| Longitudinal approaches to the study of peer victimization in youth have begun to highlight both personal factors that place children at risk for increased victimization over time. Criticisms of the traditional peer victimization literature have included the short-term nature of most longitudinal studies, moderate effect sizes, sole measure of victimization, and the focus on younger children. Participants consisted of two cohorts that underwent the transition from 8th grade into 9th grade and were administered the measures at the end of each school year. In total, 210 students were included in the longitudinal sample. The sample was comprised of 100 subjects (47%) from Cohort 1 and 110 (53%) from Cohort 2. At each of the two time points, participants completed a Peer Nomination Inventory, which provided peer-report global measures of victimization, internalizing behavior, aggression, and physical strength; a self-report global measure of victimization, aggression, global self-worth (GSW), and perception of social competence (PSC); Dyadic Aggression and Victimization Inventory (DAVI) provided four outcome measures of peer- and self-report measure of targets of aggression---Directed (same-school) victimization, directed (cross-school) victimization, received (same-school) victimization and received (cross-school) victimization. Results were that initial personal (internalizing, low global self-worth, physical weakness, and self-reported aggression) and interpersonal (rejections, perception of social competence, and number of friends) risk factors predicted changes in victimization across the outcome measures. Strong support was found for the social contextual hypotheses in that the negative outcomes of victimization, particularly self-reported aggression, were much more salient under high levels of peer-level risk, including peer rejection. The researcher focuses on several aspects of these results, including significant effects were found among the six methods of assessing victimization and the transitional design of this investigation. Directions for future research are suggested, and clinical implications for bullying interventions are discussed. |
