Proactive and Reactive Aggression Among School ...

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Salmivalli and Nieminen

AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR Volume 28, pages 30–44 (2002)

Proactive and Reactive Aggression Among School Bullies, Victims, and Bully-Victims Christina Salmivalli* and Eija Nieminen Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Bullies, victims, bully-victims, and control children were identified from a sample of 1062 children (530 girls and 532 boys), aged 10 to 12 years, participating in the study. Their reactive and proactive aggression was measured by means of peer and teacher reports. Peer and teacher reports were more concordant with respect to reactive than proactive aggression. Comparing the children in different bullying roles in terms of their reactive and proactive aggression, bully-victims were found to be the most aggressive group of all. For this group, it was typical to be highly aggressive both reactively and proactively. Although bullies were significantly less aggressive than bully-victims, they scored higher than victims and controls on both reactive and proactive aggression. However, observations at the person level, i.e., cross-tabulational analyses, indicated that bullies were not only overrepresented among children who were both reactively and procatively aggressive but also among the only reactively aggressive as well as the only proactively aggressive groups. Victims scored higher than control children on reactive aggression, but they were not proactively aggressive. Furthermore, even their reactive aggression was at a significantly lower level than that of bullies and bully-victims. Aggr. Behav. 28:30–44, 2002. © 2002 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Key words: bullies; victims; bully-victims; aggression; reactive; proactive

INTRODUCTION

Dodge [1991, p 201] presents prototypes of two school-aged boys, Billy and Reid, who share the feature of being aggressive but are aggressive in different ways. According to the author’s description, Billy is “a bully among peers” and “a major behavior problem in school.” Reid, on the other hand, is “volatile and short-tempered,” he “reacts angrily to minor provocations,” and he “doesn’t seem to start fights as much as he escalates them.” Billy is proactively aggressive and is described as being “troubling to others” because he coerces, teases, and dominates his peers, while Reid is reactively aggressive and is more or less “troubled by others.” The concepts of reactive and proactive aggression were first introduced by Dodge and colleagues [Dodge and Coie, 1987], but they have their roots in the long traditions within the field of aggression research. The former concept arises from the frustration-aggression model, viewing aggression as a hostile, angry reaction to perceived frustration [Berkowitz, 1962; Dollard et

*Correspondence to: Christina Salmivalli, Department of Psychology, FIN-20014 University of Turku, Turku, Finland. E-mail: [email protected] Received 3 May 2000; amended version accepted 20 July 2000

