Cyberbullying Involvement and Psychological Distress among Chinese Adolescents: The Moderating Effects of Family Cohesion and School Cohesion

Cyberbullying and its consequences is a little-investigated public health issue. We investigated the correlations between cyberbullying involvement, either being a victim or being a preparator, and psychological distress among a group of Chinese adolescents. A representative sample of 4978 students from Jiangsu province covering all types of pre-college schools was surveyed using a stratified sampling method. Both being a victim and being a perpetrator correlated with higher degrees of psychological distress, and the former’s effect is stronger. Family cohesion and school cohesion are protective factors of psychological distress, but only family cohesion plays a moderating effect between cyberbullying involvement and distress. Moreover, the positive correlations between cyberbullying involvement and psychological distress become non-significant when the interactions are included in regression models. Last but not least, female students and students in a higher grade or students with worse academic performance have higher degrees of distress. Our study reveals that, instead of school cohesion, family cohesion is more important to mitigate the psychological impact of cyberbullying involvement and eventually heal the trauma.

Resilience in Urban African American Adolescents: The Protective Enhancing Effects of Neighborhood, Family, and School Cohesion Following Violence Exposure

Exposure to violence (ETV) poses a serious threat to adolescents’ safety and well-being; however, some adolescents who grow up in such toxic environments are able to thrive due to a combination of internal and external characteristics. The current study examines the role of cohesion across contexts (i.e., family, school, and community) as moderating the relation between ETV and positive internal outcomes characteristic of resilient youth (i.e., ethnic identity, positive affect, and self-esteem) in a sample of low-income, urban, African American adolescents ( N = 269, 60% female) from seventh grade to eighth grade. Results indicated that greater cohesion in each context was directly related to more positive outcomes. Family and neighborhood cohesion additionally served as protective enhancing factors for males exposed to high levels of violence. These findings expand the current research on positive youth development and help locate potential environmental targets for prevention and intervention research.

School social cohesion, student-school connectedness, and bullying in Colombian adolescents

Background: Student-school connectedness is inversely associated with multiple health risk behaviors, yet research is limited on the relative contributions of a student’s connectedness with school and an overall context of school social cohesion to peer victimization/bullying. Purpose: We examined associations of perceived school cohesion and student-school connectedness with physical victimization, verbal victimization, and social exclusion in the past six months in adolescents in grades 6–11 ( N = 774) attending 11 public and private urban schools in Colombia. Methods: Cross-sectional data were collected via a self-administered questionnaire and analyzed using mixed-effects linear regression models. Results: Higher perceived school cohesion was inversely related with exposure to three bullying types examined ( p < 0.05); student-school connectedness was negatively related to verbal victimization among girls only ( p < 0.01). In full models, school cohesion maintained inverse associations with three bullying types after controlling for student-school connectedness ( p ≤ 0.05). Conclusion: Enhancing school cohesion may hold benefits for bullying prevention beyond a student’s individual school connectedness.

Article

Among the different assumptions proposed to explain why tropical tuna aggregate around floating objects ("logs"), one of the most recent is that floating objects may represent meeting points for tuna. This "meeting point hypothesis" proposes that tuna can use these floating objects to form larger schools after school fission or dispersion. The influence of meeting points on tuna school sizes is explored through different individual-based models that consider a single fusion rule and a variety of fission rules based on energetic considerations, the role of school size on school cohesion, predator attacks, and dispersion during the night. Results are first analyzed using an averaging approach to study the overall mean school size in habitats having different floating object densities. Second, a dynamic approach is used to compare the temporal dynamics of associated and free-swimming school sizes. The averaging approach indicates that in all the models (except those based on energetics), floating objects increase school size, at least up to a certain object density. The dynamic approach clearly illustrates different dynamics in the school size of associated and free-swimming schools. Most of our models show that tuna associated with logs resume schooling in larger schools after fission events.