Ch. Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.

The Podcast:

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

Hey, everybody welcome to Bullying Prevention Part 9. Which is going to be working on research question number two from our bullying prevention research that we did in conjunction with Arizona State University. What we did in conjunction with ASU was ask the question, first of all in question number one, did martial arts… If you did it long enough. Help reduce the amount of bullying that occurred in kids? In other words did it reduce the amount of bullying that would happen with a kid and in other, other words would a parent who put their kid into martial arts expect that a kid would get bullied less. What we found in our part eight of our Bullying Prevention Podcast was that indeed kids got bullied 64% less which is better than any bullying prevention program that we’ve measured in school bullying prevention program. So it was pretty successful. It was very successful and that was statistically significant data across many, many states and many, many samples of students.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

So we did the same analysis of the students regarding whether or not kids that were bullying other kids would reduce… Whether martial arts would reduce the amount of bullying that happened. So let’s look at that data a little bit. So I want to really quickly introduce myself. Today we don’t have Master Sam with us on our podcast today but I’m Dr. Greg Moody a three black belt chief instructor. Normally I have senior master Laura Sandborn here along with us. You can see some of my books @amazon.com, author Greg Moody and a few other things you can go to drgreegmoody.com and see a few things about the other podcasts that I’ve done as well. So let’s talk about again number one, what we reviewed last time was that martial arts indeed reduced bullying in kids. In other words, question number one was did it reduce the amount that kids got bullied? Number two was the question that we’re going to talk about today is, does martial arts reduce the amount that kids bully?

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

So let’s talk about this and we’re going to share from the work that I did with Arizona State University and we’re going to look at directly from the research presented there. So the data analysis looked like this. The formal research question was do children who take martial arts bully others more or less than children who just got started? So we were open to the possibility that some people worry about does martial arts increase possibly the amount the kids bully? Is it like unfortunately some popular TV shows like Cobra Kai where they do martial arts and while that’s a funny TV show and a real… It’s got a lot of TV ratings. In both sides the good karate guys and the bad karate guys really both of those kids and both of those groups bully others more than… Increase the amount of bullying that they do to the other kids and it’s not the model that we’d like to see in martial arts and none of the martial arts schools that I work with or none of the groups that I work with.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

Whether they’re martial arts or dancer, gymnastics increase or I’d like to think that they would increase bullying. So our hypothesis is that children who participate in martial arts for a long time will not bully others as much as kids who are beginners. So the main question that was asked is, how often have you taken part of bullying other students in school in the past couple months? So this is the first question with bullying that is in the questionnaire that we used. It’s relatively severe, if they answer positively to this question it means they’ve done it two to three times or more in the past months. That’s quite a bit, I mean it’s quite a bit it means they’re doing it quite frequently. They might be doing it 10 times a month or 10 times a week but at least two to three times a month. So it’s happening quite a bit if they answer this question positively. Remember this is going to be the kids self-reporting so that third grade or up and it’s an anonymous test. So there’s no reason for them to answer anything but honestly.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

Now you might make the case just as a side note here’s a little divergence here for us writing this up for anybody writing the notes on this podcast. You might take a little note and say, well what about the question of kids lying when they do this test? Well, they could for sure and some probably do. But when we compare the data from this questionnaire to the data from other research in bullying. We’re using similar questionnaires or the same questionnaires, self-reported kid data and so we’re comparing apples to apple’s data. If they fib about this information they would fib about it in the other reported data. So if we see bullying reduced from beginners to advanced students then we’re going to see comparative data. If they lied at the beginning they’d probably lied at the end about whether they bullied or not. So we’re making the assumption that if they do lie it’s going to be controlled out in the end. So that’s the idea behind these two, why we would guess that the data would be relatively accurate. Okay?

