Factors of risk and protection/resilience in adolescent scholar bullying: Longitudinal analysis

Abstract

Theories of risk, protection and resilience have gained widespread acceptance in recent years, as the university community, to a large extent, consider that they offer a satisfactory explanation as to why some adolescents fail to survive in a hostile environment while others cope adequately, almost as if they were immunized against the difficulties they encounter in the course of their lives. Applying these theories to adolescent harassment could explain why certain youth fall victim to it and others do not, despite sharing the same life variables: age, sex, school structure, family structure, residential area, mass media and so on. This longitudinal analysis examines the risks and resilience associated with the social environment, using Bronfenbrenner's version, taking into account that resilience is not necessarily due to individual personality conditioning or other significant factors, as some theories hold. Rather, it argues that environmental factors may also be responsible for increasing or reducing its effects. Given that some experts use this concept in a manner that leads to confusion, understanding adolescent bullying to be aggressive behavior on an individual level, it is necessary to highlight that it is understood here to be a multidimensional concept. It is a single variable which includes individual aggression, collective aggression, individual and collective victimization. This will avoid the misunderstanding arising from a holistic and undifferentiated use of the term. It also takes into account that the aggressor as well as the victim is also exposed, although to a lesser degree, to risks, protection and resilience.