The purpose of this study was to determine whether restrictions put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic affected the social and psychological well-being of early adolescent schoolchildren. Participants were 309 youth (51% female, average age = 12.38 years) enrolled in the sixth, seventh, or eighth grades of a single middle school located in northeastern Pennsylvania, a state that took a moderately proactive approach to the pandemic. Employing a cross-sectional design, students in three instructional conditions (100% in-person, hybrid, 100% online) were compared on nine outcome measures (perceived parental support, perceived parental knowledge, peer deviance, neutralization, cognitive impulsivity, depression, delinquency, bullying victimization, and bullying perpetration). There were no significant between-groups differences, although there was a borderline significant effect for depression (100% online >100% in-person, p = .06). A second set of analyses employed a longitudinal design and compared 174 children who completed the test battery in November 2019, 3 months before the start of the pandemic, and then again in November 2020, 9 months after the start of the pandemic. Three out of nine outcomes displayed significant change: A small reduction in parental support and modest increments in neutralization beliefs and cognitive impulsivity. Although there were no statistically significant differences between the three instructional conditions and only a handful of relatively small and predictable longitudinal changes between November 2019 and November 2020, there were a fair number of individual students who experienced moderate (≥50%) increases in depression (17.6%), cognitive impulsivity (15.8%), and bullying victimization (11.7%). Impact and ImplicationsThe psychological consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic were evaluated in early adolescents enrolled in a single Pennsylvania middle school. Results showed that instructional condition (100% inperson, hybrid, 100% online) had no bearing on a child's level of depression, peer deviance, perceived parental support and control, bullying perpetration and victimization, delinquency, and delinquencyrelated thinking. There were also very few changes on these outcome measures from before the pandemic to 9 months into the pandemic except for a rise in the tendency to think and act impulsively.

The purpose of this study was to ascertain whether parental support and knowledge moderate the relationship between bullying perpetration and delinquency. A sample of 305 middle school students (141 boys, 164 girls; 10–12 years of age) served as participants in this study. The research hypothesis predicted that parental support and knowledge would moderate the prospective bullying–delinquency relationship. Testing this hypothesis with least squares regression parametric coefficients and percentile bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals, parental support received full support and parental knowledge no support as factors potentially capable of reducing risk for future delinquency by interacting with prior bullying perpetration. Whereas parental support decreased the odds of high bullying boys engaging in future delinquency—an outcome consistent with the view that parenting can serve a protective function against future offending by neutralizing the risk effect of bullying—parental knowledge failed to reduce future delinquency in children who bullied, although it did have a direct ameliorative effect on future delinquency. The protective effect was strongest when parental support was high and parental knowledge low, whereas the risk effect was strongest when parental support was low and parental knowledge was medium to high. These results suggest that protective and risk effects are limited to certain combinations of protective and risk factors.

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The goals of this study were to determine whether children who took the bus to school on a regular basis felt safest during the commute to school, in school, or on the commute home from school, and to identify the factors that correlate with fear of being bullied on the bus. A sample of 610 students (296 boys, 313 girls; mean age = 11.25 years, SD = 0.51) was surveyed during the fall semester of their first year of middle school (sixth grade). Students indicated that they felt safer in school than they did on the commute to or from school, which nearly always occurred by bus. Sex differences were investigation and found to be small in number and magnitude. These differences were limited to slightly more girls than boys reporting feeling safer in school, slightly more boys than girls reporting feeling safer on the commute home from school, and a modestly stronger association between bullying victimization and fear of being bullied on the school bus in boys than in girls, although the effect was significant in both sexes. There were no significant differences between boys and girls in their overall level of fear of bullying on the bus. A full sample regression analysis revealed significant correlations between the risk factors of bullying victimization and depression, and a child's fear of being bullied on the bus, suggesting that such fears are related to past victimization and current feelings of sadness, loneliness, and reduced energy.

The purpose of this study was to compare drift/neutralization and criminal lifestyle interpretations of the neutralization-delinquency nexus in 1,005 (498 boys, 506 girls) youth (mean age = 11.22 years) organized into three groups: no delinquency, low-rate delinquency, and high-rate delinquency. Findings showed that low-rate delinquent youth were as committed to conventional social relationships as nondelinquent youth and more committed to conventional relationships than high-rate delinquent youth. It was further noted that low-rate or drifting delinquents used neutralization techniques more often than nondelinquents but less often than high-rate delinquents. These results suggest that neutralization may be less a matter of relieving guilt after having violated the law than it is a way of constructing a moral value system that supports crime.