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

We’re being probably picky and what we did see is here was the percentages. You can see the total, which isn’t too interesting and you can see the beginners. Most of them didn’t bully and the intermediates most of them didn’t bully and you can see that the data showed that the two to three times a week question, not much bullying’s happening. So if we jump to the end, if we look at the summary chart here we can see that… This is a good summary of our data. Beginners bullied about 4% and advanced students bullied about 1%. You might say, well gee that’s a 75% reduction in bullying from beginner to advance, that’s a ton but the comparison is against the national data which is about 19.3%. So 19.3% of kids bully other kids two to three times a month or more. The problem with our data as we look at it and the reason we won’t spend a lot of time talking about this in our podcast today and we’ll spend a little bit of time looking at it. But is that not many kids that start martial arts bully other kids.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

Compared to national data only about 20% of kids… 80% less of kids is another way to look at it. 80% less kids than the national data would come into a martial arts school and say that they wanted to start martial arts. So what’s the reason for this? Well, we don’t know. This is just what the data says.One reason could be that if kids are bullying other kids they wouldn’t want the discipline and structure of a martial arts school. If kids are bullying other kids their parents may not feel like they need extra self-confidence which supports some of the other discussions that we’ve had earlier that kids who bully other kids already have pretty good self-confidence equal to the average or better. So they may not be wanting to do martial arts for some of the same reasons that other students might want to start martial arts but we get very few kids doing martial arts. In fact in our sample it was only two and our advanced students… Now this is two out of the beginners.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

So don’t get caught up in the fact that there’s two and one in the percentages don’t seem to make some sense there. This is two out of all the beginners that we surveyed. If you look back at our other data that means that’s about 4% of the total of the beginners, not of the total of the group. Now the advanced students, there was only one advanced student that reported they bullied kids on a regular basis. That was only one so we had about a 100 advanced students that we had in our survey data. So that’s very, very low but because the numbers were so low at the beginner only two beginners out of the whole group said that they bullied other kids. This data was what we call not statistically significant. So we can’t make the assertion from our basic analysis that kids that do martial arts don’t bully other kids. But we also can’t make the assertion that kids that do martial arts do bully other kids more by doing martial arts.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

Let’s look at a little bit of the other data to see if we can clarify this a little bit and get a little bit of other feeling about what the data looks like. So here’s a couple other charts. This is what I just said, that advanced students get bullied less than beginner students or bully less than other students. But it wasn’t statistically significant because there were very few beginners that bullied other kids to get started with so there’s not enough data for us to compare with. So it’s less likely that kids that bully other kids are being brought to martial arts. So one thing that you might think of if you’re a parent thinking of bringing your kid to martial arts is, you’re very unlikely by an order of magnitude to have other kids in martial arts that are going to be bullying other kids or would be affecting your kid. So it wouldn’t be at all like some of the TV shows that you see.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

So there was further analysis done on some of the other questions in the questionnaire that we used and these questions, there were about nine questions that did talk about bullying. It talked about bullying in lots of other ways, included cyber bullying and other different ways that kids bully and these did show some statistical significance that… Here’s a chart here that you can see. That beginners did seem to bully a little bit more than the advanced students. The advanced students hardly bullied at all based on the data from the other questions that we had available. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to give us what we would call in our academic research statistical significance, but it does indicate that martial arts is very unlikely number one to increase the amount of bullying. So for any concerns that people might have that martial arts would increase bullying in kids. Absolutely not, we can say that for certain. The amount of bullying decrease, we just don’t have kids that start martial arts as bully other kids so it’s very difficult for us to measure.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

All of our measurements look like it’s very unlikely and we can say that with pretty good confidence. So that’s our summary. There’s a trend towards less bullying from advanced students and we just can’t measure the amount of reduction from the data that we used. One thing I’d like to cover now kind of as a new shift is our parent survey. We did kind of an innovative parent survey and this wouldn’t give us statistical data that we can make academic inferences from. But I’d like to report something and for all of our people out here for podcast episode number nine, you guys can get some information from what the parents thought about this. What the parents view was is after doing martial arts they did notice about what we measured in our research, that they perceived a 56% reduction in bullying after martial arts, pretty close to what we thought. I mentioned this earlier but it’s good reinforcing. Beginners reported being bullied 27% of the time. This wasn’t the parent report, remember this was the data that the students reported.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

