A Behaviorally Specific, Empirical Alternative to Bullying: Aggravated Peer Victimization

• NCJ Number: 251849
• Journal: Journal of Adolescent Health Volume: 59 Issue: 5 Dated: November 2016 Pages: 496-501
• Author(s): David Finkelhor; Anne Shattuck; Heather Turner; Sherry Hamby
• Date Published: November 2016
• Length: 6 pages
• Grant Number(s): 2006-JW-BX-0003, 2009-JW-BX-0018
• Sponsoring Agency: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP)
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Research (Applied/Empirical); Report (Study/Research); Report (Grant Sponsored); Program/Project Description
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This study tested a behaviorally specific measure of serious peer victimization, called aggravated peer victimization (APV), using empirically derived aggravating elements of episodes (injury, weapon, bias content, sexual content, multiple perpetrators, and multiple contexts) and compared this measure with the conventional Olweus bullying (OB) measure, which uses repetition and power imbalance as its seriousness criteria.

Abstract

The data for this study came from The National Survey of Children's Exposure to Violence 2014, a study conducted via telephone interviews with a nationally representative sample. This analysis used the 1,949 youth ages 10-17 from that survey. The APV measure identified twice as many youth with serious episodes involving injury, weapons, sexual assaults, and bias content as the OB measure. In terms of demographic and social characteristics, the groups were very similar; however, the APV explained significantly more of the variation in distress than the OB (R2 = .19 vs. .12). (Publisher abstract modified)