Poster #220 - Do emerging adults remember the extent of being bullied in early adolescence?

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Social Relationships

Integrative Statement

Longitudinal studies on the effects of being bullied during early adolescence show an empirical association between the painful experience and subsequent compromised development (Rivers, 2004; Sigurdson et al., 2015), however a gap in the literature exists with regard to whether emerging adults accurately remember the extent of their being bullied during the early adolescent years. Due to adaptive coping strategies, biased memory, and other psychological mechanisms such as denial, we would expect that the association between self-reported extent of being bullied during early adolescence with recollections of said bullying eight years later in emerging adulthood would fall in the small to moderate range.
Methods
A sample of about 1,500 young people, aged 10-15 years at T1, self-reported levels of being bullied at school, outside of school, through text messages, and over the internet at three annual times of measurement. After the T3 measurement a hiatus of five years occurred, and the T4 time of measurement occurred on the same sample; with attrition the sample was 938 18-22 years old. The T4 measurement included retrospective assessments of “how much were you bullied when you were 10-16 years old?” (1 = never to 5 = a lot), as well as where the bullying occurred and “Looking back, to what extent has being bullied negatively affected you?” (1 = not at all to 5 = a lot). Open-ended comments concerning the effects of being bullied were obtained from the participants as well.
Results
Self-reported extent of being bullied during early adolescence for each of the three years, all significantly predicted the extent of negative effect, R2 = .13, p < .001. Beta weights varied between .10 to .27 over the three years, with the first year (youngest age) being the strongest predictor. The same analysis predicting “how much were you bullied?” explained more variance, R2 = .22, p < .001, but in this case the strongest beta weight was the third and most recent year ( = .30).
The prediction of negative effects of being bullied by extent of earlier bullying yielded a strong association,  = .69, R2 = .47, p < .001. Notably the concurrent estimation of previous extent of bullying was a better predictor of negative effects than the temporally earlier accounts of being bullied during early adolescence.
Open-ended comments ranged in tone from positive (e.g., “it has made me grow into a better person where I can stand up for myself”) to negative (e.g., “I’m scared to leave the house or socialize or even get a job”).
Conclusions
We found significant relationships between self-reports of being bullied during early adolescence and subsequent retrospective ratings of extent of previous bullying, but these relationships, as predicted, were in the small to moderate range. We cannot know from this dataset why the relationships fall in this range, but fading memory, resilient coping efforts, therapy, and a range of supportive personal relationships have probably attenuated this relationship over time. Future directions include examining possible buffering constructs such as social support and adaptive coping.

Author

• Paul Jose, Victoria University of Wellington
  Presenting Author