Measuring 8 to 12 year old children's self-report of power imbalance in relation to bullying: development of the Scale of Perceived Power Imbalance

Building Resilience: A Qualitative Analysis of Bullying Among Children with Disabilities on Parental and Teacher's Perspective

Background

Bullying can happen to every human in the community, including children with disability and their families. Children with disabilities, as a vulnerable group in a community, may experience different types of bullying and have different responses to it.

Purpose

This study aimed to identify bullying experiences in children with disabilities based on teachers' and parents' perspectives.

Methods

This study used a qualitative descriptive research design. Participants in this study consisted of two groups, namely parents and teachers in Special Schools, with 18 people (eight parents and ten teachers) in the Pangandaran Regency area, Indonesia, from May to June 2023. The sampling technique chosen was purposive sampling. The data collection process used Focused Group Discussion (FGD) throughout the semi-structured interview. The data was analyzed by thematic analysis. This study applied NVIVO 12 software to assist with data categorization and framework based on participant statements and observations (QSR International).

Results

The data from the discussion were analyzed using thematic analysis methods to find relevant themes were found in the statements expressed by the participants. The results of the data analysis obtained three main themes related to bullying in children with disabilities, namely the type of bullying, the impact of bullying, and the responses to bullying.

Conclusion

A support group is necessary to establish a source of parental coping and increase resilience in caring for children with special needs.

School Bullying Is Not a Conflict: The Interplay between Conflict Management Styles, Bullying Victimization and Psychological School Adjustment

It has been argued that adaptive conflict management styles may protect students against bullying victimization and against negative effects of ongoing victimization on psychological school adjustment. Moreover, maladaptive conflict management styles may lead to victimization or intensify negative effects of victimization on school adjustment. Mediation and moderation models were computed to test these effects. Furthermore, a person-oriented approach compared noninvolved students, victims, and bully-victims regarding conflict management styles and school adjustment. A total of 172 individuals (77.2% female, mean age: 22.7 years) completed a retrospective online questionnaire about conflict management styles, bullying victimization and school adjustment during their school years. In the mediation model, conflict management styles were not associated with victimization, but there was a positive direct effect of the integrating style on school adjustment. In the moderation model, the integrating style moderated the negative effect of victimization on school adjustment but did not buffer against the negative effects when victimization was high. Person-oriented comparisons showed that victims used the obliging style more often than bully-victims. Furthermore, victims and bully-victims showed lower school adjustment than noninvolved students. Overall, results corroborate the view that school bullying is qualitatively different from normal peer conflicts. Implications for researchers, policymakers, school principals and teachers are discussed.

Is It Possible to Measure the Role of the Bystander and the Victim of Bullying in Children? Construct Validity of Two Brief Pictorial Scales With IRT and CFA Models

The study's objective was to develop and validate the psychometric properties of two brief pictorial scales to evaluate the roles of bystanders and victims of bullying. A sample of 910 students was considered (49.6%, boys; 50.4%, girls) between the ages of 7 and 13 (M = 10, SD = 1.4). Both instruments present nine pictorial items representing two dimensions: physical bullying (items 1 to 4) and psychological bullying (items 5 to 9). An additional measure of anxiety was used to assess convergent validity. The Confirmatory Factorial Analysis shows that the two-dimensional oblique model, physical bullying and psychological bullying, presents a better fit to the bystander scale data (RMSEA = .040; CFI = .984; SRMR = .033) and in the victim scale (RMSEA = .051; CFI = .978; SRMR = .040) in comparison to other competitor models. From the perspective of the Item Response Theory (IRT), it was found that the items adequately discriminate the levels of the latent variable; therefore, items 1 (physical bullying) and 7 (psychological bullying) are the most accurate on the bystander scale, and items 3 (physical bullying) and 7 (psychological bullying), on the victim scale. It was also found that the degree of difficulty on both scales is lower for the psychological bullying dimension than for the physical bullying dimension. Both instruments demonstrated good psychometric properties; therefore, they can detect school bullying in classrooms.

Rationale, Relevance, and Limits of Stress-Induced Psychopathology in Rodents as Models for Psychiatry Research: An Introductory Overview

Emotional and cognitive information processing represent higher-order brain functions. They require coordinated interaction of specialized brain areas via a complex spatial and temporal equilibrium among neuronal cell-autonomous, circuitry, and network mechanisms. The delicate balance can be corrupted by stressful experiences, increasing the risk of developing psychopathologies in vulnerable individuals. Neuropsychiatric disorders affect twenty percent of the western world population, but therapies are still not effective for some patients. Elusive knowledge of molecular pathomechanisms and scarcity of objective biomarkers in humans present complex challenges, while the adoption of rodent models helps to improve our understanding of disease correlate and aids the search for novel pharmacological targets. Stress administration represents a strategy to induce, trace, and modify molecular and behavioral endophenotypes of mood disorders in animals. However, a mouse or rat model will only display one or a few endophenotypes of a specific human psychopathology, which cannot be in any case recapitulated as a whole. To override this issue, shared criteria have been adopted to deconstruct neuropsychiatric disorders, i.e., depression, into specific behavioral aspects, and inherent neurobiological substrates, also recognizable in lower mammals. In this work, we provide a rationale for rodent models of stress administration. In particular, comparing each rodent model with a real-life human traumatic experience, we intend to suggest an introductive guide to better comprehend and interpret these paradigms.