Bullying Victimization among Mexican Adolescents: Psychosocial Differences from an Ecological Approach

Abstract

<jats:p>This transversal study over a random representative sample of 1687 Mexican students attending public and private secondary schools (54% girls, 12–17 years old, M = 13.65. DT = 1.14) aimed to analyze psychosocial differences between victims and non-victims of bullying from the bioecological model. It included individual variables (ontosystem), familiar, community, and scholar factors (microsystem), and gender (macrosystem) to perform a multivariate discriminant analysis and a logistic regression analysis. The discriminant analysis found that psychological distress, offensive communication with mother and father, and a positive attitude toward social norms transgression characterized the high victimization cluster. For the non-victims, the discriminant variables were community implication, positive attitude toward institutional authority, and open communication with the mother. These variables allowed for correctly predicting membership in 76% of the cases. Logistic regression analysis found that psychological distress, offensive communication with the father, and being a boy increased the probability of high victimization, while a positive attitude toward authority, open communication with the mother, and being a girl decrease this probability. These results highlight the importance of open and offensive communication between adolescents and their parents on psychological distress, attitude toward authority, community implication, and bullying victimization.</jats:p>

Interpersonal Support, Emotional Intelligence and Family Function in Adolescence

“…Whereas studies analyzing the role in social support and family function are rather scarce, in social support, the results of the study by Rowsell et al [ 14 ] suggested that emotional skills were especially important to the configuration of social networks of girls, particularly with respect to emotional awareness (ability to recognize one’s own emotions and those of others) and especially in early adolescence. Similarly, the study conducted from an ecological approach by Núñez-Fadda et al [ 73 ] concluded that the family, and especially parents, are essential to emotional socialization and learning skills for their adolescent children’s positive development in different contexts. To a great extent, parenting and socialization are influenced by the gender of their children, since they cut across perceptions, cognitions and actions, affecting them all.…”

Análisis Psicométrico de la Escala de Relaciones Intrafamiliares

“…En contraste, el clima familiar negativo, caracterizado por una comunicación ofensiva o evitativa, falta de claridad en las reglas, inconsistencia parental, prácticas parentales duras con predominio de la crítica, la humillación y la amenaza del afecto, castigos físicos y de otro tipo, y alta frecuencia de conflictos que no se llegan a resolver, tiene una influencia negativa en el ajuste psicosocial de los hijos (Cova et al, 2018;Johnson et al, 2016;Wang & Kenny, 2014;Wiggins et al, 2015). Se ha aportado evidencia respecto a su relación positiva con, las conductas violentas, delictivas (Garcés-Prettel et al, 2020;Romero-Abrio et al, 2018;Cerezo et al, 2018;Bonilla Castillón et al, 2017;Johnson, et al, 2016;Moratto Vásquez, Berbesí Fernández, Cárdenas Zuluaga, Restrepo Botero, & Londoño Ardilla, 2015), disruptivas, así como un actitud a la transgresión de normas sociales (Johnson et al, 2016) y a la victimización escolar (Nuñez-Fadda et al, 2020;León-Moreno et al, 2020;Castro, et al, 2019), hallazgos que son coherentes con las correlaciones entre la E.R.I. y estas variables.…”

“…Por el contrario, los problemas en el funcionamiento familiar se han relacionado con síntomas internalizantes y externalizantes en los hijos adolescentes (Wiggins, Mitchell, Hyde, & Monk, 2015;García et al, 2018) como depresión (Thomassin, Suveg, Davis, Lavner, & Beach, 2017;Freed, Rubenstein, Daryanani, Olino, & Lauren, 2017), ansiedad (Simpson, Vannucci, & Ohannessian, 2018;Oppenheimer et al, 2016; Callejas-Jerónimo, Suárez-Relinque, Musitu-Ferrer, & Musitu-Ochoa, 2020), violencia escolar (Garcés-Prettel, Santoya-Montes, & Jiménez-Osorio, 2020; Romero-Abrio, Musitu-Ochoa, Callejas-Jerónimo, Sánchez-Sosa, & Villareal-González, 2018;Cerezo, Ruiz-Esteban, Lacasa, & Arense, 2018;Bonilla, Nuñez, Domínguez, & Callejas, 2017;Estévez, Jiménez, & Cava, 2016), victimización escolar (Nuñez-Fadda, Castro-Castañeda, Vargas-Jiménez, Musitu-Ochoa, & Callejas-Jerónimo, 2020;León-Moreno et al, 2020;Castro, Nuñez, Musitu, & Callejas, 2019), uso de substancias (Riquelme, Garcia, & Serra, 2018), ciberacoso (Romero-Abrio et al, 2019;Martínez-Ferrer et al, 2019) uso problemático del móvil (Santana-Vega, Gómez-Muñoz, & Feliciano-García, 2019) conductas de riesgo sexual, así como conductas antisociales en los adolescentes (Johnson, Giordano, Longmore, & Manning, 2016). Los argumentos expuestos respecto a la importancia de la familia en el bienestar del adolescente justifican la validación de este instrumento que evalúa con rigor -fiabilidad y validez-las dimensiones de funcionamiento familiar que impactan en su ajuste psicosocial (Hamilton & Carr, 2016).…”

Peer Victimization, Peer Aggression and Depressive Symptoms over Time: A Longitudinal Study with Latent Growth Curves

“…It also enables the identification of markers (e.g., sociodemographic variables) that can explain differences in these trajectories. For instance, empirical research has found that victimization, aggression, and depressive symptoms are not equally distributed across genders (Lahav-Kadmiel & Brunstein-Klomek, 2018;Nuñez-Fadda et al, 2020). These studies have found, in this respect, that girls are more vulnerable than boys to the negative consequences (psychological and emotional problems) of peer victimization (Feijóo et al, 2021;Kim et al, 2018), probably due to their greater desire for acceptance and inclusion in the peer group (Baldry et al, 2017;Zhang et al, 2020).…”