© 2002 Wiley-Liss, Inc. DOI 10.1002/ab.90004

Proactive and Reactive Aggression in Bullying

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al., 1939], the latter from the social learning theory, which sees aggression as acquired instrumental behavioral controlled by external rewards and reinforcement [Bandura, 1973]. Although reactive and proactive aggression seem to be very closely connected, i.e., a child who is aggressive in one way is often aggressive in the other way as well, there is also evidence of the distinct nature of these two types of aggression. Exploratory factor analytic procedures often yield distinct, although strongly intercorrelated factors of reactive and proactive aggression [Crick and Dodge, 1996; Dodge and Coie, 1987; Pellegrini et al., 1999]. By testing both one- and two-factor models with a confirmatory factor analysis, Poulin and Boivin [2000b] showed that a two-factor model was more appropriate, i.e., showed better fit indices with the data, than a single-factor model. The two latent factors were, however, substantially correlated. Theoretically, it seems reasonable to suggest that reactive and proactive aggression may have different etiologies [Dodge 1991, p 212–214]. They have also been shown to be connected with different personality characteristics and different skill deficits. For instance, it has been found that certain deficits in the processing of social information, such as the “hostile attribution bias,” i.e., the tendency to overattribute hostility to others in provocation situations, are associated with reactive but not with proactive aggression [Crick and Dodge, 1996; Dodge and Coie, 1987; Schwartz et al., 1998], while beliefs in the social effectiveness of aggression are connected with proactive but not with reactive aggression [Crick and Dodge, 1996; Schwartz et al., 1998]. Reactive and proactive aggression are also differently related to friendship choices and characteristics of friendships [Poulin and Boivin, 1999; Poulin et al., 1997]. For instance, proactively aggressive boys tend to associate with other proactively aggressive boys, while such a similarity effect is not observed in the case of reactive aggression [Poulin et al., 1997]. Reactively aggressive boys are evaluated by peers in uniformly negative terms, while proactively aggressive boys are viewed in more mixed ways: although rejected, they are evaluated as having a sense of humor and leadership qualities [Dodge and Coie, 1987]. Furthermore, different developmental trajectories have been found to be associated with childhood reactive compared with proactive aggression [Pulkkinen, 1996; Vitaro et al., 1998; in the former study, however, the concepts of proactive and reactive aggression were operationalized in a different way from usual]. On both theoretical and empirical grounds, it thus seems meaningful to distinguish between these two types of aggression. The distinction may be meaningful also from the point of view of interventions: reactively and proactively aggressive children may benefit from different interventions, as was pointed out by Dodge and colleagues [Crick and Dodge, 1996; Dodge, 1991, p 214–215]. While a reactively aggressive child may need training in anger control and social role taking, along with a strong relationship with a caring adult, a proactively aggressive child might rather benefit from determined and consistent sanctioning of aggressive behaviors, together with reinforcement of nonaggressive responses in different conflict and problem situations. Most often, reactive and proactive aggression have been measured by the instrument developed and introduced by Dodge and Coie [1987], based on teacher reports of children’s behavior. Direct observations, as well as parents’ reports, have been used in some studies, and these have also supported the validity of a two-factor model [e.g., Poulin and Boivin, 2000b; Schwartz et al., 1998]. Although peer-reports have recently been used to a relatively large extent in aggression research [e.g., Crick and Grotpeter, 1995; Lagerspetz et al., 1988; Olweus 1977; Pakaslahti and Keltikangas-Järvinen, 1998], they have not been much utilized in evaluating reactive and proactive aggression (as an exception to this, see Pulkkinen, 1996: she, however, used scales different from those of Dodge and Coie). Of course, teacher reports are more cost-effective, but other arguments can be presented in favor of peer reports. Peer reports increase the power of the assessment procedure since there are many peers involved in the evaluation compared with a

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single teacher. Furthermore, using peer reports, the researcher gains access to the unique relationship and perspective shared by the actual participant-observers of peer social interactions, as was pointed out by Smith [1967]. In the present study, both peer and teacher reports of participants’ proactive and reactive aggression were utilized. Furthermore, both boys and girls were included in the sample studied. So far, there have been few studies examining reactive and proactive aggression in girls. Bullies, Victims, and Bully-Victims

School bullying is typically defined as deliberate and systematic negative actions repeatedly targeted at one and the same victim who is relatively defenseless in front of the perpetrator(s) [e.g., Olweus, 1973, 1991; Smith, 1991]. The definition implies that by its nature, bullying is proactive rather than reactive aggression. In fact, Coie et al. [1991] have further distinguished between two types of proactive aggression, instrumental aggression and bullying, the former referring to behavior in which aggression is used as a means to get an external reward, such as when a child pushes another to take a toy from him/her, the latter to person-directed, “mean” aggression in which no such goal is necessarily detected. It has been pointed out [Salmivalli, 1998] that emotional arousal or feelings of anger are not necessarily involved in bullying behavior. No external provocation is necessarily present either. Rather, bullying can be seen as an institutionalized habit, or “cool” aggression. Also in this respect, bullying does not seem to fit the concept of reactive aggression, which implies hottempered outbursts as reactions to real or perceived threats or provocations. Bullies have, however, been described as characterized by an “aggressive personality pattern” in general [Olweus, 1978]: they are aggressive not only toward their victim(s) at school but also in many other contexts, i.e., toward other peers, siblings, and adults, and some of them end up as antisocial young adults [Olweus, 1978]. Whether this aggressive personality pattern is a predominantly proactively aggressive pattern or whether bullies are aggressive in multiple ways, the bullying behavior being just one manifestation of their generally aggressive personality, has not been given much attention. Bullies hold positive attitudes toward violence [Lagerspetz et al., 1982] and a need to dominate others [Olweus, 1978], both characteristics typical of proactively aggressive children, but they have also been described as impulsive [Olweus, 1978], and as reactively aggressive children. In studies connecting bullying behavior and reactive and proactive aggression, bullying has been found to be correlated with both proactive and reactive aggression [e.g., Pellegrini et al., 1999], which suggests that both types of aggression are typical of bullies. However, it has not been examined whether one or the other type is predominant among them or whether there are subgroups of bullies with different “aggression profiles.” Findings from recent studies imply that there are subgroups of bullies who differ from each other in important respects. For instance, the stereotypical picture of bullies as socially clumsy troublemakers has been challenged by new theorizing and empirical results showing that bullies in fact have relatively good theory of mind skills [Sutton et al., 1999a, 1999b], and at least a subgroup of bullies seems to possess average or above average levels of social intelligence [Kaukiainen et al., in press]. It has been argued that such “socially skilled” bullies might be able to effectively manipulate others and use them to harm the target person and at the same time maintain positive relationships with peers, even “hide” their aggressive intentions [see also Salmivalli et al., 1998]. At least such “socially smart” bullies do not seem to fit the picture of reactively aggressive children, who interpret the social cues inaccurately, easily lose self-control, suffer from wholesale social rejection in the peer group, etc. The classical view of the victim of bullying, on the other hand, is of a nonaggressive, shy,


