Stability and change in student classroom composition and its impact on peer victimization.

Abstract

Although peer victimization in school mainly takes place between children in the same classroom or grade and bullying is generally seen as a group process, little is known about how stability and change in classroom composition affect peer victimization. Hence, this study addressed the following questions: (a) Are newcomers in the classroom more likely to become victims? (b) Does a stable classroom, where children generally have the same classmates over time, lead to less change in bully nominations? To address these questions, this article examined 3 waves of bully nominations in a sample of 3,254 children (50% boys; age 8 -12) in 31 elementary schools, displaying three types of schools: stable or unstable administrative or pedagogical multigrade. Both research questions were answered by longitudinal social network analyses of the school-wide networks. The meta-analyzed results of these analyses with small effect sizes showed that (a) although stable classrooms do not necessarily show less change in bully nominations than in unstable classrooms, victim-bully ties are more likely to develop among students in the same grade or same classroom and (b) newcomers were more likely to become victims, more so in unstable schools than in stable schools. Educational Impact and Implications StatementThis study contributes to the existing bullying literature by providing first insights into the formation and development of bullying relationships within the school context by examining changes in victim-bully networks in schools that do and do not combine classrooms or grades over the school years. The findings of this study suggest that school and classroom stability and change have a minor impact on the formation of victim-bully relationships between children. Bullying relationships were found to develop most easily between children in the same grade, more so in stable classrooms than in classrooms with changing classroom composition, with no clear evidence that newcomers are more at risk of becoming victimized. The formation and development of bullying relationships among students within the same grade was weakest in unstable pedagogical multigrade schools, after controlling for school size. These findings may be beneficial to schools that consistently deal with changing compositions in their student population and highlight that a context-specific approach may be necessary to tackle bullying in stable and unstable schools.

Social status and friendship in peer victimization trajectories

“…These results support the idea that a key tactic when intervening in situations of bullying could be to try to break down certain harmful social structures in the classroom ( Rambaran, van Duijn, Dijkstra, & Veenstra, 2019 ). The results observed for gender show the relevance of controlling the effect of this variable in these analyses.…”

Bullying as a Group Process in Childhood: A Longitudinal Social Network Analysis

“…We noticed that the change in bullying ties is high (see also Huitsing et al, 2014;Rambaran et al, 2019b). Recent work on the dynamic interplay between bullying and popularity showed that bullies frequently change victims to maintain a high 2019).…”

“…All models showed good convergence (Ripley, Snijders, Boda, V€ or€ os, & Preciado, 2019). In some classroom networks, one or two additional effects were necessary to achieve an acceptable model fit, which is standard practice in social network analysis for bullying and victimization networks (Huitsing et al, 2014;Rambaran, van Duijn, Dijkstra, & Veenstra, 2019b;Ripley et al, 2019). Initially, a good fit was obtained for 12 of 19 classrooms, then two more classrooms obtained good fit by including additional effects (classrooms 11 and 15).…”

“…Bullying is also not limited to classroom boundaries: They occur outside of classroom too (Huitsing et al, 2014). Hence, school-level or grade-level analyses would capture a larger proportion of children's bullying networks (Rambaran et al, 2019b). Victims in similar positions may find friends in the wider school network.…”

The Anticipation of Schools Bullying

“…Bullying considered as a common thing and bullying also used as an encouragement for its victims to make themselves better person, some bullying victims' show that they do not deserve to bullied and they choose to fight the perpetrator by bullied them back. 15 The impact of bullying for the perpetrator is that they will regret the action he has done when the victim prefers to remain silent and does not reply to the perpetrator. Meanwhile, to prevent bullying, families can teach good behaviour to their children at the early childhood stage, so that they can behave well when they are outside the home.…”