Defending Victims of Bullying in Early Adolescence: A Multilevel Analysis

Abstract

Adolescents' defending behaviors in school bullying situations is likely determined by individual characteristics, social status variables, and classroom/school contextual factors operating simultaneously in the peer ecology. However, there is little research on defending behavior that utilizes this multilevel approach. This study investigated how students' willingness to defend victims of bullying was affected by feelings of empathy, perceived popularity, and classroom-level perceived prosocial norms. Participants were 1373 adolescents (40% girls, Mage: 14 yrs) from 54 classrooms in six middle schools in South Korea. These youth reported on their feelings of empathy and how prosocial they perceived their classmates to be. Peer-ratings and peer nominations were used to estimate defending behaviors and which students were perceived as popular. Multilevel analyses showed that participants were more likely to defend victims when they had greater empathy and perceived popularity and when classroom-level prosocial norms were higher. The findings have implications for interventions to reduce school bullying and for studying defending behavior in multiple cultural contexts.

Navigating the Healthy Context Paradox: Identifying Classroom Characteristics that Improve the Psychological Adjustment of Bullying Victims

“…South Korea provides an interesting cultural context because Korean forms of bullying (Wang-ta) have strong conformity characteristics. For example, many students enlist peer norms as justification for excluding and/or ignoring one or two targeted peers (see Yun and Graham 2018 ; Yun 2019 ). Moreover, because instruction in South Korean middle schools is classroom based, the same classmates take nearly all of their classes together during a given academic year.…”

Forgiveness, Gratitude, Happiness, and Prosocial Bystander Behavior in Bullying

“…Under these perspectives, moral judgment and moral emotions are referred as directly related to the prosocial behavior. For example, some studies analyze the effects of moral sensitivity (Thornberg and Jungert, 2013;Levasseur et al, 2017), selfimportance of moral value (Pozzoli et al, 2016), empathy (Pöyhönen et al, 2010;Barchia and Bussey, 2011;Nickerson et al, 2014;Pozzoli et al, 2016;Van der Ploeg et al, 2017;Yun and Graham, 2018), and restorative shame management (Ahmed, 2008;Valdés-Cuervo et al, 2018) with defender bystander behavior in bullying. Nonetheless, for social cognitivist (Blasi, 1980(Blasi, , 1984(Blasi, , 2004Rest, 1986;Narvaez and Lapsley, 2009;Bergman, 2013), prosocial behavior is a complex phenomenon that cannot be fully explained using either a single or a couple of variables.…”

A developmental perspective on popularity and the group process of bullying

“…Popularity signifies reputation, power, and social dominance among peers (LaFontana & Cillessen, 1998) and can be an underlying motive for bullying behavior in adolescence (Sijtsema, Veenstra, Lindenberg, & Salmivalli, 2009). Studies across different ages have investigated the role of popularity in the group process of bullying (see, e.g., Duffy, Penn, Nesdale, & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2017;Pouwels, Lansu, & Cillessen, 2016;Salmivalli, 2010;van der Ploeg, Kretschmer, Salmivalli, & Veenstra, 2017;Yun & Graham, 2018).…”