Poster #220 - Alignment of Student and Teacher Reports of Peer Victimization in Fourth Grade

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Social Relationships

Integrative Statement

Research indicates that students who experience negative behaviors from classmates–such as being teased, lied about, pushed or hit, or intentionally excluded from activities–may have negative outcomes such as lower grades and standardized test scores (Glew et al., 2005; Musu-Gillette et al., 2017; Schwartz et al., 2005) and adjustment issues (Ladd & Kochenderfer-Ladd, 2002; Rønning et al., 2009). To effectively address these behaviors, known as peer victimization, adults need to be aware of how frequently they occur. However, studies have found that teachers and parents often under-report these incidents (Stockdale et al., 2002) and students do not always inform their teachers when they occur (Fekkes et al., 2004). Although adults may not always be fully aware, Ladd and Kochenderfer-Ladd (2002) found that cross-informant reports of bullying are a better predictor of loneliness and peer rejection than any single informant measure alone.
This paper extends prior research by using recently released data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:2011) to describe the prevalence of peer victimization from the perspective of students and their teachers. ECLS-K:2011 is a nationally representative sample of 18,170 kindergartners who attended 1,310 public and private schools in the 2010-11 school year. The paper examines the level of overlap in reports of peer victimization between both informants and explores differences by student and family characteristics. Findings in this paper explore how frequently students who were in 4th grade in 2015 and their teachers both reported that the students experienced four types of peer victimization incidents (Table 1). Students were considered to be frequently victimized if they or their teachers indicated that the student experienced these incidents "Often" or "Very often." Student and family characteristics included the child’s sex, race/ethnicity, and household poverty status.
Frequency distributions and cross-tabulations were generated to identify the percentage students who reported being frequently victimized in different ways by their peers. Across all types of peer victimization, significantly higher percentages of students than of teachers reported frequent victimization. The most common type of student-reported victimization was that they were frequently the subject of lies or untrue stories (18 percent), while less than 1 percent of teachers reported this type of victimization frequently occurred. The percentage of students reporting that they were frequently excluded from their peers on purpose (8 percent) was the lowest across victimization types, but this was the most common type of teacher-reported victimization, along with students being frequently teased, made fun of, or called names (2 percent each). Differences among subgroups were observed and will be described in the final paper (Figure 1).
Correlations among student reports of each of the four types of peer victimization (e.g. being teased with being excluded) were moderate and ranged from r = 0.43 to 0.55. The patterns were similar for teachers and ranged from r = 0.46 to 0.66. However, the correlations between student and teacher reports of the same type of victimization were relatively low, ranging from r = 0.18 to 0.27.

Authors

• Amy Rathbun, American Institutes for Research
  Presenting Author

• Lauren Musu, National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education
  Non-Presenting Author