Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript “Relationships between Spirituality, Happiness, and Prosocial Bystander Behavior in Bullying. The Mediating Role of Altruism” describes direct and indirect effects between spirituality, happiness, altruism, and prosocial bystander behavior in bullying.

I read the manuscript with great pleasure and find it interesting suitable for publication on EJIHPE

Below I want to highlight some minor concerns that I believe can improve the study.

In the INTRODUCTION section, main aims of the study are in lines 112-114. I think that the reader should find the general objectives of the study from the very first lines of the Introduction and not reach the end of the paragraph. This, in my opinion, increases the readability of the paper.

Although there are several indications and bibliographical references on prosocial bystander behavior in bullying, I think that the authors should better explain what emerges from the main theories and not limit themselves to only bibliographic references. I would like to read something more detailed on prosocial bystander behavior in the article. In fact, EJIHPE is not specialist journal, and we cannot assume that all readers are fully aware on this topic.

Given the importance that happiness has in research results, the Authors should provide more details and insights. For example, the relationship between bullying and school exclusion on subjective happiness has been observed in a recent cross‐national analysis (Gomez-Baia et al., 2022). The Authors find that many kids suffered harassment and felt excluded, twice or more times, at school. Negative effects of bullying and exclusion on subjective happiness were observed in the entire cross-national sample. Furthermore, differences by country were found in the frequency of bullying and exclusion, as well as in the size of their effects on happiness. I think the Authors should consider this and other important studies on the role of happiness on prosocial bystanders' behavior in bullying.

The same thing applies to altruism, since it is one of the most important variables of the study (before talking about the link with spirituality in line 84). In particular, the link between altruism and prosocial bystander behavior should be deepened.

Authors write "in a study exploring the relationships between happiness and altruism, evidence showed a significant association (Kumar & Dixit, 2017)." There are many other studies that take this relationship into consideration, starting with the Batson studies (i.e. 2011, 1991) which I was surprised not to have found among the studies cited. I think a recent meta-analysis published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (Curry et al., 2018) may be helpful to you.

 

In the METHOD section, I would like to know how were the study participants selected? Is it possible to indicate the response rate as well? If this were to be too low it could represent a further limit that must be added in the study.

The choice to partially use two scales instead of only one to measure Spirituality should be justified.

 

The comments to RESULTS are clear enough.

 

Related with DISCUSSION I think Authors should justify better the relationship between spirituality and prosocial bystander behavior. Can the authors explain this lack of relationship in more detail? Also because the literature - as they correctly underline in the introduction - finds the relationship between spirituality to the development of prosocial behaviors (and, absolutely, prosocial bystander can be considered a prosocial behavior).

One of the major limitations of the study is the use of self-report measures which inevitably favors the social desirability of the respondents, who very often could also lie to themselves in order to provide an improved image of themselves. The authors correctly point out this limitation. In my opinion this aspect should be further investigated as it is the real great limitation of a research like this.

 

There is a lack of indications for future research based on the results found.

Research does well to emphasize the role of altruism in prosocial behavior. On the other hand, the intensity of the link found in the study justify the importance of this aspect. It is interesting to note how positive psychology approach detects other aspects in addition to happiness and spirituality (which also in this research has revealed a more marginal role). These aspects are for example connected with self-awareness and the role of reward (Scaffidi Abbate and Ruggieri, 2008, 2011) as potential precursors of helping behavior. Authors should indicate how these and other predictors of the positive psychology approach can provide valuable input for future research.

 

Other minor issues should be considered:

check the References (i.e. Wicklund, 2014 is missing).

 

Author Response

Dear Editor and Reviewer

We appreciate the time devoted to reviewing our manuscript entitled “Relationships between spirituality, happiness, and prosocial bystander behavior in bullying. The mediating role of altruism” (EJIHPE-2022796). We believe the comments and suggestions of the reviewers have significantly contributed to enhance the quality of our manuscript. Within the attached document we explain in detail all the changes made, based on your suggestions and comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

the research was conducted appropriately. The analysis was conducted appropriately.

The concern I have may well be my own lack of understanding the text. The introduction seems to imply to me that the goal is to find out more about being a pro-social bystander and figure 1 supports that. However, it is not clear to me why this is the focus of a study. It would seem that being a prosocial bystander would be an independent, mediating, or moderating to some other dependent variable. If the journal editor is comfortable with the study, then my review should be seen as a review of data collection and analysis

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

We appreciate the time devoted to reviewing our manuscript entitled “Relationships between spirituality, happiness, and prosocial bystander behavior in bullying. The mediating role of altruism” (EJIHPE-2022796). We believe the comments and suggestions of the reviewers have significantly contributed to enhance the quality of our manuscript.

Comment

The concern I have may well be my own lack of understanding the text. The introduction seems to imply to me that the goal is to find out more about being a pro-social bystander and figure 1 supports that. However, it is not clear to me why this is the focus of a study. It would seem that being a prosocial bystander would be an independent, mediating, or moderating to some other dependent variable. If the journal editor is comfortable with the study, then my review should be seen as a review of data collection and analysis.

Respond

Thank you very much. We improved the introduction section to justify better the importance of studying prosocial bystander behavior. In addition, we will consider exploring the mediating and moderating role of this variable.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

the added text helps clarify the focus on bystanders as the dependent variable