Connecting Online and Offline Social Skills to Adolescents’ Peer Victimization and Psychological Adjustment

Peer victimization is a common experience among high school students and is associated with many negative adjustment outcomes, making it necessary to investigate the individual and contextual factors that may ameliorate the consequences of peer victimization. The current study explores whether social competence offline and online mediates the relationship between peer victimization and psychological adjustment for adolescents. High school students (n = 303, Mage = 15.83, 65.2% female) reported about their peer victimization experiences, social skills, perceptions of peers’ acceptance offline and social media acceptance, and self-worth. By considering both online and offline contexts, the underlying assumption that there are important differences between the two contexts and that these differences have a unique impact on teens who experience peer victimization was tested. The results indicate that teens who experience peer-victimization have deficits in both their offline and online social competence. Path analysis revealed that offline social skills mediate the relationship between peer victimization and self-worth. Also, there was a modest correlation between the indicators of offline social skills and online social skills indicating that they are not identical and have different associations with self-worth. Since teens are interacting with social media as another context of their everyday life, the implications for interventions aimed at targets of peer-victimization are meaningful.