Gendered Pathways to Bullying Perpetration via Social Achievement Goals – Mediating Effects of Sense of Belonging and Non-inclusive Group Norms

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the gender-specific effects of social achievement goals – i.e., social development goals, social demonstration approach goals, and social demonstration avoid goals – on bullying perpetration in a sample of 788 adolescents (53.3% girls), taking into account the mediating role of sense of belonging and non-inclusive group norms. Two-group structural equation modeling results indicated that social demonstration approach goals positively predicted bullying perpetration for both genders. For girls, higher social development goals and for boys, higher social avoidance goals decreased bullying perpetration. Gender-specific effects of belonging and non-inclusive group norms on bullying perpetration occurred. For boys, non-inclusive group norms mediated the relation between all social achievement goals and bullying perpetration. Implications for future research and (gender-sensitive) bullying interventions are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Bullying perpetration
• social achievement goal
• gender differences
• belonging
• non-inclusive group norms

Acknowledgments

We want to thank the participants of the writing week 2018 organized by the Early Researchers Union (ERU) of the European Association of Developmental Psychology (EADP) –and particularly the senior scholars Ersilia Menesini, Willem Koops, and Loes Keijsers– for their feedback on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for the article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. While configural invariance tests whether the same CFA is valid for each group, metric invariance implies that girls and boys attribute the same meaning to the latent constructs. If the assumption of scalar invariance holds, the meaning of the levels of the underlying items is equal in both groups (Van de Schoot et al., 2012).

2. Prior to estimating the SEM that included the three social achievement goals as predictors, we checked whether the data met the assumption of no collinearity. The tests indicated that multicollinearity was not a concern (Social development goals, Tolerance = .985, VIF = 1.015; Social demonstration approach goals, Tolerance = .742, VIF = 1.348; Social demonstration avoid goals, Tolerance = .734, VIF = 1.362).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Bardach

Lisa Bardach is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of York (United Kingdom). Lisa Bardach obtained her PhD in Psychology from the University of Vienna in Austria. In her research, she focuses on adolescents’ adaptive development and the role of classroom climate (goal structure), and teachers’ and students’ non-cognitive attributes, particularly motivation.

Daniel Graf

Daniel Graf is a PhD student at the University of Vienna. His research focuses on bullying (cyber and traditional) and sensation seeking in adolescence.

Takuya Yanagida

Takuya Yanagida is a Postdoctoral Senior Scientist at the University of Vienna. His main research interests are bullying, statistical conclusion validity, robustness of statistical tests, and evaluation research.

Marlene Kollmayer

Marlene Kollmayer works as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on gender stereotypes in education, toys and gender stereotypes, effects of gender-fair language, innovative methods for assessing gender stereotypes, and intervention research.

Christiane Spiel

Christiane Spiel is a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Vienna. Her research interests include bullying, adolescents’ positive development and evaluation research.

Marko Lüftenegger

Marko Lüftenegger holds a position as Assistant Professor fof Developmental and Educational Psychology at the Centre of Teacher Education at the University of Vienna. His research and teaching focuses on motivation and emotions in education, high ability and giftedness, classroom environments that facilitate students’ (positive) development and the evaluation of educational programs.