One of the main developmental tasks of adolescence is to develop a strong and positive sense of self. However, many youth struggle to do so. These struggles are evidenced in students’ negative self-portrayals. Negative self-portrayals reflect the unfavorable beliefs adolescents hold about themselves, including feelings of shame, self-doubt, or inadequacy, or perceptions that they are not good enough. In our recently published paper, we examined how peer victimization one year earlier combined with concurrent peer victimization predicted Brazilian youths' negative self-portrayal even after controlling for earlier values.
How peer victimization affects adolescent views of themselves
Our research team followed more than 300 adolescents from Curitiba, Brazil, over two school years to better understand how their experiences with peers relate to changes in the way they view themselves. The main variable of interest for our study was students’ negative self-portrayal. In other words, we wanted to better understand why some young people have poor views of themselves. This involved asking them about how they saw themselves, using, for instance, statements such as “I think I'm not a good person.” We then came back a year later asking the students to tell us again how they felt about themselves. In general, the majority of participants (64.8 percent) tended to disagree with these statements, suggesting that most youth feel positively about themselves. Not surprisingly, earlier scores of negative self-portrayals were strongly related to later scores, highlighting how stable this construct is over time.
The other variable we were interested in assessing was peer victimization. Here too, we asked participants to self-report, specifically how often they were teased, insulted, and made fun of by their peers, among other items. Whereas a sizable proportion of students (60.30 percent) reported “never” or “almost never,” this also meant more than a third (39.70 percent) reported “almost always” or “always.” Those adolescents who reported being victimized by their peers were significantly more likely to view themselves negatively, with 16 to 25 percent sharing overlap between the two constructs.
Our results revealed a number of notable effects. First off, reports of peer victimization during the first school year were linked to more negative self-portrayals over a year later (depicted above). This effect persisted even when we controlled for those who had worse self-portrayals a year earlier. However, the relationship between earlier victimization and later worse self-portrayals disappeared when including later peer victimization (i.e., happening concurrently). In other words, the stability of peer victimization and its cumulative impact over time explained the link to poor self-portrayals.
The results from this study underscore that peer victimization is not an isolated factor related to how adolescents see themselves and habitual victimization can compound those effects. All told, the models we tested using these data were able to explain 40.10 percent of the differences in students’ views of themselves.
Remaining questions
Despite these findings, some questions remain that the current study couldn’t answer. Perhaps most importantly, previous studies have shown that the relationship between victimization and self-portrayals is bi-directional. To explain, even though we looked at how victimization predicts later self-portrayals, other research has shown youth with poor views of themselves are also more likely to be targeted for victimization by their peers. Our study couldn’t disentangle causes from effects.
While these findings replicate those of other studies, using a Brazilian sample also allows us to ask how these results would apply to adolescents from other parts of the world. Much of previous psychological research has come from samples in North America and Europe, making it difficult to relate to students’ experiences in other parts of the world. We’d love to conduct this same study in other countries to better understand the similarities and differences across samples.
Where do we go from here?
Our goal with this research was to better understand the challenges that adolescents face in their interactions with their peers at school. Although our study did not test any interventions or treatments, parents and educators can take several practical steps:
- Pay attention to how adolescents talk about themselves. Statements such as "I’m not good enough” or “nobody likes me” might reveal struggles with self-worth. Rather than dismissing these feelings, listen with empathy and find out what might be contributing to these negative self-portrayals.
- Encourage adolescents to explore their interests, develop new skills, and celebrate their personal accomplishments.
- Support adolescents in developing healthy relationships and friendships with trusted adults. Feeling accepted, understood, and valued can provide an important source of reassurance, especially for young people experiencing peer victimization.
Ultimately, stopping peer victimization and bullying is only part of the picture. As parents, teachers, practitioners, and educators, we must empower adolescents to recognize that their self-worth is not determined by how others treat them.
About the co-author: Sheri McVay is a developmental psychologist with a master’s degree from the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO). She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree at UNO, with her research focused on peer relations, traditional bullying, and cyber victimization among children and adolescents.