Defending behavior of peer victimization in school and cyber context during childhood and adolescence: A meta-analytic review of individual and peer-relational characteristics.

Abstract

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.

Adolescent Proactive Bystanding Versus Passive Bystanding Responses to School Bullying: the Role of Peer and Moral Predictors

“…This finding is similar to other studies that found younger students tend to engage more as proactive bystanders than older students (e.g. Bellmore et al 2012;Ma et al 2019) and rates of passive bystander behaviour (or doing nothing) increase with age (Trach et al 2010). Increasing levels of bullying victimisation, peer support and school connectedness and lower moral disengagement, in particular diffusion of responsibility, distortion of consequences of being bullied, and blaming the bullying target, were associated with higher odds of a proactive bystander response.…”

“…Similar to the Ma et al (2019) and Killer et al (2019) metaanalyses, the present study found overall moral disengagement to be associated with a decreased odds of a defending or proactive response to bullying. Contrary to the hypotheses, gender did not moderate the relationship between moral disengagement and defending behaviour, and thereby failed to replicate the findings of Thornberg and Jungert (2013) and Doramajian and Bukowski (2015).…”

“…However, other studies have shown that older adolescents were more likely to intervene to assist the target than younger adolescents (Barhight et al 2013;Chapin and Brayack 2016). The recent metaanalysis of defending responses to peer victimisation by Ma et al (2019) found, based on 52 studies involving 41,919 participants, a higher proportion of young children exhibited proactive bystander behaviours than older children.…”

Evaluating the impact of a defender role-play intervention on adolescent’s defender intentions and responses towards name-calling

“…Researchers and anti-bullying organisations are increasingly investigating the individual and situational predictors of defender responses amongst young people (Ma, Meter, Chen, & Lee, 2019; van der Ploeg, Kretschmer, Salmivalli, & Veenstra, 2017; Yun & Graham, 2018) as well as attending to the development and evaluation of programmes to promote defender responses in schools (Salmivalli, Kärnä, & Poskiparta, 2010; Timmons-Mitchell, Levesque, Harris, Flannery, & Falcone, 2016). For example, the successful KiVa programme is the largest anti-bullying programme to acknowledge the importance of training bystanders.…”

Bystander behaviors in peer victimization : Associations with moral disengagement, efficacy beliefs, and student-teacher relationship quality

“…That is, bullying was considered a special form of peer victimization (e.g., "bullying is recognized as a subset of peer victimization that is intentional, chronic, and characterized by an imbalance of power between victim and aggressor", Felix et al, 2011, p. 234). Students who are targets of bullying victimization, compared to students who are targets of peer victimization, fare worse on several dimensions (Hunter et al, 2007;Malecki et al, 2015;Oblath et al, 2019;van der Ploeg et al, 2015;van Noorden et al, 2016;Ybarra et al, 2014). Even so, critical voices have been raised that being overly adherent to or focused on the concept of bullying might lead researchers to ignore children's negative social interactions that do not meet the three bullying criteria (Finkelhor et al, 2012;Fry et al, 2020;Turner et al, 2015).…”