To study these questions, Tucker et al (2014) conducted telephone interviews. Researchers examined subjects from two perspectives: victimization and mental health. Items from the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire (JVQ) were used to measure the extent of victimization. As for measuring mental health, children older than ten years old did self-reports whereas children younger than ten were examined through interviews of their caregivers. The result showed that younger children have a greater chance to be in the sibling victimization only group, while adolescents were more likely to be in the peer victimization only group. Moreover, the results showed that both children and adolescents who have experienced sibling victimizations are more likely to report peer victimizations. In both children and adolescent groups, subjects who experienced either sibling or peer victimizations showed greater metal distress than those who haven’t experienced any victimization, and subjects bullied by both siblings and peer had lowest mental health. Tucker et al concluded that the experience of being bullied by siblings made children less able to interact with their peers normally, and therefore led children to peer victimization. Also, there was a positive relationship between the magnitude of children’s mental distress and their experiences of being bullied.
However, not all children suffer from sibling victimizations. It is widely agreed that having siblings are generally beneficial for children, because siblings provide each others with contemporary companionship. Tucker and Holt note that this kind of companionship is particularly important when children are in a family where inter-parental conflicts frequently happen. They argue that warm sibling relationships are like moderators of side effects of inter-parental conflicts. However, is it true that cordial sibling relation can truly protect children, especially female adolescents, who are more emotionally vulnerable, from negative effects of parental fights?
To find the answer to this question, Tucker and Holt (2013) conducted a survey. The subjects were female college students who had at least one sibling. Questions included three dimensions: the severity of inter-parental conflicts, the degree of sibling warmth, and the magnitude of depression. The result showed that warm sibling relations moderated the association between the perception of inter-parental conflicts and depression, and that subjects who reported more sibling warmth tended to have less depression generally. Tucker and Holt concluded that siblings are truly important support for children who have stressful family experiences. thood. the decision to study these processes for female emerging adults’ depression represented an exten-sion of the previous literature that predominately focuses on the effects of inter-parental conflict for children (Grych & Fincham, 1990). Typically, emerging adulthood is viewed as a period of individual development and the importance of family relationships is often ignored as a stage of the family life-cycle. However, findings from this study suggest that emerg-ing adults’ appraisals of conflict occurring in adolescence remain impor-tant influences on adjustment in emerging adulthood; and, moreover, are shaped by their earlier sibling relationships. although the study relied on retrospective accounts of inter-parental conflict and sibling warmth, which can be influenced by memory and interference from effects of lat-er events, it is possible that emerging adults have a clearer perspective on conflict that occurred between their parents than they did as an adolescent due to advanced cognitive reasoning and social perception abilities to re-flect on family dynamics (Cui, et al., 2005). The findings indicated the importance of memories of inter-parental conflict and sibling warmth, and therefore should be replicated with con-current reports of family relationship experiences and depression with longitudinal data from adolescence to emerging adulthood. also, because this study’s convenience sample was restricted to undergraduates at two universities, replication on other college or non-college samples is re-quired. Future work in this area should include men and multiple reports of family experiences so as not to be limited by self-reports, which poten-tially inflate the associations found due to shared method variance.RefeRencesBoer, F., goedhart, a. W., & treFFers, p. d. a. (1992) siblings and their parents. In f. Boer & J. Dunn (eds.), Children’s sibling relationships: developmental and clinical issues. Hillsdale, NJ: erlbaum. Pp. 41-54. Briere, J. (1996) Psychometric review of the Trauma Symptom Checklist-40. in B. H. stamm (ed.), Measurement of stress, trauma, and adaptation. lutherville, mD: sidran Press.Cui, m., & Conger, r. d. (2008) Parenting behavior as mediator and moderator of the association between marital problems and adolescent maladjustment. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 18, 261-284. DOI: 10.1111/j.1532-7795.2008.00560.x.Cui, m., Conger, r. d., & LorenZ, F. o. (2005) Predicting change in adolescent ad-justment from change in marital problems. Developmental Psychology, 41, 812-823. DOI:10.1037/0012-1649.41.5.812.
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