Speakers
Description
Research on the group dynamics of bullying has often concentrated on specific analytic strategies, potentially overlooking the full complexity of these interactions. This symposium aims to bridge this gap by introducing recent methodological advancements that deepen our understanding of bullying through novel analytic approaches. The first paper presents a person-centered profile approach, utilizing latent transition analysis to examine longitudinal changes in popularity motivations and the moderating effects of bullying on these profiles. The second paper examines the structural characteristics of multiple social network types, analyzing the dynamic processes of friendship, affinity, and bully-victim relationships through longitudinal social network analysis. The third paper explores the links between clique hierarchies, bullying victimization, and mental health outcomes, applying a cohesive clique approach to distinguish non-overlapping cliques. The fourth paper introduces a novel method for assessing peer perceptions, using a short-term longitudinal design to investigate how victimization experiences and classroom status hierarchies influence students’ perceptions of bullying by popular peers. Finally, the fifth paper assesses the impact of a field experiment aimed at shifting explicit and implicit peer attitudes and behaviors toward victimized classmates, employing an innovative field experiment to evaluate intervention outcomes. Overall, the symposium highlights the critical role of advanced analytic methods in capturing the nuanced group processes of bullying.
Keywords
Popularity Motivation, Latent Transition Analysis, Social Network Analysis, Clique Hierarchy, Implicit Attitude
Additional field for symposia
Study1: Longitudinal Patterns of Popularity Motivation in Adolescence and Bullying: A Latent Transition Analysis
Popularity motivation is a crucial predictor of aggression linked to bullying behaviors in the classroom (Hensums et al., 2023). Not only striving for high popularity but also avoiding low popularity, and especially the combination of both, has been linked to bullying (Lansu & van den Berg, 2024). This study employs Latent Transition Analysis (LTA) as a novel method to capture person-oriented profiles of combinations of strive for high popularity motivation and avoid low popularity motivation (Lansu & van den Berg, 2024) combinations and analyze their longitudinal changes, thereby providing a nuanced perspective on how popularity motivation evolves over time. Participants were 517 South Korean 7th to 9th grade students from 17 classrooms in one secondary school who participated twice during a school year. Using LTA, we explored the profiles of popularity motivation and examined the moderating role of peer-reported bullying types (initiating vs. reinforcing) on the transition of popularity motivations. The analysis revealed four distinct popularity motivation profiles: striving status motivation, weak status motivation, average status motivation, and high-status motivation. Students seem inclined to move to the average profile over time rather than remain stable in their own profile. Notably, reinforcing bullying influenced the likelihood of transitions in popularity motivation profiles, while the effect of initiating bullying was not statistically significant. These findings highlight the value of LTA in understanding the complex, person-oriented changes in popularity motivations and underscore the critical role of bullying dynamics in this process. The significance of considering popularity motivations in bullying research will be discussed.
Study 2: Using Longitudinal Social Network Analysis to Assess Negative Peer Experiences: Can We Reliably Analyze Disliking and Bullying?
Longitudinal Social Network Analysis (LSNA) with Rsiena (Ripley et al., 2024) allows researchers to analyze how individuals interact and how these interactions influence outcomes. One limitation in the application of LSNA is that it has primarily been applied to positive relationship networks (e.g., liking, friendship) rather than negative relationship networks (e.g., disliking, bully/victim). The goal of the current study is to consider the expectations of LSNA models when used to explore negative relationship networks.
The sample consisted of 819 students (8-10 years) from public schools in the southwest US with classroom participation rates > 70%. Four network types were investigated—liking, friendship, disliking, and bully/victim—to examine how LSNA might be used to assess negative relationship experiences (e.g., bully/victim, disliking) in addition to positive relationship experiences (e.g., liking, friendship). Integral elements of social networks (e.g., density, selectivity, stability, convergence, and reciprocity) were considered.
The results demonstrate that bully/victim networks were sparse and less stable when compared to other network types. Social connections were more likely to be reciprocal in liking and friendship networks when compared to bully/victim and disliking networks. Nevertheless, it was determined that, with a few modifications, it is possible to achieve convergence (indicating a reliable LSNA analysis) for both positive and negative relationship networks. Discussions will illustrate similarities and differences between positive versus negative social networks. Potential recommendations when using LSNA to analyze negative relationships will be considered. Finally, the important practical contributions of using LSNA to analyze negative peer experiences will be discussed.
