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For most students, attending school entails daily intense social interactions with classmates in a classroom context. While many of these interactions are positive and lead to the development of friendships and a shared classroom community, some students instead suffer peer harassment and bullying. According to the social-ecological theory these disparate social phenomena may be linked. The aim of this study was to examine how number of friends, perceived friendship quality, and a sense of peer community were associated with bullying victimization at both the individual and classroom level. Additionally, to thoroughly investigate the nuances of different types of friendship qualities the concept was analyzed both as one unified construct and as five distinct dimensions (companionship, conflict, help, security, and closeness). Survey data from 587 Swedish upper elementary school students (56.22% girls; Mage = 11.72, SD = 0.96) across 54 classrooms was collected and analyzed using multilevel regression. Results showed that having at least one friend was negatively associated with victimization and that victimization was less prevalent in classrooms where students experienced a shared sense of community. Furthermore, while high-quality friendships were associated with less victimization at both the individual and classroom level, when the five dimensions where considered, only conflictual and helpful friendships were significantly associated with victimization (on both levels of analysis for conflictual friendships and only on the individual level for helpful friendships). Together these results highlights the importance of schools helping students cultivate high-quality friendships, teaching constructive conflict management and promoting a more prosocial classroom community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether authoritative teaching at the classroom-level was associated with bullying victimisation, and how this association evolved over the course of upper elementary school (i.e. in grades 4 through 6) by estimating whether the association declined with time. Data came from the first three waves of an ongoing longitudinal project examining social and moral correlates of school bullying. Survey data were analysed from 1,830 students. Multilevel analyses showed that teachers who displayed high levels of warmth, caring, and supportiveness together with high levels of structure, control, and demandingness tended to have students who reported less bullying victimisation. This association between authoritative teaching at the classroom-level and bullying victimisation, while still significant, decreased over the course of the two-year study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]