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passive, and submissive child [Olweus 1973, 1978, 1991]. Perry et al. [1990], who studied other children’s expectations of how victims and nonvictims would react to harassment and attacks, showed that victims were viewed as less likely to retaliate than nonvictims. Also other studies have shown that victimization is related to submissiveness [e.g., Schwartz et al., 1998]. However, studying how the victims actually behaved in bullying situations, Salmivalli et al. [1996a] found that so-called counteraggressive victims were not rare. On the contrary, counteraggressive responses (such as trying to pay back the bully in his own coin, attacking the bully) in bullying situations were rather typical, especially among boy victims. Also, Coie et al. [1991], making direct observations of the victims’ behavior in play groups, found that when attacked, “escalating” was a rather typical response. Furthermore, there are studies that indicate that victimization is related to reactive aggression [Pellegrini et al., 1999; Poulin and Boivin, 2000b; Schwartz et al., 1998], which also suggests that submissive behavior is not the only response on the part of the victims—they may respond with aggression as well. However, most of the above-mentioned studies have not made a distinction between the “classical” victims and another important group that has been referred to as provocative victims [Olweus, 1973, 1978], bully-victims [e.g., Whitney and Smith, 1993], or aggressive victims [Pellegrini et al., 1999; Perry et al., 1988]. This subgroup of victimized children is not only the target of others’ aggression, but its members are also aggressive themselves. They have been described as characterized by a combination of anxious and aggressive behavior patterns [Olweus, 1991], being highly emotional and hot tempered [Dodge, 1991; Schwartz et al., 1998], and an especially problematic group in need of further attention [Smith et al., 1993; Whitney and Smith, 1993]. They seem to differ from other victims in several respects; for instance, while internalizing problems and psychosomatic problems are typical of victims, bully-victims show high levels of externalizing behavior and hyperactivity [Kumpulainen et al., 1998], and they are particularly at risk of remaining involved in bullying over longer periods of time [Kumpulainen et al., 1999]. As a group, bully-victims, or aggressive victims, seem to fit the description of a reactively aggressive child. Treating them as victims among other victims may thus distort the mean values of the victim group on the aggression measures. Research Questions and Some General Hypotheses

The present study had two main goals. One was to examine whether peer reports support the kind of two-factor model of reactive and proactive aggression that has been reported for teacher reports and direct observations, i.e., whether these two types of aggression can be distinguished by means of peer reports. It was also of interest to find out how strongly children’s reactive and proactive aggression scores derived from the two information sources (teachers and peers) are interconnected, i.e., whether teachers and peers identify the same children as reactively and/or proactively aggressive. Second, we were interested in how proactive and reactive aggression is connected with bullyvictim problems. The questions of interest were, first, what is the general level and, second, the predominant type of aggression among bullies, victims, and bully-victims compared with control children? On the basis of previous studies and theorizing, it was hypothesized that bullies are predominantly proactively aggressive, or both proactively and reactively aggressive. Bully-victims, on the other hand, were expected to be predominantly reactively aggressive, or aggressive in both ways. Concerning the victims of bullying, it was hypothesized that when looked at as a separate group from bully-victims they would be found to be nonaggressive, even less aggressive than the control children.

