Development of an anti-bullying intervention model using the“Empati!Go” snakes and ladders board game at SDN Sidodadi II/154

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to design a bullying prevention intervention model using the board game Empati!Go and test its effectiveness in increasing students' awareness and empathy toward bullying behavior. The method used was action research, with 48 students from classes 3A and 3B at SD Negeri Sidodadi II/154 in Surabaya as the subjects. Data were collected through observation, documentation, pre-tests, game interventions, and post-tests, and analyzed qualitatively, supported by simple quantitative score comparisons. A sample of 13 students was selected for the pre-test and post-test data. The research results showed a significant increase: the students' average pre-test score of 1.69 rose to 10.00 on the post-test after playing Empati!Go, with a difference of +8.31 points. This finding surpasses the effectiveness of other anti-bullying board games, such as The Galaxy Rescue and Stop Bullying (Kurniawan et al., 2024), which are also documented in the scoping review as board games, and differ from conventional snakes-and-ladders games (Afandi, 2015; Wati, 2021), which merely transfer cognitive knowledge. The novelty of Empati!Go lies in integrating a mandatory multiple role-taking mechanism, in which players assume the roles of victim, perpetrator, and helper within a single game, thereby explicitly operationalizing the concepts of role-taking, the generalized other, and the mind-self from George Herbert Mead's symbolic interactionism. The implications of this study suggest that empathy-based board games can fundamentally transform students' social understanding, such that teasing behavior, initially perceived as a joke, is interpreted as bullying following the intervention. This intervention model is recommended for adoption in elementary schools as a low-tech, easily replicable, and effective promotive and preventive strategy to foster a safe, child-friendly school environment.