They were bullied 27% of the time, the parents only thought they were bullied 4% of the time. Now remember even in the general population kids are bullied about somewhere around 14% of the time. The parents only thought they were bullied 4% of the time. The kids that start martial arts are bullied about twice as much as the average. That start, the beginners. The parents are not very clued in to what’s going on in terms of bullying. They don’t think their kids are being bullied, they only think they’re being bullied 4% of the time. That’s a dramatic difference. So it’s something important to think about. Both as parents we should be paying attention to this but also understand that your kids probably aren’t going to tell you. They probably aren’t going to be clear about what’s going on. They may not even know the questions to ask or the things to say to you and until they do a survey like the questionnaire that we gave out they might not even know what to express.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

The questionnaire gives them some framework of what to express of what to… The questions and different things that we might ask. The things that might be happening, they may say yeah that’s happening to me. But they may not really know that’s not expected at school because it’s so common. So this 27% of what they reported to what 4% of what the parents thought was happening is pretty striking. So that’s a big deal, something to think about, major difference. Couple other things on the parent survey we already mentioned this first one that very few thought their kids were being bullied and that’s the opposite of the child reports. After doing martial arts. So this is after doing martial arts and when they got to their black belt which was two to three years, depending on the particular school. 86% reported improvement and they felt like their kid would be able to avoid being bullied. The ability to not bully other kids, 64% reported improvement. The question needed a little bit of refinement so we probably should have changed that question a little bit. It didn’t have a don’t bully others’ option.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

The improvement in parents understanding, 90% of the parents felt like they understood bullying. Which in all of our training, when we get to training and what to do, most of the time parents don’t understand this difference that we’ve talked about in our prior podcasts. The difference between imbalance of power repeated over time and intention to hurt. Parents don’t understand that just like a lot of teachers don’t understand this so 90% of parents got it enough and remembered enough that they understood it. This is a big part of what would help parents and help the kids downstream. This was very interesting, 25% of the parents reported that they were bullied as a kid two to three times a month or more. So the same as the question that we asked the kids and this was 48% more than what our standard data is for the general population. So 25% were bullied two to three times a month or more. That’s pretty striking. So many, many of the parents reported being bullied when they were younger. Very few of them reported bullying.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

So if you take these two into account being bullied as a kid and then bullying others it looks like the parents look very much like their kids. When we look at the beginners compared to the parents. Now we were surveying beginners of intermediate advance but they remember what they were like when they first brought their child into classes. Improved self concept. So 98% reported their child improved self-concept which is all the… Up here is bullying but self-concept is how well they felt about their self. Did they feel like they were good people? Did they feel like they could excel? Did they feel like they could achieve more in their life, their self concept? Almost a 100% reported that they improved their self-concept. Their safety skills, 99% which we would expect that they reported valuable safety skills and 98% reported that they liked their martial arts experience. Now this was in all of the students so remember this beginner’s intermediate and advanced were all reporting these.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

So some of these guys might have only started for week but they felt like they reported improved self-confidence, self-concept, improved martial arts. So these were even… Beginners felt this. Okay? Now this is pretty striking data so the parent survey along with the other data reveals a big picture. Parents were very similar to their kids when they were young, they felt it was important and they got a lot of other benefits other than just the bullying prevention detailed data that we showed in the prior information. So some other questions that might be relevant is how afraid are kids of bullying. One of the things that we talked about earlier is young girls in one of this data sets that we looked at are so afraid of bullying. They’re way more afraid of bullying than they are of death, they’re more afraid of bullying than their fear of getting bad grades. They’re more afraid of bullying than so many things.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

So this was really important for us to know how afraid are you of being bullied by other students even if you’re not getting bullied and the beginners were much more afraid of being bullied than the advanced. Now this isn’t as big as the difference in the other data that we saw. So it wasn’t statistically significant but I want to make sure that we mentioned that we did see a difference. Finally, the last part is how do they react if they see another student is being bullied and we also saw what we’d like to see. Which is that the beginners they didn’t do as much. They’d like to help 51% of the time or they’d help 51% of the time and the advanced students would help a lot more. So it went from 51 to 75% which is a 50% increase. The way we do data analysis that didn’t show statistical significance but both of these, whether the two of things. The fear being bullying and the amount that they would help, which we’ll talk about later that’s very important that we want to teach kids.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

