Bullying is a persistent issue in the school environment and can have significant impact on the mental health of adolescents involved. The challenge in preventing and responding to bullying is in its nature, as traditional forms (verbal, physical, social) are typically limited to the school setting, while cyberbullying can extend itself into the personal space of students outside of school (Kowalski et al., 2014). Thus, a complex phenomenon that is already difficult to detect in its traditional form becomes even harder to assess in cyberspace. Identifying students involved in bullying (i.e. victims, bullies, bully-victims) may become increasingly challenging for teachers and school staff. From a research perspective, person-centred approaches, such as Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) can offer detailed insights into the complex interplay of the bullying roles and associated factors (Antoniadou et al., 2019). This is because students are not grouped in bullying roles based on predetermined criteria, but the data itself leads the creation of the latent profiles based on statistical analyses.

Over the course of development of bullying research, perspectives on why students bully have changed. Early explanations focused on the bullies’ aggressive personalities, but with further research it has become evident that bullying is associated with the bully’s position in the peer group (Salmivalli, 2010). Therefore, bullies bully to achieve the goal of reaching a certain position in the peer group. As social status becomes more important in adolescence, students’ beliefs and motives related to social status become important for understanding bullying. Thus, constructs, such as social status goals and social status insecurity, are relevant in explaining bullying behaviour (Li & Wright, 2014).

Socials goals can be defined as mental representations of what students want to achieve in peer groups and can be further distinguished into popularity goals and social preference goals (Li & Wright, 2014). In previous bullying research, social status goals were operationalized as perceived popularity obtained by peer nominations. Košir et al. (2022) found that higher levels of bullying were reported by students with high popularity goals or high social status insecurity showing that social status is a motive for bullying behaviour. Research on the relationship between social goals and victimization is scarce. However, relational victimization was positively associated with social insecurity goals, but only for the group of less popular students (Long et al., 2020).

Another significant factor contributing to the relationship between social status and bullying is moral disengagement which is defined as having the ability to disengage from moral self-sanction (Hymel & Bonanno, 2014). According to a recent review by Thornberg (2023), moral disengagement is a predictor of subsequent bullying behaviour, while victims and bully-victims reported lower moral disengagement compared to bullies (Menesini et al., 2003; Runions et al., 2019).

The purpose of the present research is to assess what are the differences between (traditional and cyber) bullying roles according to social status goals, social status insecurity and moral disengagement. We have devised two research questions:

1. Which (traditional and cyber) bullying roles can be defined using LPA?
2. How do the identified profiles differ according to social status goals, social status insecurity goals, and moral disengagement?

The sample comprises 6336 students (50% girls, 49.9% boys, 0.01% non-binary; Mage = 13.43 years) from 119 Slovenian lower-secondary schools. The majority of students (92.1 %) replied that they are Slovenes, while others stated that they belong to various ethnic groups: Roma ethnic group, Croatian ethnic group, Russian ethnic group, Italian ethnic group, Albanian ethnic group, Serbian ethnic group, Ukrainian ethnic group, Hungarian ethnic group, Macedonian ethnic group, Bosnian ethnic group, Arabian ethnic group and other ethnic groups. Regarding measurements, several questionnaires were used. We applied Adolescent Peer Report Instrument - Bully/Target (APRI-BT, Marsh et al., 2011) to measure three subdomains (physical, verbal, and social) of traditional bullying and victimization. For assessing cyberbullying and cybervictimization, we used the shortened version of Revised Adolescent Peer Report Instrument (Griezel et al., 2012). For measuring moral disengagement, the Moral Disengagement in Peer Victimization Scale (Thornberg et al., 2019) was employed. For assessing social status goals and social status insecurity, The Social status goals and social status insecurity scale (Li & Wright, 2014) was applied. Firstly, the descriptive statistics and correlations were examined in IBM SPSS Statistics. Further analyses were performed using Mplus. Latent profile analysis (LPA) was applied to identify unobserved subgroups of participants according to their degree of bullying and/or victimization. LPA is a statistical method that can be used to classify and describe latent profiles within a population. After deciding upon the number of profiles, the multinomial logistic regression will be used to test the differences in age and gender and the Bolck-Croon-Hagenaars approach (BCH) will be used to examine the differences in social status goals (i.e., popularity goals and social insecurity goals) and moral disengagement.

The results of the latent profile analysis showed that different sources of reporting (i.e., self-reported bullying or victimization; peer-reported bullying or victimization) are consistent since four profiles were identified: bullies, victims, bully-victims, and uninvolved students. Out of all students, 542 (8.5 %) students belonged to a bully profile, 446 (7.0 %) students to a victim profile, 143 (2.3 %) students to a bully-victim profile, and the great majority of students (5228; 82.2 %) belonged to an uninvolved students profile. Students in the bully-victim profile reported the highest levels of self-reported victimization and cybervictimization, while they were not perceived by their peers as being as involved in bullying and victimizations as bullies or victims. Interestingly, bullies reported lower levels of bullying, while their classmates stated they are bullying perpetrators. The same applies for victims of bullying. Further on, the identified profiles will be compared in moral disengagement and social status goals. It is expected that bullies will have the highest levels of popularity goals and moral disengagement compared to other identified groups of students. Further, we expect that victims will have higher social status insecurity goals while having lower moral disengagement. As for bully-victims, it is expected that they will have higher levels of popularity goals and also higher levels of social insecurity goals due to their experience of victimization. Based on the findings, implications for future research and practice will be provided.

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