Amy Bellmore

Beyond the Individual: The Impact of Ethnic Context and Classroom Behavioral Norms on Victims' Adjustment.

With a sample of 1,630 sixth-grade students from 77 classrooms, the authors used hierarchical linear modeling to examine how ethnicity within context and classroom social disorder influenced the association between peer victimization and social-psychological adjustment (loneliness and social anxiety). Victimized students in classrooms where many classmates shared their ethnicity reported feeling the most loneliness and social anxiety. Additionally, classroom-level social disorder served as a moderator such that the association between victimization and anxiety was stronger in classrooms with low social disorder. Both findings were interpreted as evidence that problem behavior deviating from what is perceived as normative in a particular context heightens maladjustment. The authors discuss implications for studying ethnicity and classroom behavioral norms as context variables in peer relations.

Peer Victimization and Mental Health during Early Adolescence.

In this article, the authors describe recent research on peer victimization and its mental health consequences during early adolescence. They begin with a working definition of peer victimization that distinguishes it from lethal school violence and from simple conflict between peers. They then present a psychosocial profile of youth who are chronic victims of harassment, with a particular focus on their mental health challenges. To aid the understanding of the plight of victims, the authors contrast their profiles with those of bullies and with those of adolescents who have characteristics of both bullies and victims. Some unanswered questions in the peer victimization literature are then considered, such as whether there are gender and ethnic differences in the experience of victimization and the stability of victim status. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for both school-wide and targeted interventions to reduce victimization and with suggestions to teachers for concrete actions they can take to promote a safer environment for their students.

School Context Protective Factors Against Peer Ethnic Discrimination Across the High School Years

Ethnically diverse high school contexts present unique social opportunities for youth to form interethnic relationships, but they may also subject students to certain social challenges such as peer ethnic discrimination. With a sample of 1,072 high school students (55% girls; 54% Latino, 20% African American, 14% Asian, 12% White) attending 84 high schools, school context factors that protect students’ exposure to peer ethnic discrimination across the high school years were investigated with a three-level hierarchical linear model. Each spring for four consecutive years (grades 9–12), self-reported peer ethnic discrimination, interracial climate at school, and perceived school ethnic composition were assessed. At the school level, objective high school ethnic composition data were collected. Peer ethnic discrimination was found to decline slightly across the high school years. Above and beyond this decline, more positive perceptions of the school interracial climate and both objective and perceived numerical ethnic majority status predicted lower levels of peer ethnic discrimination. Taken together, the results highlight the significance of both objective (e.g., ethnic composition) and subjective (e.g., interracial climate) aspects of the school ethnic context to students’ high school social experiences.

Fast learning for sentiment analysis on bullying

Bullying is a serious national health issue among adolescents. Social media offers a new opportunity to study bullying in both physical and cyber worlds. Sentiment analysis has the potential to identify victims who pose high risk to themselves or others, and to enhance the scientific understanding of bullying overall. We identify seven emotions common in bullying. While some of the emotions are well-studied before, others are non-standard in the sentiment analysis literature. We propose a fast training procedure to recognize these emotions without explicitly producing a conventional labeled training dataset. We apply our procedure to social media posts on bullying and discuss our findings.

Children's meta-perceptions and meta-accuracy of acceptance and rejection by same-sex and other-sex peers

The goals of this study were to examine childrens meta-perceptions and meta-accuracy of acceptance and rejection in the peer group, the degree to which these perceptions vary by perceiver sex and sex of the reference group, and the association between these perceptions and childrens actual functioning in the peer group. Participants were 644 fourth-grade children. Meta-perceptions and meta-accuracy were derived from sociometric nominations of actual and perceived acceptance and rejection. Children more accurately perceived how they were seen by same-sex peers than how they were seen by other-sex peers. They also perceived more rejection than acceptance from other-sex peers. Meta-accuracy for rejection was low regardless of the sex of the reference group. Sex of the reference group significantly moderated the association between meta-perceptions and meta-accuracy of acceptance and rejection and childrens actual peer relationships. These findings indicate the importance of examining these relatively understudied social cognitions in research with children and the importance of taking the sex of the reference group into account in future peer relations studies using peer nomination methods.

