2023-06-10, Garrote, Ariana, Zurbriggen, Carmen L. A., Schwab, Susanne

Friendships with classmates play a significant role in student’s development. However, only some friendships are maintained for longer than a school year and their formation depend on many factors. One important factor is gender because gender homophily is consistently found in friendship networks. In addition, there is evidence that same-gender friendships are more stable. In the context of inclusive education, friendship can be considered as one of four key dimensions of social inclusion. While three of these dimensions are assessed from others’ perspective, self-perception of social inclusion focuses solely on the individual students’ view. However, hardly any studies investigated how students’ self-perception of social inclusion is related to friendships, and more specifically, whether and how self-perceived social inclusion is related to changes in friendship networks in the classroom. To contribute to this research gap, friendship networks of 280 students aged 9–11 years (49% girls) in 15 classes of Grade 4 were examined at the beginning and at the end of one school year. Network changes were analyzed with longitudinal social network analyses. Students’ gender and self-perception of inclusion were added as predictors of changes in the friendship networks. The results confirmed gender homophily for formation and stability. The analyses also showed that students who perceived themselves as socially included nominated more best friends at the end of the school year but were not necessarily perceived as best friends by their peers. This highlights the importance of considering different perspectives to better understand social inclusion in classrooms.

2021, Schnepel, Susanne, Garrote, Ariana, Moser Opitz, Elisabeth

2022-04-22, Favre, Céline Anne, Aksoy, Dilan, Garrote, Ariana, Janousch, Clarissa

Research has well established that parental physical abuse experiences can lead to devastating consequences for adolescents, with peer relationships acting as both protective and risk factors. With the person-centered latent profile analysis (LPA), we analyzed questionnaire data from a cross-sectional study in 2020 composed of a sample of 1959 seventh-grade high school students from Switzerland. This study investigated and compared peer-status profiles combining peer acceptance and peer popularity for adolescents with and without parental physical abuse experiences. We conducted a multinomial logistic regression analysis to investigate further depression, anxiety, and dissociation as predictors of profile membership. With LPA, we identified three distinct profiles for adolescents within the subgroup with experiences of parental physical abuse (n = 344), namely liked, liked-popular, and rejected-unpopular. Within the subgroup of adolescents without parental physical abuse experiences (n = 1565), LPA revealed four profiles, namely liked, liked-popular, rejected-unpopular, and average. For adolescents with parental physical abuse experiences, higher levels of dissociation significantly indicated they were more likely to belong to the rejected-unpopular group than belong to the liked group. Anxious students without experiences of parental physical abuse were more likely to belong to the rejected-unpopular and liked profiles than belong to the liked-popular and average profiles. These findings clearly argue for a deeper understanding of the role of parental physical abuse when analyzing the relationship between dissociation and anxiety and peer status. Operationalizing peer status with the four individual dimensions of likeability, rejection, popularity, and unpopularity was valuable in that the role of peer rejection with respect to different internalizing symptoms became apparent.

2021-12-02, Ertanir, Beyhan, Kassis, Wassilis, Garrote, Ariana

This study aimed to explore changes in mental health outcomes (depression, anxiety, home, and school stress) from before the first COVID-19 wave (autumn 2019) to the later stages of the same wave (autumn 2020) in a sample of N = 377 Swiss adolescents (Mage = 12.67; 47% female. The results showed that the expected impact of the pandemic on mental health was not noticeable in the later stages of the first COVID-19 wave. Only two effects were demonstrated in terms of intra-individual changes, namely, an effect of gender on depression and anxiety symptoms and an effect of reported COVID-19 burden on school stress symptoms. Moreover, few associations were found for selected predictors and students’ mean level scores, averaged across both time points.