The Transition of Aggressive Patterns among Youth: an Application of Latent Transition Analysis

Peng Wu Jing-Jun CHEN

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2014, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (5) : 1167-1173.

PDF(6991 KB)
PDF(6991 KB)
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2014, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (5) : 1167-1173.

The Transition of Aggressive Patterns among Youth: an Application of Latent Transition Analysis

  • Peng Wu1, Jing-Jun CHEN3,4, 5
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Abstract

Many researchers investigated adolescent aggressive behavior, in consideration of the negative consequences and psychological problems that aggression will cause. Some researches have been done to show the development of aggressive behavior among adolescence or children, others explored the relationship between aggression and personality, cognitive factors or parenting. With regard to the development of aggression, statistics analysis that deal with continuous variables prevailed researches. Some conclusions was made through regression, ANOVA, HLM or LGM. But researchers early stressed that patterns of aggression should be more important issue and aggressive researchers should explore the transitions of the patterns. We can recognize and intervene the aggressive behavior more comprehensively and adequately if we find the pattern of aggression. Despite several conclusions have been come through analyzing continuous variables, these conclusions are singular and tedious. In more specific terms, the researches adopted continuous variables can indicate the quantitative relationship or the change on the degree or the frequency of aggression. The current aggression research needs some conclusion from the perspective of categorical variables. Such study can show the pattern of aggression behavior. The latent class model and latent transition model that are new analysis method in psychological study, fortunately, can deal with the categorical variate and present the qualitative relationship and change. This study describes patterns of youth aggression and change in aggression profiles. 276 participants attend this longitudinal study. Aggression behaviors and friendship quality were assessed. Through recoding the aggressive scores, we get a set of dichotomous variables that indicated whether specific aggression behaviors is present or not. Latent class analysis was used to determine the aggressive pattern of youth, and latent transition analysis was used to examine the conditional probabilities of transitions in class membership between adjoin time. The results indicate that there are three aggressive patterns in adolescence and the transition of the patterns was rather steady. Three aggression patterns were defined as high aggressive, low aggressive and mixture pattern, respectively. The high aggressive pattern indicated that there are common more frequent behaviors in three aggression forms. On the contrary, there are common less frequent behaviors in three aggression forms. The mixture pattern is a special one where there weren’t consistent frequency in there aggression behavior. That is to say, some aggressive forms presented high frequency and even more frequent behavior than the high aggressive pattern. Meanwhile, other aggressive forms presented low frequency and even less frequent behavior than the low aggressive pattern. The majority of youth remained high aggressive and low aggressive pattern. There are high probability that low aggressive pattern transited to high aggressive pattern, mixture pattern transited to low aggressive pattern or high aggressive pattern. Importantly, there is gender difference in the conditional probabilities of transition of aggressive patterns. The girls maintain mixture and low aggressive pattern more steady than boys. Conflict resolution can predict positively the stability of low aggressive pattern and predict negatively the stability of high aggressive pattern. In future, more factors can influence the class and the transition probability should be added to the study for undrstanding the adolescent aggression in-depth and comprehensively.

Key words

aggression / Latent Class Analysis / Latent Transition Analysis

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Peng Wu Jing-Jun CHEN. The Transition of Aggressive Patterns among Youth: an Application of Latent Transition Analysis[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2014, 37(5): 1167-1173
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