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The prevalence of bullying peaks during the middle school years and declines over the high school years. This review examines the distinct features of bullying during the high school years that may explain this decline. We explore how changes in the social contexts of high-school aged adolescents influence whether bullying occurs and is reported. We focus first on changes that happen within the organizational and social aspects of high schools compared to elementary and middle schools that may influence bullying. Then we consider changes that occur through the introduction of new social contexts including work, romantic relationships, social media, and the juvenile justice system. We evaluate how these contexts and the perspectives of the individuals with whom teens interact in these contexts may influence how bullying-like behaviors are interpreted during the high school years. We end by providing a nudge to scholars of bullying to work more deliberately across disciplines to yield a richer understanding of bullying.

School-based bullying is a serious health issue among adolescents world wide. We identify several differences in microblogs of school-based bullying between Twitter (mostly representing the USA) and Weibo (mostly representing China). First, we see a smaller fraction of victim authors in Weibo than in Twitter. We hypothesize that this may be due to Asian culture's emphasis on saving face where it is more of a taboo to be a victim or label someone a victim. Second, we see different temporal dynamics of school bullying posts due to differences in holidays and length of school days. Finally, bullying posts from Weibo contain more mentions of family than those from Twitter. This may be due to the greater emphasis on family in Asian cultures.

This study investigates whether cultural differences exist between the ways U.S. and Taiwanese college students perceive peer victimization using both an experimental vignette method and an open-ended question format. A total of 1,125 college students (53% female) from the United States (n = 535) and Taiwan (n = 590) read and responded to vignettes which depicted peer interactions in the college context. The peer interactions varied along three factors expected to be associated with differentiating victimization from affiliative teasing: hostility, playfulness, and relationship closeness. Controlling for individual factors of sex, prior victimization, prior teasing, and emphasis on interpersonal harmony, students perceived more victimization when both hostility and a lack of playfulness were present. Culture interacted with the situational factors such that both hostility and lack of playfulness were stronger predictors of perceived victimization for Taiwanese than for U.S. college students. In open-ended responses about sensitive topics, "Ability and academic performance" and "Self/thoughts/characters/habits" were more indicative of victimization for Taiwanese college students. "Health and disability" was more salient as indicative of victimization for U.S. college students. Findings from this study are among the first to evaluate signals of peer victimization with a cultural comparison; they can be used to inform victimization intervention programs or socioemotional curriculums in late adolescence to be culturally relevant.

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