For Better or Worse: Friendship Choices and Peer Victimization Among Ethnically Diverse Youth in the First Year of Middle School

Abstract

As children approach early adolescence, the risk of peer victimization often increases. Many children experience some form of peer victimization during this time, but children who experience chronic victimization may be particularly vulnerable to adjustment difficulties. Thus, identifying risk and protective factors associated with chronic victimization continues to be an important area of research. This study examined the effect of change in the victimization of friends on change in children's own victimization, taking into account the ethnic group representation of children in their classes. Over 3,000 6 th grade students (52% female; M = 11.33 years) were drawn from 19 middle schools varying in ethnic composition. Friendships were distinguished by typereciprocal, desired, and undesired-and a novel methodology for measuring ethnic group representation at the individual level was employed. Multilevel modeling indicated that change in friends' victimization from fall to spring of 6 th grade had a differential impact on children's own victimization by friendship type and that the benefits and consequences of change in friends' victimization were especially pronounced for children in the numerical ethnic majority. The findings underscore the role of friendship choices in peer victimization, even if those choices are not reciprocated, and highlight the unique social risks associated with being in the numerical ethnic majority.

Dynamic Changes in Peer Victimization and Adjustment Across Middle School: Does Friends’ Victimization Alleviate Distress?

“…Although there is strong evidence from other research areas that social relationships and experiences have a significant impact on physical health in adulthood (Uchino, ), much less is known about the extent to which these processes operate similarly when considering peer victimization experiences among adolescents and their friends. Understanding such pathways will also help reconcile the current findings with past studies showing that friends’ victimization can actually exacerbate links between victimization and externalizing symptoms (Brendgen et al., ), as well as future victimization (Echols & Graham, ). Whereas sharing social plight with friends’ may promote adaptive social comparisons that alleviate internalizing distress, exposure to friends’ victimization may also promote social learning (i.e., modeling reactive aggression) that in turn increases students’ future externalizing behavior and risk of victimization.…”

“…We rely on all given nominations for the analyses. Although a focus on reciprocal friendships may provide a stricter criterion for friendship, adolescents’ outgoing nominations are meaningful to the nominator (Furman, ), and perceived friends may be just as, if not more, influential as reciprocal ones (Echols & Graham, ; Vitaro, Boivin, & Bukowski, ). Across the four waves of data collection, approximately 70% of the total friends nominated were also participants in the study, which should yield good reliability (Marks, Babcock, Cillessen, & Crick, ).…”

“…According to emotional contagion hypotheses (Brendgen et al., ; Dishion & Tipsord, ), having victimized friends amplifies feelings of vulnerability among youth experiencing victimization themselves. Indeed, there is evidence that adolescents are at increased risk for continued mistreatment over time if their friends are also more victimized (e.g., Echols & Graham, ; Sentse, Dijkstra, Salmivalli, & Cillessen, ), and bullied youth who engage in more negative, problem‐focused discussions with their best friends experience worse internalizing symptoms (Guarneri‐White, Jensen‐Campbell, & Knack, ). These findings suggest that links between peer victimization and adjustment problems are particularly pronounced for students affiliating with friends who are similarly mistreated by peers.…”

Multiracial in Middle School: The Influence of Classmates and Friends on Changes in Racial Self‐Identification

“…In addition, the racial diversity experienced by youth in their classrooms could vary substantially from student to student even within the same school. For these reasons, a novel measure of diversity was employed in which racial diversity was measured at the individual level based on students’ course schedules (obtained from participating schools) and was used in place of a single measure of school‐level diversity (see Echols & Graham, for a discussion of the methodological advantages of measuring diversity at the individual level). Participants’ self‐reported race or ethnicity was used in conjunction with their individual class schedules to calculate diversity among classmates based on Simpson's () diversity index.…”

Meeting in the Middle: The Role of Mutual Biracial Friends in Cross‐Race Friendships

“…Since friendships choices are constrained by availability (propinquity) of potential friends (McPherson et al, 2001) and sharing classes with peers is associated with friendship nominations (Clark & Ayers, 1988;Hallinan & Williams, 1989), we developed a new index of propinquity based on students' class schedules that measured each participant's exposure to their sixth-grade peers throughout the school day. This allowed us to account for availability in a more dynamic way-unique for every participant-than has been done in previous research (see Echols & Graham, 2016;Juvonen, Kogachi, & Graham, 2018). Lastly, we included other network covariates (e.g., indegree, two-paths, reciprocity; described next) standard in most social network analyses.…”