Developmental Trajectories of Bullying and Moral Disengagement in Youth

• In Event: Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Morality, Moral Disengagement, Identity, and Meaning of Youth

Abstract

Although there are a few previous research studies identified the relationship between bullying and moral disengagement, those are limited into cross-sectional data or two-time points. No studies have even attempted to identify direction of effects to each other. This study used cross-lagged path modeling to examine competing hypotheses about longitudinal associations between bullying and moral disengagement in young adolescents. Participants were 1180 students from 5th to 9th grade at the fall of 2005, spring of 2006, and fall of 2006. We found that bullying and moral disengagement are correlated at each time point and there are some variations on predicting each other construct in longitudinal data. A reciprocal relationship between bullying and moral disengagement was found over three time points.

Authors

• Ji Hoon Ryoo, University of Virginia

• Cixin Wang, University of California - Riverside

• Susan Swearer, University of Nebraska - Lincoln