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METHODS Participants

The participants were 1220 children (600 girls and 620 boys) from 48 school classes. The classes were from the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades of elementary school, 16 classes from each grade. The age of the participants varied from 10 to 13 years. They were already taking part in a large project concerning bullying in schools and interventions against it. As part of the questionnaire pack they had completed at the beginning of the project (time 1 measurement in the intervention study), they had filled in peer nominations concerning their classmates’ proactive and reactive aggression, as well as a questionnaire concerning bully-victim problems in their class. Information from these questionnaires was utilized in the present study. Furthermore, the teachers of each class were invited to participate in the study and nominate reactively and proactively aggressive children in their classes. Altogether, 42 of the 48 teachers completed and returned the questionnaire. Only children for whom both peer and teacher reports were available were included in the study, so the final size of the sample was 1062 children (530 girls and 532 boys) from 42 classes, 14 classes from each grade level. The measurements took place in October, when the students had been attending school for 2 months after the summer holidays. The data were collected at this point of the school year to ensure that the students had already spent some time together after the holidays and got acquainted with each other, especially when new students had joined the classes at the beginning of the term. Also, the teachers were expected to be familiar with their students by this point. The data were collected in each class separately. The students were seated separately to make sure they did not disturb each other, did not see each other’s answers, and could not discuss them. The confidentiality of the data was strongly emphasized. Two trained research assistants were present in each class during the data collection, answering questions and assisting students who needed help in completing their questionnaires. The teachers were asked to leave the classes while the data were collected. They completed their questionnaires later on, in a meeting arranged in the context of the intervention project they were all participating in. Those who were not present in the meeting received the questionnaire by mail and were also asked to return it by mail. Questionnaires

As part of the larger project, the child participants had filled in (1) a 15-item version of the Participant Role Questionnaire (PRQ), which concerns bullying in the class and the roles associated with it [see Salmivalli, 1998; Salmivalli et al., 1996b], and (2) a peer-nomination questionnaire of reactive and proactive aggressive behavior patterns among classmates. There were also other measures to be completed, but these were not relevant for the present study. Bullying and victimization. Parts of the PRQ were used in the present study to identify the bullies, victims, bully-victims, and control children. In the PRQ, the participants are presented, first of all, with the following definition of bullying: (It is bullying when) ... “one child is repeatedly exposed to harassment and attacks from one or several other children. Harassment and attacks may be, for example, shoving or hitting the other one, calling him/her names or making jokes about him/her, leaving him/her outside the group, taking his/her things, or any other behavior meant to hurt the other one.” It was further pointed out that “It is not bullying when two students with equal strength or equal power have a fight, or when someone is occasionally teased. It is bullying, when the feelings of one and the same student are intentionally and repeatedly hurt.” The definition was given in the questionnaire, but it was also explained verbally to the participants before the questionnaires were distributed.


