This study examines the prevalence, stability, and contextual correlates of peer victimization in a sample of African-American, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic White urban elementary school-age children. A total of 1956 children (40% African-American, 42% Hispanic, and 18% White) attending any 1 of 14 public elementary schools located in one large and one mid-sized Midwestern city participated in th...

Researchers have expended considerable effort to understand the causes and correlates of criminal victimization. More recently, scholars have focused on identifying individual-level traits that increase the odds of victimization. Generally absent from this line of research, however, is examining the extent to which previously unmeasured genetic and environmental influences contribute to the cov...

OBJECTIVE Our goal was to study predictive associations between bullying and victimization at age 8 years and psychiatric disorders in early adulthood. METHODS The sample comprised 2540 boys born in 1981. Information about bullying and victimization was gathered in 1989 when the boys were 8 years old from parents, teachers, and children. Information about psychiatric disorders was based on mi...

Before effective prevention interventions can be developed, it is necessary to identify the mechanisms that contribute to the targeted negative outcomes. A review of the literature on women's substance use and sexual victimization points to women's heavy episodic drinking as a proximal risk factor, particularly among college samples. At least half of sexual victimization incidents involve alcoh...

There is a significant gap in understanding the risk of sexual victimization in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and the variables that contribute to risk. Age appropriate sexual interest, limited sexual knowledge and experiences, and social deficits, may place adults with ASD at increased risk. Ninety-five adults with ASD and 117 adults without ASD completed questionnaires rega...

Using the general strain theory as a theoretical framework, the present longitudinal study investigated both face-to-face and cyber victimization in relation to cyber-displaced aggression. Longitudinal data were collected from 130 (70 women) young adults who completed measures assessing their victimization (face-to-face and cyber), cyber aggression, and both face-to-face and cyber-displaced agg...

This study examined aggression and withdrawal as predictors of peer victimization. In addition, peer rejection was evaluated as both a moderator and mediator of these relations. The sample consisted of 1956 African-American, Hispanic, and White elementary school-aged boys and girls attending urban and inner-city schools that were classified as high or moderate disadvantage. Correlation and regr...

This paper presents the development of a Bayes net classifier for prediction of a victimization attribute value for the National Crime Victimization Survey dataset. The National Crime Victimization Survey dataset has over 250 attributes and 216,000 data points, and as such poses a large-scale problem context for classifier development. The classifier was developed using the Weka machine learnin...

We examined the relation of overt and relational victimization to depressive symptoms, fear of negative evaluation (FNE), social avoidance, and loneliness in a sample of Hispanic and African-American children. The Social Experience Questionnaire, Children’s Depression Inventory, Social Anxiety Scale for Children— Revised, and Asher Loneliness Scale were administered to 190 children in the fifth...

Subjective insecurity is a key determinant of different forms of prosocial behavior. In Study 1, we used field experiments with farmers in Colombian villages exposed to different levels of violence to investigate how individual perceptions of insecurity affect cooperation, trust, reciprocity and altruism. To do so, we developed a cognitive-affective measure of subjective insecurity. We found th...