Pathways from School Bullying to Adult Aggression: A Longitudinal Study

Abstract

This study identifies developmental processes underlying the relationship between school bullying and physical aggression in emergent adulthood. The data are drawn from the ‘Life at School’ project, a longitudinal study of schooling, socio-emotional functioning, and bullying in a sample of young people living in the Australian Capital Territory. This study consists of three waves of self-report data collected from 88 females and 63 males (N=151) during primary school (Time 1), high school (Time 2) and emerging adulthood (Time 3). The study extends earlier analyses to consider the relative significance of distal functioning and the proximal effects of heavy drinking and work/study roles during the transition to emerging adulthood in shaping pathways from school bullying to adult aggression. … The analyses show that the expression of bullying and adult physical aggression is flexible, open at each stage of development to influence from personal resources (e.g., capacity for adaptive shame management), social resources (e.g., parental education), and changing institutional settings, through for example the cultural and behavioural norms that characterise the university, workplace, and drinking environments and which constrain aggressive behaviour or promote a sense of future orientation. Patterns of adult aggressive behaviours are thus shaped not just by past bullying, but by the subtle interplay of emergent adult settings and experiences, socio-emotional functioning in school contexts, and family social capital.