Aggression and bullying

Models are presented describing how bullying others and being bullied are related to proactive and reactive aggressiveness. This was investigated among 1801 pupils in Norwegian schools at the end of grade five and among 2083 pupils at the end of grade eight. Pupils in the two samples were approximately 11 and 14 years old, respectively. The procedure of structural equation modeling with latent variables was followed using LISREL 8.30 to estimate the parameters. Analyses were conducted for boys and girls separately at fifth and eighth grades. Support for the assumptions of factor solution and factorial invariance of the concepts across gender and age was obtained independently from estimating structural parameters. Both proactive and reactive aggressiveness were related to bullying others and to being bullied at Level 5. Among the older pupils, there was a strong relationship between proactive aggressiveness and bullying others, while reactive aggressiveness was much more weakly related to bullying others. Being bullied, on the other hand, was only weakly related to proactive and reactive aggressiveness among the older pupils. Age was therefore an important factor in determining how proactive and reactive aggressiveness were related to bullying. When pupil gender is concerned, power-related proactive aggressiveness in predicting bullying was a more important factor for boys, while affiliation-related proactive aggressiveness was a more powerful factor for girls. (C) 2001 Wiley-Liss, Inc.