Longitudinal Associations between Students' Willingness to Seek Help and Their Exposure to Peer Victimization

Background and Purpose: Peer victimization – defined as the intentional use of aggression and violence to oppress, humiliate, or dominate another person – is a relatively common experience for children, with studies suggesting that over half of all elementary school students experience some exposure. A number of negative developmental impacts can occur as a result of unmitigated exposure to peer victimization, including internalizing and externalizing difficulties that can persist into adulthood. However, evidence suggests that emotional support from teachers and other school personnel can moderate the relationship between peer victimization exposure and emotional and behavioral problems. Although help seeking is an important strategy to cope with peer victimization, only a fraction of victims seeks help from teachers, parents, or other adults. This evidence implies that some youth seek help while others do not. If youth fundamentally differ on their help seeking behavior, especially in relation to their exposure to peer victimization, studies are needed that examine this heterogeneity to identify who may need more support from adults to encourage their help seeking. To that end, the purpose of the present study is to examine how willingness to seek help from teachers changes over time and how it may change in relation to peer victimization exposure among a sample of 3^rd to 5^th grade students.

Methods: Based on a longitudinal survey of 960 elementary school students from seven schools in a large Midwestern district, mixed-effect models were estimated to examine the relationships among help-seeking behavior, victimization, and child age.

Results: In general, help seeking was found to decline as children age. Significant variation was also found in both the initial level of help seeking and the degree to which help seeking changes as children age. In relation to peer victimization, higher levels of exposure during the prior semester were associated with lower levels of help seeking the following semester; however, there appears to be substantial variation across students in the magnitude of this relationship. Also, there was a significant interaction between victimization and age, suggesting that the age-related decline in help seeking is more pronounced for victims than for non-victims. Significant differences were also found in help seeking across schools. However, the relationships among help seeking, victimization, and age were not significantly different across schools, suggesting that age-related changes in the relationship between victimization and help seeking are not context specific.

Conclusions and Implications: The age-related declines in help-seeking behavior suggest that bolstering students’ abilities to seek help in response to negative peer experiences may be an important preventative strategy. Results also suggest that some students may struggle to seek help in response to peer victimization more so than others; thus, preventative efforts should seek to identify students exposed to peer victimization and encourage teachers, school social workers, and other adults to provide tangible support to students at risk. Further implications for social work practice in schools and other child-serving systems will be noted.