We review the recent literature on cyberbullying and its effects on victimised youth, identifying key points. We conclude that cyberbullying, while following many of the underlying dynamics of more traditional forms of bullying, features some unique qualities that can both magnify the damage caused and make it more difficult to detect. These features include the pervasive, never-ending nature of cyberbullying and the ability to quickly reach large audiences. The potential for anonymity and the related distance afforded by screens and devices compared to in-person interaction allow the cruelty of cyberbullying to go unchecked. Despite the perceived anonymity of cyberbullying, cyberbullying can be perpetrated by friends, who often have intimate knowledge about the victimised youth that can be devastating when made public. Given the difficulty schools face in preventing or even detecting cyberbullying, health care providers are an important ally, due to their knowledge of the youth, the sense of trust they bring to youth, and their independence from the school setting. We conclude by calling for routine screening of bullying by health care providers who deal with paediatric populations.

Scholars have posed different hypotheses on the impact of global telecommunications on value orientations. We analyze and characterize the global telecommunication network and test a series of hypotheses on the relationship between gender values and three types of telephone connections: ties with the global society, ties with Western nations, and ties within groups of nations sharing similar cultural, religious, political, or geographical traits. We use multilevel models and data on two levels, between-country telecommunications network data from TeleGeography, and individual-level data (N = 70,225) on people living in 47 countries from the World Value Survey, waves III and IV. Countries with high degrees of communication insulation, measured as a high percentage of within-group ties of all global telephone links, hold less egalitarian attitudes toward gender equality. This negative effect of group insulation depresses the egalitarian effects of younger birth cohort, college education, and higher income. Embeddedness in a localized information diffusion network and isolated from global communication is associated with less egalitarian attitude toward gender equality. But neither global ties nor ties with Western countries are linked with gender attitudes.

"This study attempts to measure neighborhood boundaries in a novel way by creating network neighborhoods based on the density of social ties among adolescents. We create valued matrices based on social ties and physical distance between adolescents in the county. We then perform factor analyses on these valued matrices to detect these network neighborhoods. The resulting network neighborhoods show considerable spatial contiguity. We assess the quality of these aggregations by comparing the degree of agreement among residents assigned to the same network neighborhood when assessing various characteristics of their “neighborhood”, along with traditional definitions of neighborhoods from Census aggregations. Our findings suggest that these network neighborhoods are a valuable approach for “neighborhood” aggregation."

Objective

The current study examined whether an adolescent's standing within a school-bounded social network moderated the association between depressive symptoms and substance use across adolescence as a function of developmental and demographic factors (gender, parental education, and race/ethnicity).

Method

The sample of 6,776 adolescents participated in up to seven waves of data collection spanning 6th to 12th grade.

Results

Results of latent growth models showed that lower integration into the social network exacerbates risk for depression-related substance use in youth, particularly around the high school transition, but social status acted as both a risk factor and a protective factor at different points in development for different youth. Findings also varied as a function of youth gender and parental education status.

Conclusions

Together these findings suggest that lower integration into the social network exacerbates risk for depression-related substance use in youth, particularly around the high school transition in general as well as just before the high school transition in those with lower parental education or just after the high school transition in males. Thus, the risky impact of social isolation appears more consistent across this period. Social status, however, showed a more varied pattern and further study is needed to understand the sometimes risky and sometimes protective effects of social status on depression-related substance use.

In the study of adolescent health, it is useful to derive indices of social dynamics from sociometric data, and to use these indices as predictors of health risk behaviors. In this manuscript, we introduce a flexible latent variable model as a novel way of obtaining estimates of social integration and social status from school-based sociometric data. Such scores provide the flexibility of a regression-based approach while accounting for measurement error in sociometric indicators. We demonstrate the utility of these factor scores in testing complex hypotheses through a combination of structural equation modeling and survival models, showing that deviance mediates the relationship between social status and smoking onset hazard at the transition to high school.

This study identified profiles of internalizing (anxiety and depression) and externalizing (delinquency and violence against peers) symptoms among bullying victims and examined associations between bullying victimization characteristics and profile membership. The sample consisted of 1196 bullying victims in grades 8-10 (Mage = 14.4, SD = 1.01) who participated in The Context Study in three North Carolina counties in Fall 2003. Five profiles were identified using latent profile analysis: an asymptomatic profile and four profiles capturing combinations of internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Associations between bullying characteristics and membership in symptom profiles were tested using multinomial logistic regression. More frequent victimization increased odds of membership in the two high internalizing profiles compared to the asymptomatic profile. Across all multinomial logistic regression models, when the high internalizing, high externalizing profile was the reference category, adolescents who received any type of bullying (direct, indirect, or dual) were more likely to be in this category than any others.

