Online support seeking, co-rumination, and mental health in adolescent girls

Introduction

Adolescents frequently use informal support seeking to cope with stress and worries. Past research in face-to-face contexts has shown that the relationship between informal support seeking and mental health is influenced by the specific strategy used and the mode through which support is sought. To date, little research has considered the relationship between support seeking online and adolescent mental health.

Methods

In this study, structural equation modeling (SEM) examined the mediating role of co-rumination in the relationships between seeking support from friends or online and two measures of mental health: depression and anxiety. Participants were 186 adolescent girls, drawn from four independent girls' schools in Sydney, Australia. Four brief vignettes described common social stressors and participants rated their likelihood of seeking support from close friends and from informal online sources. Co-rumination was measured using a short form of the Co-rumination Questionnaire and depression and anxiety were measured with the youth version of the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale-Youth (DASS-Y).

Results

Different patterns of findings were found for support seeking from close friends and support seeking online. First, support seeking from friends was related to lower levels of depression and anxiety while seeking support online was related to higher levels depression and anxiety. Second, co-rumination suppressed the relationship between seeking support from friends and depression, but not online support seeking and depression or anxiety.

Discussion

These findings suggest that co-rumination reduces the benefits of seeking support from friends but is unrelated to online support seeking. The findings also confirm the problematic nature of online support seeking for adolescent girls' mental health, particularly in response to social stressors.

Overcoming Limitations in Peer-Victimization Research That Impede Successful Intervention: Challenges and New Directions

Peer victimization at school is a worldwide problem with profound implications for victims, bullies, and whole-school communities. Yet the 50-year quest to solve the problem has produced mostly disappointing results. A critical examination of current research reveals both pivotal limitations and potential solutions. Solutions include introducing psychometrically sound measures to assess the parallel components of bullying and victimization, analyzing cross-national data sets, and embracing a social-ecological perspective emphasizing the motivation of bullies, importance of bystanders, pro-defending and antibullying attitudes, classroom climate, and a multilevel perspective. These solutions have been integrated into a series of recent interventions. Teachers can be professionally trained to create a highly supportive climate that allows student-bystanders to overcome their otherwise normative tendency to reinforce bullies. Once established, this intervention-enabled classroom climate impedes bully-victim episodes. The take-home message is to work with teachers on how to develop an interpersonally supportive classroom climate at the beginning of the school year to catalyze student-bystanders' volitional internalization of pro-defending and antibullying attitudes and social norms. Recommendations for future research include studying bullying and victimization simultaneously, testing multilevel models, targeting classroom climate and bystander roles as critical intervention outcomes, and integrating school-wide and individual student interventions only after improving social norms and the school climate.

The Adolescent Peer Relations Instrument- Bully/Target: Measurement Invariance Across Gender, Age, and Clinical Status

Adolescent Peer Relations Instrument-Bully/Target (APRI-BT) is a multidimensional scale designed to assess bullying involvement both as target and perpetrator. Although existing research has shown that the APRI-BT satisfies the assumption of measurement invariance across age and gender, these findings come from western individualistic countries (e.g., Australia). This study aimed to investigate the factorial structure and measurement invariance across age, gender, and clinical status in a sample of Romanian youths. Participants were 1,024 adolescents, 10 to 18 years, recruited from both community and clinical setting. Our results confirmed a six first-order factor structure and two second-order factors (Bully including Bullying Physical, Bullying Verbal, Bullying Social and Victimization including Physical Victimization, Verbal Victimization, Social Victimization). In addition, measurement invariance across age, gender, and clinical status was demonstrated. This study identifies APRI-BT as an instrument with solid psychometric proprieties for measuring bullying and victimization among preadolescents and adolescents.

Exploring the Dimensional Structure of Bullying Victimization Among Primary and Lower-Secondary School Students: Is One Factor Enough, or Do We Need More?

