Damanjit Sandhu

Research investigating cultural dimensions explaining differences in peer aggression across countries is scant, while very few studies have investigated harmful adolescent peer aggression. We sought to contribute to this under-researched area by examining the relationship of harmful adolescent peer aggression across 12 countries (Australia, Greece, Indonesia, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, the Philippines, India, Italy, Mainland China, and Israel) with diverse cultural and religious values, using Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions as well as happiness scores. We aimed to compare only harmful peer aggression, cultural values, and happiness in different cultures. Data collected from over 7,000 students aged 11–16 who completed a purpose-built questionnaire that assessed harmful peer aggression, and Hofstede’s cultural dimension scores for different countries, were used in the correlational analyses. The results showed a positive association of harmful adolescent peer aggression with the cultural dimensions of Power Distance and Masculinity. A strong positive association was evident with the cultural dimension of Uncertainty Avoidance, but only for locations with Uncertainty Avoidance scores above a threshold of 60. Below this threshold, no association was apparent. A negative association was found between harmful adolescent peer aggression and the cultural dimension of long-term orientation and happiness. However, no association was evident between harmful adolescent peer aggression and the cultural dimension of Individualism-Collectivism, raising as a possible explanation that schools epitomise collective sub-cultures. The applicability of Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions in adolescent cohorts was questioned, and suggestions were made that cultural influences on adolescents living in different cultures require more research.

This paper unpacks how everyday lives of urban middle-class children were mediated by digital technologies during the COVID-19 national lockdown in India. In contemporary India, children’s engagements with digital technologies are structured by their social class, gender, and geographical locations. The resultant disparities between “media-rich” and “media-poor” childhoods in India are stark (Banaji 2017). In this paper, we argue that the national lockdown in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed India’s “media-rich” children to particular threats and obstacles. Based on semi-structured interviews and mapping exercises with 16- to 17-year-old urban middle-class young people, we explore how being confined to their homes for an extended period when their schools shifted to online delivery of teaching and learning; young people negotiated risks and sought digital opportunities in the management and social construction of the self (Callero 2003, 2014). While the majority of existing studies focus on societal anxieties around children’s digital media use, in almost a medicalized and pathological fashion, and its impact on parenting practices (Lim 2020; Livingstone and Blum-Ross 2020), we shift the attention to study this social phenomenon to help understand how children reflect on their engagement with technology and shape their own well-being through social construction of the self. Our findings demonstrate that children are reflexive users of digital technologies, as they navigate network failure issues, the demands of online classrooms, their own mental health and social relationships, and deploy the affordances of digital technologies to combat loneliness, nurture contact with friends, and explore educational and career resources. These strategies, in the management and social construction of the self, play out within the discourse of pedagogized middle-class childhood in India, which is imbued with notions of academic success and failure (Kumar 2016; Sen 2014). Media-rich middle-class young people’s management and social construction of the self, in the context of crisis and uncertainty, helps promote our understanding of the relationship between social structure, self-structure, and behavior choices, implications of this for child well-being, and reproduction of social inequality in society.

Based on in‐depth interviews with 24 middle‐class Indian child participants, this is the first exploratory qualitative study, in India, to demonstrate the ways in which children as reflexive social actors re‐negotiated everyday schedules, drew on classed resources at their disposal and made sense of the impact of the pandemic on their educational pathways and future aspirations. These narratives offer a unique lens on the politics of middle‐classness and its constitutive relation to constructions of normative childhoods in contemporary India. Study findings contribute to the sociology of Indian childhood and more generally help enrich our understanding of southern childhoods and the reproduction of inequalities in contemporary India.