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Temporal Relation Between Pubertal Development And Peer Victimization In A Prospective Sample Of Us Adolescents, Jessica A. Marino, Elysia Poggi Davis, Laura M. Glynn, Curt A. Sandman, Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Peer victimization typically peaks in early adolescence, leading researchers to hypothesize that pubertal timing is a meaningful predictor of peer victimization. However, previous methodological approaches have limited our ability to parse out which puberty cues are associated with peer victimization because gonadal and adrenal puberty, two independent processes, have either been conflated or adrenal puberty timing has been ignored. In addition, previous research has overlooked the possibility of reverse causality—that peer victimization might drive pubertal timing, as it has been shown to do in non-human primates. To fill these gaps, we followed 265 adolescents (47% female) prospectively across three-time points …