Study 3: A blessing or a curse? The link between status hierarchies within friendship-cliques and bullying victimization
Close-knit peer groups, or cliques, can be a blessing and a curse for victims of bullying. On the one hand, cliques can provide support and affection, but on the other hand, cliques can be characterized by social hierarchies and corresponding behaviors (e.g., aggression) that may have a negative effect on youth and victims in particular. To examine the links between cliques hierarchies and bullying victimization, we identified unique friendship-cliques in a sample of 1,947 Dutch adolescents (N = 1,941, M age = 14.7 years, 53% girls). Moreover, we calculated social status discrepancies scores to reflect the level of differences in social status between clique-members, where higher scores are indicative of a stronger social hierarchy. In the first step, we will analyze associations between peer-reported bullying victimization and the level of social hierarchy. In the second step, we will analyze the extent to which associations of bullying victimization and mental health outcomes are moderated by the level of social hierarchy within cliques. In both analyses, we adjust for sex, clique-size, and similarity in bullying victimization within cliques. Findings will be discussed in relation to the role of peer support for victims of bullying and the importance of incorporating contextual factors in understanding victims’ mental health.
Study 4: Perceptions of Popular Peers’ Bullying Behavior in Early Adolescence: The Effects of Victimization Experience and Classroom Status Hierarchy
Children’s cognitive representations of peers are complex, encompassing both general beliefs about peer groups as a whole and specific cognitions about particular types of individuals. Previous research has predominantly focused on general perceptions of the peer group. It remains underexplored how youth form peer perceptions towards specific peers. During early adolescence, popular children often capture the attention of their classmates within their peer groups, eliciting varied perceptions among their classmates. While some youth may view popular peers as aggressive and deviant, others may not. Perceptions of peers’ traits and behaviors are theorized to be interdependent with individuals’ interpersonal experience and the social context where they find themselves. Using a 3-month longitudinal design, this study investigated how victimization experiences (peer-reports versus self-reports) and classroom status hierarchy (classroom standard deviation versus Gini coefficient of popularity) affect youth’s perceptions of bullying behavior by popular peers. The participants were 2,008 Chinese youth from grade 5 through grade 8 (Mage = 12.82 years). Findings revealed that both peer-identified and self-reported victimized youth tended to perceive popular peers as exhibiting more bullying behavior in classrooms with high Gini-hierarchy. Moreover, self-reported victimized children were more inclined to perceive popular peers as exhibiting less bullying behavior in classrooms with low Gini-hierarchy. These findings indicate that victimized youth are more likely to form negative perceptions of popular peers in classrooms where popularity is less equally distributed. Therefore, teachers should make efforts to minimize status discrepancies and build egalitarian relationships among classmates.
Study 5: Effectiveness of an Evaluative Conditioning Field Experiment to Change Peers’
Explicit and Implicit Attitudes and Behaviors Towards Victimized Classmates
Peers’ attitudes and behaviors toward victims are more negative, leading to detrimental effects on victims’ well-being (Zimmer-Gembeck, 2016). This does not only occur on the explicit level (e.g. Prinstein et al., 2018), but also on the implicit level victims are evaluated and treated more negatively (Lansu et al., 2014). In order to change peers’ explicit and implicit attitudes and behaviors towards their victimized classmates for the better, we ran a novel field experiment to test the effectiveness of an evaluative conditioning intervention.
We developed and implemented an evaluative conditioning-based game in 46 Dutch upper elementary school classrooms (n students = 948, M age = 10.05; % girls = 48.63%), which were randomly assigned to the experimental versus control condition. We assessed peers’ implicit and explicit attitudes as well as their deliberate behavior intentions and emotional expressions towards a victimized classmate.
Favorable effects of the manipulation emerged in that deliberate behavior intentions became more negative and less positive in the control condition but remained stable in the experimental condition. Evaluative conditioning furthermore positively affected children’s attitudes, but only when the game was played often for implicit attitudes and when the game was liked for explicit attitudes. A counterproductive effect emerged for emotional expressions, as they became more negative in the experimental condition than in the control condition.
This indicates that evaluative conditioning can indeed have benefits with regard to peers’ negative behavior towards a victimized classmate. However, future work needs to replicate the current findings and further examine the underlying processes.
| Please also indicate what kind of contribution it is: | Scientific |
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| Please indicate what type of scientific contribution it is | Quantitative method study |
