Navigating the Healthy Context Paradox: Identifying Classroom Characteristics that Improve the Psychological Adjustment
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EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
Navigating the Healthy Context Paradox: Identifying Classroom Characteristics that Improve the Psychological Adjustment of Bullying Victims Hye-Young Yun
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Jaana Juvonen2
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Received: 27 May 2020 / Accepted: 24 July 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The healthy context paradox—an unexpected pattern in which victims’ psychological adjustment worsens as the overall level of victimization in a classroom or school declines—implies that reducing the frequency of bullying or victimization incidents does not do enough to help victims of bullying. In light of this finding, it is imperative to identify protective factors that alleviate victimization-related distress in the peer ecology. The current study examines classroom-level peer victimization and peer-defending behaviors as moderators of the association between individual-level victimization and psychological adjustment. These classroom-level moderators were tested with a sample of 1373 adolescents (40% girls, Mage: 14 years) from 54 classrooms in South Korean middle schools. Consistent with past findings documenting the healthy context paradox, the results of multilevel modeling indicated that victimized youth experienced a lower level of depressive symptoms in classrooms where victimization was more common. Most importantly, bullied students reported fewer depressive symptoms, on average, in classrooms with relatively high levels of bully-oriented (i.e., confronting the bully), rather than victim-oriented (i.e., comforting the victim), defending behavior. These findings provide a more nuanced understanding of the role of peers’ defending behaviors toward bullied adolescents and have significant implications for antibullying interventions. Keywords
Healthy context paradox Victimization Defending Adolescents ●
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Introduction Experiencing peer victimization (e.g., being pushed, called names, gossiped about) during childhood or adolescence has long-lasting negative effects on social psychological adjustment and is a predictor of persistent victimization (e.g., Brendgen and Poulin 2018; Haltigan and Vaillancourt 2018). Over the last two decades, a number of anti-bullying intervention programs have been developed to decrease peer victimization (e.g., Gaffney et al. 2019; Ttofi and Farrington 2011). Although classrooms and schools with lower rates of bullying and victimization are safer environments for most
* Hye-Young Yun hye-young.yun@utu.fi 1
Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland
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Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
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students (e.g., Cornell et al. 2013; Mehta et al. 2013), paradoxically, recent findings suggest that experiencing bullying in a context with a lower rate of victimization exacerbates the emotional plight of bullied students. This inverse association between victimization-related distress and overall classroom victimization level has been described as the “healthy context paradox” (Salmivalli 2018). However, classroom level of peer vict
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