Session: Individual and Peer Factors Influencing Aggression and Victimization in Cyber, Dating, and Peer Contexts (Society for Prevention Research 27th Annual Meeting)

The goal of this symposium session is to present recent findings on individual and peer factors that are associated with aggression and victimization in online, dating, and peer contexts. The symposium supports the conference themes of Epidemiology and Etiology. The symposium brings together researchers from several institutions with a shared interest in violence prevention.

The first paper, “Social and Emotional Adjustment Across Aggressor/Victim Subgroups: Do Aggressive-Victims Possess Unique Risk?” examines social and emotional adjustment across homogeneous subgroups of early adolescents who differ in their patterns of physical and relational aggression and victimization. Contrary to previous research suggesting that “aggressive-victims” require specific and targeted interventions, the findings presented in this study will highlight the lack of unique characteristics among aggressive-victims relative to those who are mostly aggressive or mostly victimized. Implications for social-emotional learning interventions as well as the utility of the “aggressive-victim” prototype will be discussed.

The peer context plays an important, yet understudied role in dating violence. The second paper, “Exposure to Community Violence, The Peer Context, and Adolescent Dating Violence” describes subgroups of high school students who differed with regard to the degree and types of violence in their peer groups. Findings indicated that adolescents who had been exposed to high levels of community violence faced an increased risk of having a highly violent peer context and engaging in dating violence perpetration or being victimized by a dating partner. Considerations for dating violence prevention efforts will be discussed.

The online context is rapidly becoming a critical context in prevention research, as many young adults in the United States have had access to wireless internet and smartphones throughout their adolescence. The third paper, “Development and Initial Validation of a Measure to assess Beliefs about Cyber Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)” will present the psychometrics of a recently developed measure of beliefs about cyber IPV among young adults, as well as the relation among one’s beliefs about cyber IPV and both in-person and cyber IPV perpetration. This author will discuss the importance of understanding attitudes regarding cyber IPV and how doing so can inform prevention efforts.

Following these presentations, the discussant will comment on the implications of the presented findings for prevention science, and facilitate a discussion on risk and protective factors for aggression and victimization in the various contexts that they occur.