How New Ties Facilitate the Mutual Reinforcement of Status and Bullying in Elementary Schools Rozemarijn Van Der Ploeg, Christian Steglich and René Veenstra
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The way bullying works: How new ties facilitate the mutual reinforcement of status and bullying in elementary schools Rozemarijn van der Ploeg, Christian Steglich and René Veenstra The self-archived postprint version of this journal article is available at Linköping University Institutional Repository (DiVA): http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-154080 N.B.: When citing this work, cite the original publication. van der Ploeg, R., Steglich, C., Veenstra, R., (2019), The way bullying works: How new ties facilitate the mutual reinforcement of status and bullying in elementary schools, Social Networks. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2018.12.006 Original publication available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2018.12.006 Copyright: Elsevier http://www.elsevier.com/ ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT / UNCORRECTED PROOF The Way Bullying Works: How New Ties Facilitate the Mutual Reinforcement of Status and Bullying in Elementary Schools Rozemarijn van der Ploega,b, Christian Steglicha,c, René Veenstraa a Department of Sociology, University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands b Department of Pedagogy and Educational Science, University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands c Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden Article in press Social Networks: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2018.12.006 Correspondence regarding this paper should be addressed to Rozemarijn van der Ploeg, University of Groningen, Grote Rozenstraat 38, 9712 TJ Groningen, the Netherlands. Electronic mail may be addressed to [email protected]. Telephone: 0031 50 363 2486. 1 ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT / UNCORRECTED PROOF Highlights Younger children punished bullying by a refusal to attribute status to bullies. Older children reward bullying with peer status. High-status bullies seemed to avoid continual bullying of the same victims. Abstract This study addresses the puzzle how high-status bullies in elementary school are able to maintain high status among their classmates despite bullying (some of) them. The dynamic interplay between bullying and status was studied, focusing on how relational bullying affects the creation, dissolution, and maintenance of status attributions, and vice versa. Longitudinal round-robin peer nomination data were obtained from 82 school classes in 15 Dutch elementary schools (2055 students; 50% boys) followed over three yearly measurements, starting out in grades 2-5 when students were aged 8-11. An age-dependent effect of bullying on the creation of new status attributions was found. Whereas the youngest group punished bullying by a refusal to attribute status to the bully, this turned into a reward of bullying in the oldest groups. Unexpectedly, high-status bullies seemed to avoid continual bullying of the same victims, pointing to explanations of why their status can persist. Keywords: bullying; peer status; creation and maintenance of ties 2 ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT / UNCORRECTED PROOF The way bullying works: How new ties facilitate the mutual reinforcement of status and bullying in elementary schools Bullying is commonly defined as repetitive and intentionally negative behavior against a victim who finds it difficult to defend him- or herself (Olweus, 1993). It can be formalized as a directed, negative social relation in which one social actor (the bully) behaves negatively against another (the victim). The effects of bullying are generally not limited to the bully- victim dyad. When bullying takes place in a social group and under conditions of high visibility (e.g., among students in a school class or among colleagues at a workplace), third actors become witnesses and can react to the bullying, either pro-socially (by defending the victim, or expressing disapproval to the bully), or anti-socially (by siding with the bully, or even joining in the bullying). Also a non-reaction in the face of bullying conveys the social cue of tacit approval. Bullying is a group process that affects all the group members (Salmivalli et al., 1996; Salmivalli, 2010) and is characterized by complex interdependencies (Huitsing et al., 2014; Fujimoto, Snijders, & Valente, 2017). From an organizational viewpoint, bullying is a challenge to the social order in a task-related group. If bullying plays too prominent a role in daily life, students cannot concentrate on school tasks and employees cannot work well. It is in the interest of management (in the school class: the teacher) to contain bullying, and if necessary intervene to reduce it. For such interventions to be successful the processes by which bullying spreads need to be understood in the