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After the definition, the children were asked to nominate the children from their class they thought were victims bullied by others: “Who in your class is being bullied? Write the name(s) of the bullied students here.” The victimization score was computed for each student by dividing the number of nominations received by him/her by the number of nominators, i.e., the number of classmates present. This results in a victimization score ranging from 0.00 to 1.00. In the other part of the questionnaire, the students were asked to evaluate their classmates’ behavior in situations of bullying. Among the 15 items they were presented with1 there were three items measuring tendencies to bully others. These items were utilized in the present study for calculating a bullying score for the participants: starts bullying, makes the others join in the bullying, and always finds new ways of harassing the victim (the three items represent the most active “ringleader” bullies rather than their assistants or reinforcers, also indentifiable with the PRQ). In the PRQ, the names of all the children in the class are printed in the columns of the questionnaire beforehand, and the children evaluate which classmates behave according to the descriptions sometimes (marking these classmates with “1”) or often (marking these classmates with “2”). For those who do not behave in the ways described, they are asked to mark nothing, i.e., leave an empty space in that column. The scores received by each child are averaged and divided by the number of evaluators. As a result, each child has a bully score ranging from 0.00 to 2.00. Identification of bullies, victims, and bully-victims is done on the basis of each child’s withinsex standardized scores on the victim and bully scales. A child was considered a bully if he/she scored above 1.00 on the standardized bully scale but his/her standardized victim score was below 1.00. Victims had a standardized victim score above 1.00 and scored below 1.00 on the standardized bully scale. Bully-victims scored above 1.00 on both standardized scales, and noninvolved children scored below 1.00 on both scales. This procedure led to the identification of 113 bullies (46 girls and 67 boys, 10.6% of the total sample), 66 victims (23 girls and 38 boys, 6.2%), 20 bully-victims (12 girls and 8 boys, 1.9%), and 863 control children (444 girls and 419 boys, 81.3%). Within-sex standardization of scores was used to level out the differences in bullying behaviors among girls and boys, which might have caused highly unequal frequencies of bullies and bully-victims among the sexes (for instance, there would have been only two female bullyvictims if standardization had been done within the whole sample; this would have caused difficulties in the statistical analyses that follow). After this procedure, there was no significant sex difference in how girls and boys were distributed between the bullying roles (chi square (3) = 6.94, P = .07). Reactive and proactive aggression. The children were presented with a questionnaire dealing with eight behavioral descriptions. Four of these descriptions dealt with reactive, four with proactive aggression. For each description presented to them, the students were asked to nominate the classmate(s) they thought fit the description. For each item, or description, they were allowed to nominate no more than three girls and three boys from their class. They did not have to nominate anyone if they could not think of a classmate who fit a certain description. Also class teachers filled in the questionnaire concerning reactive and proactive aggression. They nominated children from their classes whom they thought fit each of the eight descrip1

In previous studies, 50- and 22-item versions of the PRQ have been used [e.g., Salmivalli, 1998; Salmivalli et al., 1996]. The present version was developed for the purposes of our intervention project, to make the PRQ more suitable for children as young as 10 years to fill in. The psychometric properties of the shortened scales are, however, satisfactory. The internal consistency of the three-item bully scale, as measured by Cronbach’s alpha, was .93 in the present sample.

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tions. This provided categorical variables with values 0 or 1 for each child on each item. The peer- and teacher-reported item scores were averaged and, in the case of peer reports, divided by the number of evaluators. (In fact, only six of the eight items were used for the final scales; see the factor analysis below in the “Results” section.) The proactive and reactive aggression items used by us were similar but not identical to those developed by Dodge and Coie [1987]. We did not want to include items on the proactive aggression scale that measure bullying behaviors explicitly (“gets others to gang up on a peer,” “threatens and bullies others”) since one purpose of the study was to examine associations between bullying and proactive aggression; we did not want to use a proactive aggression scale that would be just another scale measuring bullying behaviors. Nor did we want to include items on the reactive aggression scale that imply that reactive aggression is typical of those who are actually victimized (“when teased, strikes back”). Furthermore, we wanted to use scales that would be as “sex-neutral” as possible, and thus we did not include items such as “uses physical force to dominate.” Dominating others may occur in different ways, which may be different for boys and girls. In the case of girls, they are often not physical or even direct at all [Crick and Grotpeter, 1995; Lagerspetz et al., 1988]. For these reasons, we ended up developing scales with items different from those originally presented by Dodge and Coie. The content of the scales, however, was based on their theoretical formulation of the concepts of reactive and proactive aggression. RESULTS The Factor Structure of Peer- and Teacher-Reported Proactive and Reactive Aggression Scales

A principal-components factor analysis, with varimax rotation of the factors, was conducted for the eight peer- and teacher-reported items on proactive and reactive aggression. The factor loadings of each peer- and teacher-reported item scores are displayed in Table I, along with the eigenvalues of the rotated factors. Two items were dropped from the scales that were formed since they were either not very strongly loaded on either factor or had moderate loadings on both. We thus ended up with three-item scales of reactive and proactive aggression. TABLE I. Factor Loadings of Peer- and Teacher-Reported Items of Reactive and Proactive Aggression* Peer reports f1 (proactive)

Teacher reports

f2 (reactive)

f1 (proactive)

f2 (reactive)

Reactive aggression Gets angry and mean for no reason at all Loses temper, “blows up” easily Swings one’s fist for a minor reason?

