Social ostracism in school context: academic self-concept, prosocial behaviour, and adolescents’ conduct problems

ABSTRACT

Objective: Social ostracism is a serious psychosocial pattern because of its detrimental impact on adolescents’ adjustment and school functioning. The objective of present study was to examine whether academic self-concept and prosocial behaviour mediated the association of social ostracism with conduct problems among adolescents.

Method: Participants of the study comprised 337 adolescents (48.2% girls), and ranged in age from 11 to 13 years (M = 11.95, SD =.799).

Results: Findings from mediation analysis revealed that social ostracism had a significant effect on academic self-concept, prosocial behaviours, and conduct problems. Academic self-concept and prosocial behaviours also had significant effects on conduct problems. Further, academic self-concept and prosocial behaviour simultaneously served as mediators on the association between social ostracism and conduct problems in adolescents.

Conclusions: These results suggest that academic self-concept and prosocial behaviour may help to explain the effect of social ostracism on adolescents’ conduct problems and contribute to developing prevention and intervention strategies in school settings to foster healthy development and adjustment among students. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Social ostracism
• academic self-concept
• prosocial behaviour
• conduct problems

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Ethical standards

The author asserts that all procedures contributing to this work comply with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.