first place. A key ingredient of such an understanding is the social standing of the involved individuals. High-status students are more visible and more accepted in the peer group, and what these students do also gains visibility and acceptance. This way, they are in a position to set behavioral norms in the school class (Dijkstra & Gest, 2015). Students with high social status among their classmates were shown to be influential in their peer group and often serve as role models (Dijkstra, Cillessen, & Borch, 2013). If they act as bullies, there is the danger 3 ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT / UNCORRECTED PROOF that bullying becomes socially accepted. A high-status bully can potentially lead a whole school class into bullying. For this reason, many anti-bullying interventions focus on diminishing the social status of bullying by targeting group norms (Swearer, Espelage, Vaillancourt, & Hymel, 2010), by encouraging others to disapprove of bullying. Unfortunately, these interventions do not always work (e.g., Gaffney, Ttofi, & Farrington, in press; Nickerson, 2017). Especially bullies with high status tend to continue bullying and keep their high status among peers, thus defeating the intervention’s purpose (Garandeau, Lee, & Salmivalli, 2014). In contrast to medium- or low-status bullies, these high-status bullies somehow succeed in convincing a sufficiently large number of their peers to attribute status to them despite their bullying. Given the sensitivity of group behavior to what high-status students do, it is essential to examine the interplay between bullying and status attribution more thoroughly. While in the past, bullying was often considered an impulsive, uncontrolled outburst of aggression (Olweus, 1978), scientists and practitioners today tend to agree that it predominantly involves proactive, strategic, and goal-directed behavior (Reijntjes, Vermande, Olthof, et al., 2013; Volk, Veenstra, & Espelage, 2017). Bullies are thought to bully in order to achieve dominance and high social status in the peer group (Salmivalli et al., 1996). Bullies were shown to be more strongly motivated by considerations of peer status than non-bullies (Cillessen & Mayeux, 2004; Sijtsema et al., 2009). To achieve this high status, they strategically pick on easy victims, e.g., the physically weak or those who are rejected by other classmates (Sijtsema et al., 2009; Veenstra et al., 2007). This strategy seems effective for them: Bullying was repeatedly found to be positively associated with social status among peers in cross-sectional studies (Caravita, Di Blasio, & Salmivalli, 2009; De Bruyn, Cillessen, & Wissink, 2010). Longitudinal studies reveal that the two concepts are entrained, referring to that they remain associated over time. High-status bullies tend to keep their high status, and 4 ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT / UNCORRECTED PROOF continue bullying (Cillessen & Borch, 2006; Reijntjes, Vermande, Olthof, et al., 2013; Sentse, Kretschmer, & Salmivalli, 2015; see also for aggression instead of bullying: Juvonen, Wang, & Espinoza, 2013). On the conceptual level, it remains a puzzle how bullying and high status can reliably co-occur, and how some bullies can successfully derive high status over longer time periods from the very group they victimize. Although the existence of such a “controversial” group of children has been documented at least since the early 1980s (e.g., Coie, Dodge & Coppotelli, 1982), the literature remains inconclusive about the underlying mechanisms. We intend to examine how status and bullying co-determine each other, this way contributing to a solution of the puzzle and facilitating the development of more effective anti-bullying interventions. We think that the lack of solid insights is rooted in inappropriate methodology. Despite both concepts being defined on the dyadic level, the literature on adolescent development has traditionally taken an actor level approach in studies of bullying (e.g., Olweus, 1993) as well as peer status (e.g., Cillessen, Schwartz, & Mayeux, 2011). This choice of the level of analysis makes it impossible to look at the finer-grained dyadic and triadic patterns required for understanding the interplay between bullying and peer status. Whereas such studies on social relationships and status have recently started emerging (Betancourt, Kovács, & Otner, 2018, for bullying and related behaviors see Appendix B), the specific puzzle of how bullying and status attribution affect one another has so far remained unaddressed. To address this puzzle, we put forward what might be termed a network understanding of the mechanisms that allow high-status bullies to keep their high status while staying bullies, even when bullying is disapproved of. For this aim, we investigate the determinants of status attribution over time, paying special attention to the bullying of status recipients. And we examine the determinants of bullying over time, paying special