Under what conditions do U.S. and Taiwanese late adolescents feel victimized by their peers?

Abstract

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.

Performance-Based Measures, Experimental Approaches, and Intensive Repeated Measures to Examine Interpersonal Characteristics of Victims

“…Another way to study interpersonal responses to social rejection is to use vignettes, which are short fictional scenarios describing different bullying situations. Before being presented with these vignettes, participants are asked to imagine that they are the target of bullying (Huang & Bellmore, 2020;Palomares & Wingate, 2020), the perpetrator of bullying (Thornberg et al, 2020), a bystander to a bullying situation (António et al, 2023;Choi & Park, 2021;Fousiani et al, 2019;Fousiani et al, 2020), or a witness to self-defense following bullying (Fousiani et al, 2020). These bullying vignettes are most often presented in a written format but have also been shown as visual stimuli, such as screenshots of received hypothetical Facebook or text messages (Palomares & Wingate, 2020).…”

“…Whereas previous studies aimed to measure (interpersonal) reactions to bullying situations, most of the presented studies did not assess or report participants' own experiences with bullying. Those studies that did, used it only as a control variable in the analyses (Choi & Park, 2021;Huang & Bellmore, 2020), thus missing the opportunity to use past bullying experiences as a focus to assess differences in reactions to being a hypothetical victim, bystander, or perpetrator of bullying. Considering that interpersonal reactions are influenced by past social experiences (Pincus et al, 2020), it is important to assess if victims have heightened responses to these vignette scenarios compared with peers with no personal bullying history, thus understanding the potential impact of bullying.…”