Different forms of aggression among inner-city African–American children: Gender, configurations, and school social networks
Section snippets
The current study
We investigated subtle forms of aggression along with overt forms of aggression among inner-city African–American children and adolescents from three grade levels. Specifically, four distinct types of aggressive behaviors were included: social, direct relational, physical, and verbal aggression. Similar to the definitions used in previous publications (e.g., Xie, Swift, et al., 2002), social aggression refers to actions that cause interpersonal damage and are achieved by non-confrontational and
Participants
This study involved 489 participants in four inner-city public schools. Over 99% of students enrolled in these schools were African–American, and all participants in this study were African–American. There were 93 first graders (54 boys and 39 girls; mean age=6.98) and 142 fourth graders (67 boys and 75 girls; mean age=9.96) from two elementary schools, and 254 seventh graders (99 boys and 155 girls; mean age=13.09) from two middle schools. These schools were located in two neighborhoods of a
Conflict structure and aggressive behaviors
We examined the relations between the use of different aggressive strategies (i.e., social, direct relational, verbal, and physical) and conflict structure (i.e., dyadic, triadic, or multiple). About half (49%, 38/78) of the conflicts where social aggression was used had a triadic or multiple structure, while only 13% (13/97) of conflicts involving direct relational aggression, 9% of verbal aggression conflicts, and 6% of physical aggression conflicts did.1
Discussion
This study provided important information on the use of different forms of aggression in peer conflicts among African–American children and adolescents in inner-city schools. Using the same interview probes and coding scheme developed in a large-scale longitudinal study of rural and suburban children—the Carolina Longitudinal Study (e.g., Cairns & Cairns, 1994, Cairns et al., 1989, Xie et al., 2002, Xie et al., 2002)—we obtained parallel findings on patterns of conflict structure associated
Acknowledgements
The data presented in this study were collected as part of a larger project entitled “The Assessment of Aggression and Violence among Inner-city Youth”. Center for Disease Control and Prevention provided funds (R40 CCR403641) to the Injury Control Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham to support this project. Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation provided funds to the first author for conducting narrative analyses of peer conflicts. We thank Dylan Swift, Jason Clemmer, Tom
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