In adolescence, bullying victimization is typically represented in terms of a three-fold factor structure reflecting three components of verbal, physical, and social victimization. Recent studies have suggested the usefulness of alternativte models including both general and component-specific factors. In this study, we assessed the empirical and theoretical validity of an instrument assessing verbal, physical and social victimization using a set of alternative models of victimization: a unidimensional model, a three-factor model, and a bifactor model. Association between emerging factors and student variables were explored to establish theoretical fit of the models. Sample consisted of upper primary and lower secondary school students [N = 1311; 53% Male; Mean age (SD) = 10.73 (1.45)] and their teachers. The three factor and bifactor models showed good fit. In spite of acceptable fit, the unidimensional model showed lower empirical support when compared with the other models. The dimensions of the three-factor model showed similar associations with most student variables, while the bifactor showed more heterogeneous, and theoretically coherent associations. General victimization decreased with age and was positively related with externalizing and internalizing symptoms, student-teacher conflict and negative expectations. Verbal victimization showed increased prevalence among girls and older students. Physical victimization showed increased prevalence among boys and younger students, and positive associations with externalizing symptoms and student-teacher conflict. Social victimization was more frequent among girls, and positively related with internalizing symptoms and negative expectations toward teachers. These findings highlight the usefulness of modeling victimization using both general and form-specific dimensions for both assessment and theory-building purposes.

Temporal ordering effects of adolescent depression, relational aggression, and victimization over six waves: Fully latent reciprocal effects models

The temporal ordering of depression, aggression, and victimization has important implications for theory, policy, and practice. For a representative sample of high school students (Grades 7-10; N = 3,793) who completed the same psychometrically strong, multiitem scales 6 times over a 2-year period, there were reciprocal effects between relational-aggression and relational-victimization factors: aggression led to subsequent victimization and victimization led to subsequent aggression. After controlling for prior depression, aggression, and victimization, depression had a positive effect on subsequent victimization, but victimization had no effect on subsequent depression. Aggression neither affected nor was affected by depression. The results suggest that depression is a selection factor that leads to victimization, but that victimization has little or no effect on subsequent depression beyond what can be explained by the preexisting depression. In support of developmental equilibrium, the results were consistent across the 6 waves. (PsycINFO Database Record

A short version of the Self Description Questionnaire II: operationalizing criteria for short-form evaluation with new applications of confirmatory factor analyses

Four studies evaluate the new Self Description Questionnaire II short-form (SDQII-S) that measures 11 dimensions of adolescent self-concept based on responses to 51 of the original 102 SDQII items and demonstrate new statistical strategies to operationalize guidelines for short-form evaluation proposed by G. T. Smith, D. M. McCarthy, and K. G. Anderson (2000). Multiple-group confirmatory factor analyses revealed that the factor structure based on responses to 51 items by a new cross-validation group (n=9,134) was invariant with the factor structures based on responses to the same 51 items and to all 102 items by the original normative archive group (n = 9,187). Reliabilities for the 11 SDQII-S factors were nearly the same and consistently high (.80 to .89) for both groups. Multitrait-multimethod analyses support the internal validity of responses over time. Gender and age effects on the 11 SDQII-S factors were invariant across the archive and cross-validation groups.

A Multidimensional Perspective of Relations Between Self-Concept (Self Description Questionnaire II) and Adolescent Mental Health (Youth Self-Report)

Relations between self-concept and mental health are best understood from a multidimensional perspective. For responses by 903 adolescents (mean age = 12.6) to a new French translation of the Self Description Questionnaire II (SDQII), confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated a well-defined multidimensional factor structure of reliable, highly differentiated self-concept factors. Correlations between 11 SDQII factors and 7 mental health problems (Youth Self-Report; YSR) varied substantially (.11 to -.83; mean r = -.35). Single higher-order factors could not explain relations among SDQII factors, among YSR factors, or between the SDQII and YSR factors. This highly differentiated multivariate pattern of relations supports a multidimensional perspective of self-concept, not the unidimensional perspective still prevalent in mental health research and assessment.