Poster #223 - Heterogeneity of Defender and Outsider Roles in School Bullying

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Social Relationships

Integrative Statement

The milestone study of Salmivalli and colleagues in 1996 on participant roles in school bullying represented a critical transition in bullying research from a dyadic approach, which focuses exclusively on bullies and victims, to a triadic approach, which involves not only bullies and victims, but also bystanders. To transform passive bystanders, also called outsiders, to defenders, which is one of the main goals of anti-bullying interventions, it may be necessary to understand the role of both defenders and outsiders concurrently. Indeed, the behavior of adolescent defenders and outsiders in classroom bullying situations is likely determined by individual and contextual factors operating simultaneously in the peer ecology. Accordingly, this study refined the traditional defender and outsider roles in school bullying situations among middle school students and examined how individual and contextual factors are associated with subtypes of defender and outsider roles.
The study participants comprised 1,373 adolescents (40% girls) from 54 classrooms in six middle schools in South Korea. The students took confidential paper surveys (i.e., self-ratings, peer ratings, and peer nominations) in their classrooms during regular school hours. As a preliminary step, the current study examined how participant roles are distributed in the classrooms of South Korean middle schools by using the participant role questionnaire (PRQ; Salmivalli et al., 1996), which has been widely used in bullying studies over the past 20 years. The results indicated that bullying occurring in South Korean middle school classrooms was a group process involving various participant roles. Of the 1,373 study participants, only defenders and outsiders were selected, and the traditionally defined defender and outsider roles were further refined. To identify subtypes of defender and outsider roles, the measures that have been in use since 1996 were modified to better understand defender and outsider roles in actual school bullying situations. Using latent profile analysis (LPA) in Mplus 8, the overall defender role was disaggregated as assertive defender (9.9 %) and comforting defender roles (53.4 %), while overall outsider roles were decomposed as sympathetic outsider (32.9 %) and indifferent outsider roles (3.8 %) (see Figure 1). To better understand the different attributes these role subtypes carried, using multinomial logistic hierarchical generalized linear model in HLM, the current study investigated how these unique defender and outsider profiles were associated with individual and contextual factors. The predictors of different profiles were empathy, anti-bullying attitudes, self-efficacy, and responsibility at the intrapersonal level, popularity and likeness at the interpersonal level, and perceptions of peers’ anti-bullying attitudes and expectation for intervention at the contextual level (see Table 1).
Olweus (1978) was the first to conduct empirical research into bullying. He focused on the dyadic relationships between bullies and their victims. Almost two decades later, in 1996, Salmivalli and colleagues argued that the act of bullying is not limited only to the victims and bullies, but bystanders are all part of the scenario. Just over two decades later, in 2018, I proposed and found additional roles (i.e., assertive defender, comforting defender, sympathetic outsider, indifferent outsider) of bystanders.

Author

• Hye-Young Yun, UCLA
  Presenting Author