well. So thank you so much.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Thank you, sir.

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Dr. Moody is also a licensed psychotherapist and maintains a practice at Integrated Mental Health Associates (IntegratedMHA.com) where he specializes in couples therapy and mens issues.