Assistant Professor of Psychology Jean Burr, Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology Mark Oakes and Tori Nygren '11 presented their paper "An Implicit Association Test to Measure Relational Aggression: Preliminary Results and Directions for Future Research" at the 3rd Research Conference on Relational Aggression in Philadelphia on June 23.
Relational aggression is defined as the deliberate attempt to harm someone through the manipulation of relationships and social status. Traditional techniques of measurement have relied on surveys that ask students whether they engaged in relationally aggressive behaviors. Unfortunately, surveys of socially sensitive topics, such as bullying or relational aggression, suffer from underreporting of the targeted behavior due to the fear of being evaluated in a negative manner.
The current paper discusses an indirect measurement technique, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), that neither informs the student of what behavior is being measured, nor asks for the student to self-report about the behavior. Instead, the IAT assesses the strength of association between concepts, such as relational aggression and good, by measuring the ease with which one can respond to the separate concepts as a single unit. The assumption is that the more associated relational aggression is to the concept of good, the more a person may use relational aggression as a problem solving strategy. Initial data analyses revealed that the IAT converged with measures of relational aggression and is uniquely predictive of academic uncertainty and time pressure.
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