Ethnically diverse high school contexts present unique social opportunities for youth to form interethnic relationships, but they may also subject students to certain social challenges such as peer ethnic discrimination. With a sample of 1,072 high school students (55% girls; 54% Latino, 20% African American, 14% Asian, 12% White) attending 84 high schools, school context factors that protect students' exposure to peer ethnic discrimination across the high school years were investigated with a three-level hierarchical linear model. Each spring for four consecutive years (grades 9-12), self-reported peer ethnic discrimination, interracial climate at school, and perceived school ethnic composition were assessed. At the school level, objective high school ethnic composition data were collected. Peer ethnic discrimination was found to decline slightly across the high school years. Above and beyond this decline, more positive perceptions of the school interracial climate and both objective and perceived numerical ethnic majority status predicted lower levels of peer ethnic discrimination. Taken together, the results highlight the significance of both objective (e.g., ethnic composition) and subjective (e.g., interracial climate) aspects of the school ethnic context to students' high school social experiences.

Given the passivity of many adolescents upon witnessing peer victimization, the goal of this study was to evaluate the features of school‐based peer victimization events that promote helping. A sample of 470 early adolescents (52% girls; 71% White, 9% Black, 6% Latino, 2% Asian, 1% American Indian, 8% Multiethnic, and 3% Other) reported likelihood of helping and specific helping and non‐helping behaviors with an experimental vignette method and through descriptions of recently witnessed real‐life victimization events. With both methods, an adolescent's relationship with the victim predicted likelihood of helping and specific helping behaviors above and beyond the contribution of other key personal characteristics including gender, empathy, communal goal orientation, and previous victimization experiences. Examination of adolescents' real‐life experiences yielded systematic patterns between their responses and their reasoning about the responses undertaken. The results illustrate the relevance of taking into account peer victimization event characteristics for promoting witness intervention in adolescence.

Adolescent defending of peer victimization in the school and cyber context has received increased attention in developmental science and is an important component of antibullying interventions. However, the overall prevalence, and individual characteristics that correlate with defending in adolescence, have not been systematically and statistically reviewed. Framed in Bronfenbrenner’s social-ecological theory, this meta-analytic review included 172 reports out of 155 studies of defending including 150,978 children and adolescent participants from 4 continents (i.e., North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia) to analyze two aspects: (1) the average proportion of defenders in the population and (2) associations between defending and individual and peer-relational correlates of defending in school and cyber contexts. Using mixed-effects modeling, our results confirmed prior findings of gender differences (favoring girls) and age differences (favoring younger children) in defending. We found positive correlations between defending and affective empathy, cognitive empathy, experiences of peer victimization, self-efficacy, popularity, and acceptance, and a negative correlation between defending and moral disengagement. We also found substantial heterogeneity in these effect sizes. The reporter of defending consistently moderated all mean effect sizes. Implications for prevention efforts and future research are discussed.

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With a sample of 831 U.S. adolescents (49% girls) followed from 9th to 11th grade, the directionality of the association between school-based peer victimization and adolescents' perception of their parents' psychological control were examined. Possible mediating influences of internalizing symptoms were also explored. The results highlight the relevance of adolescent-to-parent influences during adolescence by demonstrating that physical peer victimization was predictive of increases in mother's psychological control but parental psychological control did not predict subsequent peer victimization. These direct effects were present above and beyond the contribution of adolescent internalizing symptoms to higher parental psychological control. Practical implications of the primacy of adolescent-to-parent influences in predicting the social adjustment of victims of peer harassment are discussed.