The physical aspect is not behind bullying, but rather the networks of friends and enemies in class determine how much bullying exists in the classroom and who is the victim.
This is one of the main conclusions of the study on the problem of bullying in schools and the role of class networks in the appearance and persistence of this problem, carried out by Antonio Cabrales, from the Carlos III University, in the framework from TeensLab, a consortium of universities that has produced a comprehensive study on adolescent behavior. Likewise, the study reveals those who are bullied tend to become friends with other bullied people and there is a "strong gender component", since girls who suffer bullying are in the center of the network, while boys are usually isolated.
The section dedicated to the competences and abilities of adolescents in the report has addressed issues such as the effects of the presence of students of migrant origin and cohesion in the classroom or the impact of childhood obesity. In this sense, the study presented by the Loyola University researcher, María José Vázquez, concludes that students of migrant origin are not particularly different from the rest of their classmates who find themselves in the same circumstances, except in two aspects: they have a greater preference for risk (they are less prudent) and are more altruistic.
On the other hand, regarding the impact of childhood obesity on the academic performance of secondary school students, the study presented has revealed that obesity negatively affects academic performance and cognitive skills, especially in the case of girls.
Another researcher focuses on the issue of the type of friendships and enmities within the classroom. The study by Ángel Sánchez, also from the Carlos III University, indicates that "two students will be friends with greater or lesser probability depending on the friendships and enmities they have in common." In fact, he details that a quantity can be defined, which is like a sum of friendships and enmities, which "allows us to predict with a probability close to 90% whether two students are friends or not." Furthermore, he assures that the fact that personal attitudes are more or less prosocial "is not related to making friends, which speaks to the fundamental role that the social context plays in establishing relationships."
On the other hand, the professor of economics at Loyola University, Pablo Brañas Garza, has analyzed whether young people correctly predict who their friends and enemies are. The results show that students with high cognitive abilities predict better who their friends and enemies are. He also concludes that those who are in the peripheral zones of relationship networks "are perfectly aware of their position in the network, however, those who occupy central positions do not know it."
Since Carlos III, the temporal evolution of friendships has also been studied in a specific institute, in which data have been collected on eight different occasions over three years. The results confirm the existence of Dunbar circles in the structure of relationships, that is, there are small groups of best friends that are more stable than simple friends, and explains the different nature of enmities, "much more volatile and less frequent." Also that 60% of the relationships are reciprocal, "a very stable number throughout the different data collections."
Finally, researchers from the University of Barcelona have studied what characteristics make a student chosen as a partner to do a job. Thus, he points out that boys choose boys and girls choose girls. However, there is another element: the boys and girls with the best grades are always chosen first to form the groups, unlike the students who suffer bullying, who are not chosen.
