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The Social, Behavioral, and Emotional Correlates of Bullying and Victimization in a School-Based Sample

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Abstract

Bullying is a prevalent problem in schools that is associated with a number of negative outcomes for both the child who bullies and his or her victims. In a community sample of 284 ethnically diverse school-children (54.2 % girls) between the ages of 9 and 14 years (M = 11.28, SD = 1.82), the current study examined whether the level of victimization moderated the association between bullying and several behavioral, social, and emotional characteristics. These characteristics were specifically chosen to integrate research on distinct developmental pathways to conduct problems with research on the characteristics shown by children who bully others. Results indicated that both bullying and victimization were independently associated with conduct problems. However, there was an interaction between bullying and victimization in the prediction of callous-unemotional (CU) traits, such that the association between bullying and CU traits was stronger for those lower on victimization. Further, bullying was positively associated with positive attitudes towards bullying and anger expression and neither of these associations were moderated by the level of victimization. In contrast, bullying was not associated with the child’s perceived problems regulating anger, suggesting that children with higher levels of bullying admit to expressing anger but consider this emotional expression as being under their control.

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Notes

  1. The victimization scale was developed to include both relational victimization and overt victimization and past research has supported its use as a total scale (Crick and Bigbee 1998; Crick and Grotpeter 1996; Paquette and Underwood 1999). In the current sample, we repeated analyses with the relational and overt victimization items separately and the results were very similar, with the exception that the correlation between anger expression and overt victimization reached statistical significance.

  2. Given that the conduct problems variable was highly skewed, all analyses were run with both the raw variable and a log transformed variable. Results were very similar for both the raw and transformed variable with the only difference being that the correlation between conduct problems and anger inhibition reached statistical significance using the transformed variable. Thus, the results are reported using the raw variable.

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Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of New Orleans, New Orleans, USA

    Farrah N. Golmaryami, Paul J. Frick & Annie M. Crapanzano

  2. Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia

    Paul J. Frick & Sheryl A. Hemphill

  3. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, USA

    Rachel E. Kahn

  4. Coastal Carolina University, Conway, USA

    Andrew M. Terranova

  5. Department of Psychology, Geology/Psychology Building, The University of New Orleans, 2000 Lakeshore Drive, New Orleans, LA, 70148, USA

    Farrah N. Golmaryami

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  1. Farrah N. Golmaryami
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  2. Paul J. Frick
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  4. Rachel E. Kahn
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  5. Annie M. Crapanzano
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  6. Andrew M. Terranova
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Correspondence to Farrah N. Golmaryami.

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This study was supported, in part, by funding from The American Psychological Foundation’s Elizabeth Munsterberg-Kottitz Fellowship.

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Golmaryami, F.N., Frick, P.J., Hemphill, S.A. et al. The Social, Behavioral, and Emotional Correlates of Bullying and Victimization in a School-Based Sample. J Abnorm Child Psychol 44, 381–391 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-015-9994-x

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