.40 .12 .53

.84 .93 .71

.77 .75 .76

.25 .07 –.06

Proactive aggression Does nasty things to others Dominates, forces others to do as (s)he wises Embarrasses others without a reason

.72 .81 .86

.44 .22 .17

.27 .15 –.04

.67 .67 .74

.60 .77 5.23

.59 .40 .94

.51 .58 2.97

.41 .25 1.21

Unclassified In a fit of anger, says nasty things to others Threatens others Eigenvalue *f1 = factor 1; f2 = factor 2.


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The internal consistencies of the scales, as measured by Cronbach’s alphas, were .89 and .87 for peer-reported reactive and proactive aggression scales, respectively. For the teacher-reported scales, the corresponding alpha values were .70 and .55. Consistency Between Peer and Teacher Reports

The correlations between peer- and teacher-reported reactive and proactive aggression scales are presented in Table II. The scales based on peer reports were more strongly intercorrelated, while correlations between teacher-reported proactive and reactive aggression were only moderate, although significant. Peer-reported reactive aggression also significantly correlated with teacher-reported reactive aggression, and the same was true for peer- and teacher-reported proactive aggression. The correlation was significantly stronger in the case of reactive than proactive aggression (chi-square (1) = 42.11, P < .001), as shown by the multicorr program [Steiger, 1987]. Teachers and peers thus agreed more about children’s reactive than proactive aggression. Proactive and Reactive Aggression Among Bullies, Victims, Bully-Victims, and Control Children

To examine the effect of both sex and bullying role on a child’s aggression, a 2 × 4 (sex × bullying role) MANOVA was conducted, with (peer- and teacher-reported) reactive and proactive aggression as dependent variables. The effect of sex. The multivariate test showed a significant main effect of sex on children’s aggressive behaviors (F(4, 1051) = 37.98, P < .001). Boys scored higher than girls on all aggression variables, and, according to the univariate tests, the effect was significant in the case of peer-reported reactive (F(1) = 143.727, P < .001), peer-reported proactive (F(1) = 58.001, P < .001), and teacher-reported reactive (F(1) = 24.224, P < .001) aggression but not in the case of teacher-reported proactive aggression. The effect of bullying role. The multivariate test showed a significant main effect of bullying role on a child’s overall aggression (F(12, 3159) = 57.49, P < .001). Univariate tests indicated that the effect was significant in the case of all types of aggression, regardless of the evaluator, at the P < .001 level (F values with 3 degrees of freedom being 177.11, 270.33, 63.43, and 47.49 for peer-reported reactive, peer-reported proactive, teacher-reported reactive, and teacher-reported proactive aggression, respectively). The interaction effect of sex ´ bullying role. There was a significant interaction effect of sex × bullying role on children’s aggression (F(12, 3159) = 11.84, P < .001). The univariate tests showed that this effect was significant at the P < .001 level in the case of peer-reported reactive and proactive aggression as well as teacher-reported reactive aggression (F values with 3 degrees of freedom being 44.09, 23.89, and 6.03 for these types of aggression, respectively.) The mean scores and standard deviations of girls and boys in the different bullying roles for reactive and proactive aggression are presented in Table III, along with the significant contrasts TABLE II. Pearson Product-Moment Correlations Between Students’ Scores on Scales Measuring Peer- and Teacher-Reported Proactive and Reactive Aggression*

1. 2. 3. 4.

Peer-reported proactive Peer-reproted reactive Teacher-reported proactive Teacher-reported reactive

*All correlations are significant at the P < .001 level.

1.

2.

3.

