Abstract
Aggressing, bullying, and helping occur within the social context and their impact may be determined by the nature of the dyadic relationship between the agent and the recipient of the behavior. This study tests a theoretical model of power-relevant interpersonal behavior which proposes two bipolar continua: beneficial to harmful impact and relative power imbalance between dyad members. From a bystander perspective, adolescents rated similarity of paired vignettes, which varied based on intensity of beneficial to harmful impact, relative power between agent and recipient, and power type (academic or social). Multidimensional scaling (MDS) analyses were conducted separately for girls and boys according to type of power to test whether the proposed theoretical model of power-relevant interpersonal behavior is supported. The first proposed dimension, beneficial–harmful, emerged in all four sets of MDS analyses (boys, academic power; boys, social power; girls, academic power; boys, academic power). The secondary proposed dimension, relative power, only emerged for girls regarding social power, as the fourth dimension in that solution. Thus, results suggest that relative power is not a salient concept in adolescents’ thinking about helping and aggressing. Rather, dimensions of extent of impact and collective power of the dyad (combined status of agent and recipient) empirically emerged. These results may inform a taxonomy of interpersonal behavior, conceptualization of bullying, and promotion-prevention programs that promote helping and prevent aggressing among adolescents in schools.
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Research materials and data are available at the OSF project page: https://osf.io/t2w3g/.
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26 October 2022
The original version of this article was updated. First sentence of the body has been updated.
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Acknowledgements
This study was conducted as the first author’s dissertation and was supported by the Kevin R. Lawall Fellowship. We thank Reagan Miller for co-facilitating focus groups, Shivanie Ramdin for serving as the videographer, and Valerie Hennessee, Summer Lawrence, Elissa Lichtman, Allison Norberg, Katelynn Petrasic, Shivanie Ramdin, and Michaela Schulze for assistance with coding and data entry. We are grateful to the students and staff at Berkshire Jr/Sr High School, especially Michelle Paluf and the late Doug DeLong.
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McCarty, S.M., Dunsmore, J.C. Adolescents’ perceptions of helping and aggressing at school: Salience of benefit-harm, extent of impact, and collective dyadic power. Curr Psychol 42, 27153–27166 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03806-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03806-4