Friend similarity in attitudes toward bullying and sense of responsibility to intervene

Individual and contextual-level predictors of progression in the bystander intervention model

The situational model of bystander behavior is a validated 5-step process for understanding intervention in bullying and sexual harassment, yet the individual-level and contextual-level factors that facilitate the progression from one step to the next are not well understood. The purpose of the current study was to examine whether individual characteristics (social-emotional skills, affective empathy, cognitive empathy, and personal attitudes toward bullying and sexual harassment) and contextual-level factors (school climate and perceived peer attitudes toward bullying and sexual harassment) explained the association between subsequent steps of the bystander intervention model. A sample of 788 high school students completed several validated measures of these constructs. Structural equation modeling analysis revealed that each step significantly and positively predicted the next step, and the addition of a direct path from accepting responsibility to helping improved model fit. The mediational model indicated that individual-level characteristics had significant direct effects on interpreting bullying and sexual harassment as problems, accepting responsibility, and helping, and indirect effects from noticing the bullying and sexual harassment to all subsequent steps except knowing. In contrast, contextual-level effects contributed to accepting responsibility in an inverse direction.

Socio-Cognitive Processes and Peer-Network Influences in Defending and Bystanding

Peers are critical to defending and bystanding during episodes of bullying. This study investigates the extent to which friends can shape defending and bystanding as well as social cognitions associated with these two behaviors (i.e., perceptions of self-efficacy and moral distress). The study sample consisted of n = 1354 early and middle adolescents (7th‒10th grade; 81.4% Italian; 51.3% boys) in northern Italy. Employing a longitudinal social network analytic approach, using stochastic actor-oriented modeling, this study found that adolescents become more similar or stay similar to their friends in both behaviors and perceptions, with no clear indication that students select friends based on similar levels of behaviors or perceptions. The findings illustrate how defending and bystanding behaviors and related social cognitions are developed within friend (peer) networks.

Standing Up or Standing By: Understanding Bystanders’ Proactive Reporting Responses to Social Media Harassment

Social media harassment, a cyberbullying behavior, poses a serious threat to users and platform owners of social media. In this paper, we contextualize the bystander intervention framework and reporting literature to social media in order to understand why bystanders report social media harassment. Our contextualized intervention framework focuses on three sociotechnical aspects—the online social environment, characteristics of the technology platform, and their interplay—that explain bystander reporting on social media platforms. We tested the model using data gathered from active Facebook users. Our findings direct practitioners’ attention to the role of the platform in encouraging bystanders to help stop social media harassment. For policy makers, our findings direct attention to supporting programs that encourage social media users to feel responsible for reporting harassment and making transparent the outcomes of reporting social media harassment using anonymous reporting tools. For platform owners, our findings direct attention to investing in tools that enable anonymous reporting, to fostering a climate that encourages reporting, and to ensuring that all users understand that reporting social media harassment results in swift, effective responses from platform owners. Taken together, we believe our research offer insight into how to build safer and secure social media platforms.

Measuring Bystander Behavior in the Context of Sexual Violence Prevention: Lessons Learned and New Directions

Bystander intervention is receiving increased attention as a potential sexual violence prevention strategy, especially to address campus sexual assault. Rather than focusing on potential perpetrators or victims, the bystander approach engages all members of a community to take action. A growing body of evaluative work demonstrates that bystander intervention education programs yield increased positive attitudes and behaviors related to sexual violence and greater willingness to intervene in pro-social ways. Future program outcome studies, however, would benefit from more refined measures of bystander action as it is a key variable that prevention education programs attempt to influence. The purpose of the current article is to present key issues, identified by four different research teams, on the measurement of bystander behavior related to sexual violence in the context of college campuses. Comparisons among the methods are made to suggest both lessons learned and new directions for bystander behavior measurement using self-report surveys in program evaluation.

Popularity Breeds Contempt: The Evolution of Reputational Dislike Relations and Friendships in High School

In this study, we examined the dynamics of the perception of "dislike" ties (reputational dislike) among adolescents within the contexts of friendship, perceived popularity, substance use, and Facebook use. Survey data were collected from a longitudinal sample of 238 adolescents from the 11th and 12th grades in one California high school. We estimated stochastic actor-based network dynamic models, using reports of reputational dislike, friendships, and perceived popularity, to identify factors associated with the maintenance and generation reputational dislike ties. The results showed that high-status adolescents and more frequent Facebook users tended to become perceived as or stay disliked by their peers over time. There was a tendency for friendships to promote the creation and maintenance of reputational disliking but not vice versa. Adolescents tended to perceive others as disliked when their friends also perceived them as disliked. There was no evidence that either cigarette smoking or drinking alcohol affected reputational dislike dynamics. This study highlights the important role that the hierarchical peer system, online peer context, and friendships play in driving information diffusion of negative peer relations among adolescents.

Humor style similarity and difference in friendship dyads

This study assessed the concurrent and prospective (fall to spring) associations between four different humor styles to assess the degree to which stable friendships are characterized by similarity, and to assess whether best friends' humor styles influence each other's later use of humor. Participants were aged 11-13 years, with 87 stable, reciprocal best friend dyads. Self-report assessments of humor styles were completed on both occasions. Results indicated that there was no initial similarity in dyads' levels of humor. However, dyads' use of humor that enhances interpersonal relationships (Affiliative humor) became positively correlated by spring. Additionally, young people's use of this humor style was positively associated with their best friend's later use of the same. No such effects were present for humor which was aggressive, denigrating toward the self, or used to enhance the self. These results have clear implications for theories of humor style development, highlighting an important role for Affiliative humor within stable friendship dyads.