Help other kids when you see another kid being bullied or tell an adult. That’s part of our process and training that we want you to do as parents and we want other people to teach kids is very important. We did see a very large jump in the data just because of the numbers we’d like to get more research into this. That’s not considered statistically significant but it’s certainly worth further investigation and we did see a large jump in the advanced group in terms of how much they would help other kids. 75% of the advanced group versus 51, again 50% improvement in that data. When we did look just between white belts and black belts that was statistically significant. So if we just compare white belts to black belts only and we didn’t compare them to the intermediate group that was a statistically significant number in both of the cases. I think in the other case too. Yeah, in both the cases. So as far as being afraid of bullying… So to restate kind of these two questions, being afraid of bullying, beginners to advanced that was statistically significant.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

So we can say that from beginner to advanced you’re a lot less afraid of being bullied and from beginner to advanced you’re a lot more willing to help other kids if they’re being bullied when you become a black belt. Major, major differences. So these are big summary things. So if we can summarize everything that we talked about. Number one, martial arts does have a big effect on bullying reduction. Big effect on bullying reduction. Number two, and this is all our technical data that you’re seeing on the slide. Martial arts does seem to have a big effect in reducing kids bullying other kids but we just didn’t have enough kids that bully other kids that start martial arts to measure it. But it does look like it makes a big difference based on our follow up analysis. What we did see also that’s a big deal is advanced students, our black belts fear being bullied a lot less than beginners and our advanced students help other kids a lot more than the beginners.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

Which those two things, fearing being bullied, whether or not you’re being bullied and helping other kids if other people around are being bullied are two major things. In fact that second one about helping other kids when they’re being bullied is also speaking to their confidence, speaking to their ability to be a leader and speaking to their ability to do a lot of other things in their life and excellence in their life in a lot of other ways. The next thing I wanted to make sure we summarize here is the parent survey. The parent survey was pretty amazing. Number one, they do not have an accurate perception of how much their kids are being bullied 4% to 27%. They think their kids are being bullied about 4% of the time but really it’s 27% of the time for beginners. That’s a huge gap. Number one, they think it’s even less than the national average. I’m sure if we surveyed parents in the general population we would have a very lower number two for the amount that they see it and it’s not because parents don’t care about their kids.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

It’s not because they’re not watching what’s going on. I think mostly it’s because they haven’t read or watched the podcast. Read the information that we give out on bullying prevention and mostly it’s a lack of education and they don’t understand the myths that we’ve talked about in these series of podcasts. So they don’t have an accurate perception of bullying and also then they don’t know what to do about it. They do feel like the martial arts program’s helping in all the ways that we talked about. They like the program, they’ve rated it overwhelmingly good or great like 98%, 99%. Even the beginners rated it 98%, 99%, good for self concept, safety skills and also of course for bullying. Now there’s some limitations in the research that we did. If people, kids or people that started the martial arts program or people that wanted to start the martial arts program. So we would certainly welcome more people in but the only people that we got were ones that wanted to do martial arts. So the work of the martial arts program worked really well on them.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

We don’t know if people that didn’t want to do martial arts if all this stuff would work on them because well they didn’t do martial arts. So would this work as well on somebody that didn’t have an inclination to participate in something like this? We just don’t know and we can’t know so that’s a little bit of a limitation of this work. What we do know are the things that we talked about and that seems very exciting not just for martial arts but for other types of activities that implement similar types of systems and understand the research that we presented in these podcasts up to now. So that’s part nine of our Bullying Prevention Podcast. I hope you enjoyed that and hope you learned a lot about what to do in bullying, understand the concepts of what can help. The next time we’re going to talk about some things that you can do whether it’s in martial arts or other ways. That you can do as a parent or as somebody who’s an educator or works with kids or if you’re watching this and you are a kid what you can do.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC:

So I look forward to seeing you in Bullying Prevention Podcast number 10.

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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.