This short-term longitudinal study examined whether the association between bullying perpetration and later physical dating violence perpetration and mediators of that association (via anger, depression, anxiety, and social status), varied depending on level of bullying victimization. Differences have been noted between those who bully but are not victims of bullying, and those who are both bullies and victims. These differences may influence dating violence risk and the explanations for why bullying leads to dating violence. Data were from dating adolescents in three rural counties who completed self-administered questionnaires in the fall semester of grades 8-10 and again in the spring semester. The sample (N = 2,414) was 44.08% male and 61.31% white. Bullying perpetration in the fall semester predicted physical dating violence perpetration in the spring semester when there was no bullying victimization, but not when there was any bullying victimization. Bullying perpetration was positively associated with anger at all levels of bullying victimization and with social status when there was no or low amounts of victimization; it was negatively associated with social status at high levels of victimization. Bullying victimization was positively associated with anger, depression, and anxiety at all levels of bullying perpetration. Anger mediated the association between bullying perpetration and dating violence, regardless of level of victimization; depression, anxiety, and social status did not mediate the association at any level of bullying victimization. The findings have implications for dating violence prevention efforts and for future research on the link between bullying and dating violence.

Purpose: One suggested approach to preventing adolescent dating violence is to prevent behavioral precursors to dating violence, such as bullying. However, no longitudinal study has examined bullying as a behavioral precursor to dating violence. In this study, longitudinal data were used to examine (1) whether direct and indirect bullying perpetration in the sixth grade predicted the onset of physical dating violence perpetration by the eighth grade and (2) whether the associations varied by sex and race/ethnicity of the adolescent. Methods: Data were collected in school from sixth graders in three primarily rural counties and then again when students were in the eighth grade. Analyses were conducted with 1,154 adolescents who had not perpetrated dating violence at the sixth-grade assessment. The sample was 47% male, 29% black, and 10% of another race/ethnicity than black or white. Results: Direct bullying, defined as hitting, slapping, or picking on another kid in the sixth grade, predicted the onset of physical dating violence perpetration by the eighth grade, controlling for indirect bullying and potential confounders. Although indirect bullying, defined as spreading false rumors and excluding students from friendship groups, was associated with the onset of physical dating violence perpetration in bivariate analyses, it did not predict the onset of physical dating violence when controlling for direct bullying. None of the associations examined varied by sex or race/ethnicity of the adolescents. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that efforts targeted at preventing direct bullying may also prevent the onset of physical dating violence. © 2014 Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine.

Objective

The relationship between smoking and adolescents' peer relationships is complex, with studies showing increased risk of smoking for adolescents of both very high and very low social position. A key question is whether the impact of social position on smoking depends on an adolescent's level of coping motives (i.e., their desire to use smoking to mitigate negative affect).

Method

We assessed how social position predicts nicotine dependence in a longitudinal sample (N = 3,717; 44.8% male; mean age = 13.41 years) of adolescent lifetime smokers measured between 6th and 12th grades. Using both social network analysis and multilevel modeling, we assessed this question at the between-person and within-person level, hypothesizing that within-person decreases in social position would lead to increased risk of nicotine dependence among those with high levels of coping motives.

Results

In contrast to our hypotheses, only interactions with the between-person measures of social position were found, with a slight negative relationship at low levels of coping motives. In addition, the main effect of coping motives was considerably stronger than that of social position at the between-person level, and social position had no significant within-person main effect on nicotine dependence risk.

Conclusions

These results suggest that adolescents with higher overall levels of social position among their peers may have slightly decreased risk for nicotine dependence, but only when coping motives are low. Counter to expectations, higher levels of nicotine dependence risk were not linked to fluctuations in social position.

The current study examined whether social status and social integration, two related but distinct indicators of an adolescent's standing within a peer network, mediate the association between risky symptoms (depressive symptoms and deviant behavior) and substance use across adolescence. The sample of 6,776 adolescents participated in up to seven waves of data collection spanning 6th to 12th grades. Scores indexing social status and integration were derived from a social network analysis of six schools and subsequent psychometric modeling. Results of latent growth models showed that social integration and status mediated the relation between risky symptoms and substance use and that risky symptoms mediated the relation between social standing and substance use during the high school transition. Before this transition, pathways involving deviant behavior led to high social integration and status and in turn to substance use. After this transition, both deviant behavior and depressive symptoms led to low social integration and status and in turn greater substance use. These findings suggest that the high school transition is a risky time for substance use related to the interplay of increases in depressive symptoms and deviant behavior on the one hand and decreases in social status and integration on the other.