Mutual antipathies during early adolescence: More than just rejection

Recent research suggests that having a mutual antipathy, in comparison to not having an antipathy, is associated with a host of negative outcomes. However, the methods used may not have adequately controlled for rejection and therefore may have provided an incomplete description of the psychosocial correlates of having a mutual antipathy. With a sample of approximately 2000 sixth-grade students, the goal of the present study was to disentangle the effects of rejection from those of having mutual antipathies and assess whether or not involvement in a mutual antipathy reflects maladaptive behaviour for young adolescents. When controlling for rejection, and including only students who received at least one rejection nomination, having a mutual antipathy was not necessarily associated with increased maladjustment. Additionally, when compared to boys and girls with no antipathies, those involved in at least one same-sex antipathy had different psychosocial adjustment profiles than those involved in at least one opposite-sex antipathy. The results indicate the need to carefully choose comparison groups when examining the correlates of mutual antipathies.

When Might Peer Aggression, Victimization, and Conflict Have Its Largest Impact? Microcontextual Considerations

Peer aggression, victimization, and conflict are common occurrences during early adolescence. In the collection of articles in this special issue, several themes emerged, including the use of social psychological theory, individual difference variables, and social context. This article briefly reviews these articles and presents original data that examine microcontextual characteristics (i.e., context of specific events) of sixth and ninth graders’ peer victimization. Students completed daily reports on 5 school days across 2 weeks. Adolescents’ experiences were mostly public (i.e., witnessed by another individual) and perpetrated by a single student from the same grade. Adolescents were unlikely to receive help from others (less than half the time when a witness was present). Ninth-grade data suggest that friends are the most likely witnesses to help the target. Strangers to the target never intervened or tried to help. These findings are discussed in light of implications for prevention and intervention.

New Directions in Cyberbullying Research

This introduction provides an overview of the special issue of the Journal of School Violence. We present a rationale for the need for new directions in cyberbullying research, and include a brief overview of the state of scholarship on this topic. We then include a brief outline of the articles included in the special issue, and point out how they address novel questions and use innovative methods to answer those questions.

The five W's of bullying on Twitter

Machine learning is used to describe how bullying is represented on social media.More than 9million posts referred to bullying episodes on Twitter over two years.Using social media data allows for an examination of all bullying role-players.Investigating real-time posts provides timely, dynamic data about bullying. This paper explores the utility of machine learning methods for understanding bullying, a significant social-psychological issue in the United States, through social media data. Machine learning methods were applied to all public mentions of bullying on Twitter between September 1, 2011 and August 31, 2013 to extract the posts that referred to discrete bullying episodes (N=9,764,583) to address five key questions. Most posts were authored by victims and reporters and referred to general forms of bullying. Posts frequently reflected self-disclosure about personal involvement in bullying. The number of posts that originated from a state was positively associated with the state population size; the timing of the posts reveal that more posts were made on weekdays than on Saturdays and more posts were made during the evening compared to daytime hours. Potential benefits of merging social science and computer science methods to enhance the study of bullying are discussed.

Peer Victimization and Parental Psychological Control in Adolescence

With a sample of 831 U.S. adolescents (49% girls) followed from 9th to 11th grade, the directionality of the association between school-based peer victimization and adolescents’ perception of their parents’ psychological control were examined. Possible mediating influences of internalizing symptoms were also explored. The results highlight the relevance of adolescent-to-parent influences during adolescence by demonstrating that physical peer victimization was predictive of increases in mother’s psychological control but parental psychological control did not predict subsequent peer victimization. These direct effects were present above and beyond the contribution of adolescent internalizing symptoms to higher parental psychological control. Practical implications of the primacy of adolescent-to-parent influences in predicting the social adjustment of victims of peer harassment are discussed.