Twenty Years' Research on Peer Victimization and Psychosocial Maladjustment: A Meta-Analytic Review of Cross-Sectional Studies

This chapter presents a meta-analytic review of cross-sectional studies, published between 1978 and 1997, of the association of peer victimization with psychosocial maladjustment. Peer victimization is the experience among children of being a target of the aggressive behavior of other children, who are not siblings and not necessarily agemates. Cross-sectional quantitative designs are often used to investigate whether peer victimization is positively related to psychosocial maladjustment. Peer aggression are variously described as being bullied, being victimized, or sometimes as being rejected. Recent European researchers have distinguished among physical, verbal, and indirect victimization. Victims of peer aggression tended to be more depressed than nonvictims. In the literature it is fairly common to find victimization positively correlated with some measure of social anxiety, or with constructs that are similar but not equivalent to anxiety, such as neuroticism or anxious self-concept. A large number of cross-sectional studies have investigated the relation between peer victimization and children's global or general self-concepts.