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Social norms are vital for the functioning of adolescent peer groups; they can protect the well-being of groups and individual members, often by deterring harmful behaviors, such as aggression, through enforcement mechanisms like peer victimization; in adolescent peer groups, those who violate aggression norms are often subject to victimization. However, adolescents are nested within several levels of peer group contexts, ranging from small proximal groups, to larger distal groups, and social norms operate within each. This study assessed whether there are differences in the enforcement of aggression norms at different levels. Self-report and peer-nomination data were collected four times over the course of a school year from 1,454 early adolescents (M age = 10.27; 53.9% boys) from Bogota, Colombia. Multilevel modeling provided support for social regulation of both physical aggression and relational aggression via peer victimization, as a function of gender, grade-level, proximal (friend) or distal (class) injunctive norms of aggression (perceptions of group-level attitudes), and descriptive norms of aggression. Overall, violation of proximal norms appears to be more powerfully enforced by adolescent peer groups. The findings are framed within an ecological systems theory of adolescent peer relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a four‐wave/seven‐month longitudinal design with a sample of 1595 preadolescents (53% boys, 47% girls, Mage = 10.2 years) from 63 fourth‐, fifth‐ and sixth‐ grade classrooms in nine mixed‐sex schools in Bogotá, Colombia, we examined whether growth trajectories of measures of overt and relational aggression varied as a function of classroom norms for aggression. Multilevel growth mixture modeling revealed (a) distinct trajectories of overt and relational aggression for boys and girls and (b) that norm salience (i.e., the process by which a group norm is made salient via the punishments or reinforcements to the behavior within the group) was a better predictor of associations with trajectories of overt and relational aggression than were perceived injunctive norms (i.e., the perceived standards of what is approved or disapproved in a social context). In classrooms where popular or accepted children were perceived by their peers as aggressive, more boys followed an increasing trajectory of overt and relational aggression than a low‐stable trajectory, and more girls followed a high‐stable trajectory of relational aggression than a low‐stable trajectory. These findings are discussed in terms of the practical implications for the design of educational interventions aimed at preventing aggression in classroom settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]