Conflict Resolution Tactics and Bullying

• Author: Lisa Parry,Carlene Wilson,Ted Nettelbeck,Jodie Bell
• Date: 01 January 2003
• DOI: 10.1177/1541204002238364
• Published date: 01 January 2003
• Subject Matter: Articles

10.1177/1541204002238364
article
Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
Wilson et al. / CONFLICT RESOLUTION TACTICS
CONFLICT RESOLUTION
TACTICS AND BULLYING
The Influence of Social Learning*
Carlene Wilson
Lisa Parry
Ted Nettelbeck
Jodie Bell
University of Adelaide
Teachers’ reports were used to define school children, ages 10 and 11 years, as bullies
(n = 47), passive victims (n = 37), aggressive victims (n = 29), and controls (n = 220).
Teachers’ ratings of children’s styles of interactions with peers were consistent with
these assignments, confirming significantly different kinds of conflict resolution
strategies between the four groups. Compared to controls or passive victims, bullies and
aggressive victims were judged to display higher levels of aggression. In contrast,
controls scored above bullies or aggressive victims for prosocial behaviors. These
results were partially confirmed by children’s reports about their own behaviors.
Attempts to establish whether bullying and victimization could be linked to social
learning of conflict resolution tactics from parents, television, or peers suggested that
peers had a role in sustaining aggressive behaviors.
Much research has attempted to identify experiential and individual difference
variables that may better explain bullying and victim behaviors in school-aged children.
These studies have predominantly sought to identify causal variables that influence
different behavioral styles that discriminate victims from bullies and passive victims from
aggressive victims. Although estimates of prevalence vary, bullies and victims have been
conservatively estimated to represent 15% to 25% of school-aged children (Olweus, 1993;
Rigby & Slee, 1991; Smith, 1991). Bullies and victims, identified through observation, peer
and teacher report, and self-report, have been found to be reliably distinguishable in terms
of characteristic behaviors. Bullies have been described as using different forms of
aggression as a purposeful strategy for achieving particular ends. They have been identified
by a propensity in their interactions with less assertive peers to use physical and verbal
aggression as well as indirect aggression (e.g., aggressively ignoring another) in a goal-
oriented way. Passive victims have been characterized by submissive behaviors indicative
of low self-esteem and general acquiescence to the demands of the bully, but these children
may also use submission as a purposeful strategy to avoid further confrontation. Aggressive
victims (also known as bully victims) are victimized children, but they also display a more
aggressive style of social interaction that, compared to an average child, is marked by
Youth Violence and Junenile Justice: An Interdisciplinary Journal (YVJJ), Vol. 1 No. 1, January 2003 64-78
DOI: 10.1177/1541204002238364
© 2003 Sage Publications
64

