Prospective Associations between Popularity, Victimization, and Aggression in Early Adolescence
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EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
Prospective Associations between Popularity, Victimization, and Aggression in Early Adolescence Sarah T. Malamut
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Tana Luo2 David Schwartz3 ●
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Received: 25 February 2020 / Accepted: 24 April 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Recent research has highlighted an understudied phenomenon in the peer victimization literature thus far: the overlap between high status (i.e., popularity) and victimization. However, the research on this phenomenon has primarily been crosssectional. The current investigation uses a longitudinal design to address two questions related to high-status victims. First, the present study examined prospective associations between popularity and two forms of indirect victimization (reputational victimization and exclusion). Second, this study examined elevated aggression as a consequence of high-status youth’s victimization (using self- and peer- reports of victimization). Participants were 370 adolescents (Mage = 14.44, range = 14.00–16.00; 56.5% girls) who were followed for 1 year. Both high and low levels of popularity were prospectively associated with reputational victimization. Moreover, popularity moderated the association between self-reported indirect victimization (but not peer-reported indirect victimization) and aggression. The results help build toward a more comprehensive understanding of both victimization and aggression in adolescence. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for a cycle of aggression in youth and the lowered effectiveness of bullying interventions in adolescence.
Introduction In adolescence, there is a consistent and robust association between popularity and aggression (Cillessen and Mayeux 2004). Paradoxically, there is also emerging evidence that popular youth are not just perpetrators but are also victims of aggression (e.g., Dawes and Malamut 2018). However, due to a dearth of longitudinal studies, many questions still remain regarding the experiences of high-status victims. The purpose of the current study was to address two distinct but related questions regarding this phenomenon. The first goal was to understand whether popular youth are more likely to experience specific subtypes of indirect victimization (i.e., reputational victimization, exclusion) over time.
* Sarah T. Malamut sarah.malamut@utu.fi 1
INVEST Research Flagship, Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland
2
Eating Disorders Center for Treatment and Research, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA
3
Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
The second goal was to examine how popular youth’s own perceptions of being victimized are related to subsequent indirect aggression.
Popularity and Victimization High levels of popularity are typically thought of as protective against victimization, as popularity is an indicator of social success. Nevertheless, there are several explanations for why popular youth may be targeted by peers (see Dawes and Malamut 2018 for a
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