Peer and Self-Estimated Aggression and Victimization in 8-Year-Old Children From Five Ethnic Groups

Abstract

The Direct & Indirect Aggression Scales (DIAS) (Björkqvist et al. [1992b] Finland: Åbo Akademi University) were applied in order to investigate the perception of aggression among 8-year-old children (n=404, girls 200, boys 204) in a cross-cultural comparison. Two samples from Finland (Finnish and Swedish-speaking children), two from Chicago, IL (African Americans and Caucasians), and one from Warsaw, Poland, were included in the study. These types of aggressive behavior and victimization of aggression (physical, verbal, and indirect) were measured using both peer and self estimations. Peer estimations were internally more consistent than self estimations. Children rated themselves as significantly less aggressive than their peers rated them. The opposite was true of victimization. An attributional discrepancy index (ADI) was calculated as the difference between self and peer estimated aggression scores. The index may be seen as an indicator of norms pertaining to aggression in different ethnic groups. ADI scores of girls, but not for boys, showed significant variance over culture on all three types of aggression. This indicates greater cultural variation in norms pertaining to aggression for girls than for boys. Cultural variation and sex differences in the patterning of aggressive behavior were analysed using multidimensional scaling (ALSCAL). Cultural variation appeared as distribution along the x-axis (dimension 1) in a two-dimensional solution, and sex differences along the y-axis (dimension 2), indicating that patterns of aggressive behavior are dependent on both culture and sex. © 1994 Wiley-Liss, Inc.