---

Wilson et al. / CONFLICT RESOLUTION TACTICS
65
overreactive anger and hostility. However, in contrast to bullies, the aggression displayed
by aggressive victims tends to be reactive and retaliatory in nature (Olweus, 1978;
Stephenson & Smith, 1989). As Perry, Kusel, and Perry (1988) have pointed out, aggressive
victims are dually disadvantaged in gaining acceptance from other children; they are
victimized by bullies, but their aggression toward others also independently contributes to
their rejection by peers.
Many researchers have hypothesized that the source of the inappropriate behavioral
aggression in children arises from social learning within the family and wider social living
environments (e.g., Crick & Didge, 1994; D’Zurilla & Goldfried, 1971; Huesmann, 1988;
Huesmann & Eron, 1989; Lochman & Lenhart, 1993; Pakaslahti, 2000). Specifically,
Bowers, Smith, and Binney (1992, 1994) have argued that both the nature of cohesion and
the form of power structures within the family setting are predictive of bullying. Thus,
Bowers et al. have described bullies as coming from families with “low cohesion,”
particularly poor sibling relationships. These authors have also described victims as coming
from “enmeshed” families, in which each member has a high investment in the opinions and
activities of the other family members, and aggressive victims as characterized by high self-
involvement and perceptions that their parents have poor management skills. These
observations are consistent with earlier reports by a number of researchers (e.g., Olweus,
1980).
Other researchers have also looked to the family environment for links between poor
parental practices, including abuse of children in the home, and the child’s experiences in
the schoolyard, where most bullying takes place (Duncan, 1999). For example, Oliver,
Oaks, and Hoover (1994) reported that bullying was fostered in families characterized by an
undemonstrative emotional environment, lack of structure, social isolation, parental
conflict, positively reinforced aggression, and punished nonaggression. An authoritarian
parenting style has also been empirically linked to the personal characteristics of aggressive
victims (Baldry & Farrington, 1998). Similarly, researchers have argued that aberrant
family values may contribute to bullying behavior, with support for this contention coming
from a study in which selfless care (a form of altruism) was found to be weak among
members in the families of bullies and victims (Rican, 1995).
The most substantial attempt to examine the socialization of aggressive victims
involved a prospective examination of the early family experiences of boys who were later
described in their middle school years as aggressive victims, bullies, passive victims, or
controls (Schwartz, Dodge, Pettit, & Bates, 1997). Examination of the preschool home
environment of 198 boys, based on interviews with mothers, found reliable differences
between the four groups. Aggressive victims were reported to have experienced more
punitive, hostile, and abusive family treatment than did bullies, passive victims, or controls.
The bullies had been exposed to adult aggression and violence in the preschool home
environment, although they had not themselves been victimized in this context. Passive
victims were reported as having experienced a home environment that did not differ
significantly from controls. Schwartz et al. (1997) interpreted these results as meaning that
the behaviors of aggressive victims arise within a family environment in which the child has
experienced poor management of emotional regulation together with personal aggression
and that these circumstances result in inappropriate, overreactive anger toward other
children as well as the behaviors that lead to victimization by peers.
The conclusions from this research are that the early socialization experiences within
the family provide a powerful social learning and modeling mechanism and that passive and
aggressive victims can be distinguished from each other, and from bullies, by the nature of

---

66
Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
these experiences. Thus, socialization experiences help determine or modify the child’s
own strategies for handling interactions with peers, particularly those in which conflict
occurs or is incipient. Crockenberg and Lourie (1996) compared conflict strategies in
parent-child interactions with those in child-peer interactions and examined possible links
between these and social competence and behavioral adjustment. They reported that
children’s self-reported conflict strategies with peers correlated with those of parents, both
concurrently and longitudinally. More specifically, parents who invited mutual give and
take through reasoning and guidance had children who were more likely to use this strategy
to resolve conflicts with peers. Less considerate parental strategies also appeared to be
modeled by their children. Most strikingly, Crockenberg and Lourie’s important
observation that parental behavior when children were 2 years of age predicted the
children’s behavior at 6 years indicate the causal role that parental behavior may play in
producing or sustaining bullying and victim behaviors in the school environment.
Arguably, bullying behavior can be interpreted as a strategy for communicating needs, as
modeled by parents. Similarly, the behaviors of passive and aggressive victims may be
ways of responding to this form of communication. This interpretation is consistent with
research results, whereby the presence of adult aggression between dyads within families
predicted social rejection of children from those families by peers in the school environment
(Strassberg, Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1992).
Results from the longitudinal study by Schwartz et al. (1997) and the work of
Crockenberg and Lourie (1996) suggest that bullies and victims learn inappropriate conflict
resolution tactics from their parents, which they then use in interactions with their peers.
However, these studies have not provided a direct test of this hypothesis, because they have
not related the child’s perceptions of parental conflict resolution strategies to the same or
similar tactics used by the child. If the behaviors displayed by bullies and victims are
learned through modeling the behavior of the parents, then both sets of behaviors should be
significantly related.
Other individuals and groups also possess the potential to play an important social
learning role for children. For example, although the evidence is equivocal, researchers
have argued that aggression observed on television can influence the likelihood that a child
will display aggressive behavior (Eron, Huesmann,...