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We are researchers in developmental psychology from the University of Osnabrück. We carry out the project together with some specially trained people from your school. They are available to answer questions for you at your school. We also work together with the following organizations: the Radicalization Awareness Network of the European Commission (RAN); the State Prevention Council of Lower Saxony (LPR), the Theoretical Computer Science research group at the University of Osnabrück and the Association of Lower Saxony Educational Initiatives (VNB).
An ethics committee at the University of Osnabrück has evaluated the project and declared it to be ethically acceptable.
You can find more information about this in the FAQ.
“Together for Tolerance” is a project about social relationships at school – and you know the most about it! With your knowledge, you will help us to find out how we can take action against prejudice, racism and aggression.
That is why your participation counts!
Your teachers will explain to you how the survey works before you fill it out. You will fill out two short online questionnaires – if you need help with this, your teachers can support you.
Only students in grades 7 to 9 can take part in the surveys. Both you and your parents must agree to this in advance.
If you take part in the project, you will complete a total of two questionnaires, each on different days, on your own or a provided cell phone or tablet.
The surveys take place during lesson time and only take a few minutes. Your teachers are there during the survey and can support you.
In addition to the questions mentioned above, we are interested in how students influence each other. For example, we ask who you spend time with. If you take part, in this question, you can select the names of other classmates who are also taking part in the project and agree to it from lists. Other students can then also select your name. But don’t worry! Only you, a teacher specially trained for the project and the researchers will know who you choose from this list of names. All persons involved in the project have a duty of confidentiality, i.e. they are not allowed to share this information with anyone.
You can find out more about this under “What happens to my answers?”.
Along with the surveys, we conduct a program called an intervention, which prevents conflicts between groups and promotes a positive school climate. This will be accomplished by inviting a few students that participate in the project to participate in a few project sessions.
During these sessions, students share what problems they have at school and what changes they would like to see. After that, we plan and implement school-wide activities. Be creative!
The whole school can take part in these activities. These could include a school assembly, awareness campaigns on the school grounds or social media campaigns.
We look forward to your ideas!
Your participation in the project is voluntary. This means that you do not have to take part in the project if you do not want to. Even if you agree to participate, you can decide not to complete the survey at any time. However, your name can no longer be removed from the list of participants. After the end of the project, your name will be anonymized, i.e. made secret.
Even if we wanted to, we are not allowed to share your data and information with others or tell others what you have answered. There is a law that prohibits us from doing so. We are therefore obliged to keep your data secret.
You can take part in the project if
School activities are an exception: the whole school can take part in these.
In the process of storing, anonymizing, and using your data, we comply with the provisions of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the German Research Foundation (DFG). For this reason, we store the data for a period of at least ten years after the completion of a project. Your answers to the surveys will be kept anonymous after the project ended. This means you won’t be able to track back who answered what after the project ended. We do this by replacing the names at the end of the project with substitute names (codes of letters and numbers). Since this is a research project, the anonymous (secret) data will be published in scientific journals. In addition, the anonymized data should also be made accessible in a secure data archive on the internet. Other researchers can then review our study or use the data to investigate their own questions. The purpose of this procedure is to ensure the quality of the research.
No. The questionnaires are not exams. We are interested in your honest answer. There are no right or wrong answers. We make sure that all your answers are and remain secret.
If you have any questions, please contact the person responsible for the project at your school at any time. You can also send us an e-mail at: tolerance@uos.de
Please include the name of the “Together for Tolerance” project in the subject line.
If you take part in the project, you will complete a total of two short online surveys, each on different days during the school year. The surveys take place during lesson time and last a few minutes each.
The regulations of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Society for Psychology (DGP) are intended to ensure that researchers abide by the rules and are fair to everyone involved. There is a group of experts at the University of Osnabrück to check compliance with these rules: the so-called ethics committee. It takes a close look at projects and checks whether these rules are being followed. The ethics committee of the University of Osnabrück also checked this project: we comply with all the rules and the project is therefore ethically unobjectionable. When storing, anonymizing and using your data, we comply with the provisions of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).
A consent form is an assurance that both you and your parents have understood the information and agree to you taking part in the project. We want to make sure that you and your parents feel comfortable about you taking part in the project. If there is anything that you (or your parents) are not comfortable with, you do not have to complete the consent form. So if you don’t want to take part in the project, you can say “no” – and not fill in the consent form.
The consent forms are collected by your teacher before the project starts to ensure that only students who want to and are allowed to take part in the project do so.
We use the so called gender star because it is important for us to address all people, regardless of their gender: girls, boys and all other genders. The female and male forms are connected with an asterisk (*). Thus, the composite word should ensure that all people of any gender can be addressed with one word.
An intervention is a measure to change or improve something. The aim is to find solutions so that things go better in the future. Our project is also an intervention: together with some of the students, we are developing strategies to help everyone at the school get on better with each other in future.
An important topic in the surveys is: What does the social network at your school look like, i.e. who spends time with whom, who influences each other? For example: Lisa and Tom are friends and spend a lot of time together. Lisa is also friends with Selin from the parallel class, but she doesn’t know Tom very well.
When we evaluate your answers, we can see who has how much to do with whom. It is very important that the other classmates cannot see which people you have chosen.
In a school, everyone is connected somehow. In such a social network, all of you are important. Through your data, we can indirectly recognize who is particularly important to YOU in this network and invite some of these students to participate in intervention. We then want to talk to them about the topics that are important to all of you and therefore affect the whole network.
The webtool is a program that makes it possible to make your school’s social network visible. The social network is the “network” of relationships that exist between students. Your information in the survey and the webtool are used for this purpose. An example: Momo and Kim are in the same class and have become friends. In the question “Who did you choose to spend time with?”, they both give the name of the other person. However, this connection is not visible. The webtool is now used to make the network visible. This is quite special, because previously this was only possible with a lot of work from many people. In the end, the goal is to find very well-connected students (the social referents). This is important because these students are then invited to the intervention. Studies show that intervention projects with these students can be particularly effective.
Weitere Informationen zur Studie “Together
for tolerance – miteinander füreinander”
findest du auf unserer Studienwebsite.
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