.67 .41 .41

.21 .60

.32

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TABLE III. Mean Scores (and Standard Deviations) of Bullies, Victims, Bully-Victims, and Controls on the Proactive and Reactive Aggression Scales*

Peer reports Reactive aggression Girls Boys Both Proactive aggression Girls Boys Both Teacher reports Reactive aggression Girls Boys Both Proactive aggression Girls Boys Both

Bullies

Victims

Bully-victims

Controls

.07 (.07)b .22 (.16)b .16 (.15)

.08 (.11)b .12 (.15)c .10 (.14)

.16 (.10)a .45 (.26)a .27 (.23)

.02 (.03)c .03 (.06)d .03 (.05)

.09 (.09)b .18 (.13)b .14 (.12)

.03 (.04)c .03 (.05)c .03 (.05)

.15 (.08)a .26 (.08)a .19 (.10)

.01 (.02)c .02 (.04)c .02 (.03)

.12 (.23)b .27 (.32)b .21 (.30)

.06 (.16))c .11 (.25)c .09 (.22)

.25 (.41)a .46 (.47)a .33 (.43)

.01 (.06)d .04 (.15)d .02 (.11)

.14 (.28)b .22 (.31)a .19 (.30)

.01 (.06)c .04 (.13)b .03 (.11)

.25 (.32)a .29 (.28)a .27 (.30)

.03 (.10)c .04 (.13)b .03 (.12)

*Group means with different superscripts (a–d) in a row showed a statistically significant difference (P < .05) when tested with pairwise contrasts using the Bonferroni correction.

between the groups. The mean scores of bullies, victims, bully-victims, and control children on the aggression measures are also illustrated in Figure 1. As can be seen in Table III and Figure 1, bully-victims scored higher than the other groups in both types of aggression, regardless of the evaluator. The bullies were the second most aggressive group: in most cases, they were perceived as significantly more aggressive than either victims or controls (with the only exception that the girl victims were perceived by peers as equally reactively aggressive as were the girl bullies). Both girl and boy victims were perceived as significantly more reactively aggressive than the control children. This emerged in both peer and teacher reports. According to both peers and teachers, however, victims and control children showed equally low levels of proactive aggression. We continued with logistic regression analyses, using children’s membership in any of the four groups (bullies, victims, bully-victims, or control children) as the dependent dummy variables and their continuous peer- and teacher-reported scores (in separate analyses) on reactive and proactive aggression as the independent ones. The four dummy variables that served as the dependent variables in the analyses indicated whether a child was a bully, a victim, a bullyvictim, or a control, and they had categorical values of 0 and 1. The analyses were conducted separately for boys and girls, and their results are presented in Tables IV–VI. For both sexes, peer-reported proactive aggression scores significantly predicted a child’s being a bully, but peer-reported reactive aggression scores did not significantly contribute to the prediction. Among both boys and girls, however, teacher-reported reactive and proactive aggression scores both predicted a child’s belonging to the bully group (Table IV). In the case of both girls and boys, (peer-reported) reactive aggression scores significantly predicted the child being a victim. Among both sexes, lack of (peer-reported) proactive aggression contributed to the prediction, but in the case of girls this did not quite reach the level of significance. However, as the chi-squares indicate, victimization could not be as strongly pre-


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Fig. 1. Mean scores of bullies, victims, bully-victims, and control children in peer- and teacher-reported reactive and proactive aggression.

dicted from children’s aggression scores as could membership in the other groups. Teacherreported aggression scores did not significantly predict a child being a victim at all (Table V). The reactive aggression scores, both peer and teacher reported, significantly predicted a child’s being a bully-victim in the case of both sexes. Usually, reactive aggression was the single significant predictor of a child’s belonging to this group, with the exception of peer reports among girls. Peer-reported proactive aggression scores were more important in predicting a girl’s being a bully-victim than were peer-reported reactive aggression scores (Table VI). TABLE IV. Logistic Regression Analyses: Predicting Boys’ and Girls’ Belonging to the Bully Group From Their Peer- and Teacher-Reported Reactive and Proactive Aggression Scores Variables in the equation Boys, peer-reported scores Reactive aggression Proactive aggression Boys, teacher-reported scores Reactive aggression Proactive aggression Girls, peer-reported scores Reactive aggression Proactive aggression Girls, teacher-reported scores Reactive aggression Proactive aggression

B

S.E.

P