Quantifying Toxic Friendship: A Preliminary Investigation of a Measure of Victimization in the Friendships of Adolescents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although friendship is a key source of support and intimacy for adolescents, adolescent friendships can also involve victimization, which can be harmful to youth well-being. To date, our understanding of victimization in friendship has been limited by a lack of measures that comprehensively capture the variety of negative behaviors occurring in this relationship. This study outlines the development and preliminary validation of the Friendship Victimization Scale for Adolescents (FVS-A), which assesses victimization and controlling behaviors in adolescent friendships. Adolescents ( N = 706, M age = 15.93, SD = 1.67; 62.3% cisgender girls, 33.7% cisgender boys) from high schools in Canada completed the FVS-A and other measures in the fall of 2019. The factor structure and psychometric properties of the measure were examined. The FVS-A demonstrated excellent internal consistency and a 3-factor structure (relational victimization, physical/verbal victimization, controlling behavior). There was evidence for demographic differences such that cisgender girls reported more overall friendship victimization, as well as relational victimization and control, than did cisgender boys. Greater friendship victimization was associated with greater dating victimization and gender-based bullying and was uniquely associated with greater depressive symptoms after accounting for these other types of victimization. Findings suggest that friendship victimization is common among adolescents. The results provide evidence for the utility of the FVS-A as a measure of an understudied source of interpersonal risk. Future work is needed to understand the long-term implications of friendship victimization and to elucidate the temporal associations between friendship victimization and other indicators of psychosocial adjustment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".