Olivier, Elizabeth
Galand, Benoît
[UCL]
Introduction. Thirty percent of students worldwide are repeatedly victims of verbal, physical, or relational threats and aggression from their peers, with prevalence peaking during early adolescence (Modecki et al., 2014). Victimization has harmful consequences for students' adjustment in school, such as decreased belongingness, thwarted emotional well-being, and increased perception of violence. Yet, students can be victims and perpetrators (bullies) simultaneously (Nasel et al., 2001). Cutoffs and K-mean clustering techniques traditionally classify students in four groups: uninvolved, victims, bullies, and bully-victims. Using the more reliable Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), Goldweber et al. (2013) identified only three groups, the bully-only profile not being representative of students’ involvement. Identifying the correct grouping of students has critical implication, as it guides the selection of intervention strategies. Our study thus aims to identify students' involvement profiles as victims and/or bullies from childhood to adolescence. Methods. We recruited a transversal sample of 3,472 students between 4th and 9th grades in French-speaking Belgium. Using Mplus7, we first conducted LPA within each school grade, which included six variables (verbal, physical, and relational, for both victimization and bullying). To assess the discriminant validity of profile-solutions, we tested the equality of means of school adjustment indicators across profiles. We used Bonferroni corrected p-values to account for the number of comparisons. Results. LPA (Figure 1). From 4th to 7th grades, the three-profile solutions reached the best fit indicators. It included Uninvolved, Victim, and Bully-victim profiles. We did not retain the four-profile solution because the bully-victim profile was divided in moderate- and high-level profiles and were therefore not qualitatively different, which violates the principle of parsimony. In 8th and 9th grades, we retained the two-profile solutions including Uninvolved and Bully-victim profiles. The three-profile solutions were not parsimonious (low, medium, and high involvement profiles). See Table 1 for students repartition in profiles. Discriminant Validity. We compared the means of three indicators of school adjustment: belongingness, emotional well-being, and perceived violence, as well as gender (Table 1). In 4th to 7th grades, the Victim and Bully-victim profiles significantly differed from the Uninvolved profile. However, Victim and Bully-victim students had similar levels of adjustment. Boys were overrepresented in the Bully-victim profile. In 8th grade, compared to the Uninvolved profile, Bully-victim students reported lower emotional well-being and higher perceived violence. In 9th grade, the comparisons were not significant after applying the Bonferroni correction. In 8th and 9th grades, boys and girls were equally distributed in the two profiles. Discussion. Our results suggest that student involvement in bullying and victimization must be considered through a developmental lens, since the configuration of profiles changed among older students. These results also question the existence of a Bully-only profile. Although a few students may be bullies but not victims, they are not numerous enough to compose a profile. Bullies must instead be seen as vulnerable youth who need intensive support. In our sample, this is also supported by the discriminant validity investigation, which showed that Bully-victim students were similar to Victims in terms of belongingness, emotional well-being, and perception of violence in school.


Bibliographic reference |
Olivier, Elizabeth ; Galand, Benoît. Student involvement in victimization and bullying from 4th to 9th grade: A latent profile analysis .SRCD 2019 Biennial Meeting (Baltimore, USA, du 21/03/2019 au 23/03/2019). |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/242362 |