UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Potter, Tracey Meryl

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    The Assessment of the Forms and Functions of Childhood Aggression Reconsidered
    (2009) Potter, Tracey Meryl; Teglasi, Hedwig; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This study examined the relationships between aggression and adjustment with a configuration of aggression categories derived from factor analyses of two commonly used scales to measure aggression, Dodge and Coie's (1987) Reactive/Proactive scale and Crick and Grotpeter's (1995) Children's Social Behavior Scale (relational and overt aggression). Second and third grade students and their teachers completed aggression ratings and a battery of adjustment measures. Teacher and peer rated aggression scales were constructed from an exploratory factor analysis of the aggression items. The teacher rated scales that emerged were pure overt, reactive relational, and reactive overt, and emerging peer rated scales were pure overt and reactive relational. The factor analysis of the teacher ratings revealed numerous cross-loaded as did the analysis of peer ratings. Cross-loaded teacher-rated items captured the construct of emotional dysregulation whereas the cross-loaded peer-rated items represented pure relational aggression. Unique associations were observed between teacher-rated pure overt aggression with externalizing behaviors, peer rated reactive relational aggression with self-rated depression and anxiety symptoms, and peer rated pure overt aggression with self-rated depression symptoms. The results regarding overall gender differences were consistent with prior research in that boys were perceived as more purely overtly aggressive than girls when rated by both their teachers and peers, and girls were perceived as more reactively relationally aggressive than boys when rated by both teachers and peers. Gender was also found to moderate certain relationships between aggression and adjustment. Importance of informant, as well as implications for understanding the construct of aggression and its relationship to adjustment are discussed.
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    The Emotions and Social Information Processing Patterns of Aggressive Children
    (2007-04-11) Potter, Tracey Meryl; Teglasi, Hedwig; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This study examined children's emotions, ratings of aggressive behaviors and aggression related social information processing patterns. Second and third grade students completed self-reports of anger and aggression, as well as a measure of SIP. The students' teachers and peers also completed aggression ratings that differentiated between reactive and proactive aggression and overt and relational aggression respectively. Exploratory factor analyses revealed inconsistent results with previous studies regarding the designation of items as "reactive" or "proactive" on aggression ratings scales. Generally, teachers and peers agreed in their ratings of aggression, but did not agree with students' own self-reported aggression. There were modest correlations between hostile SIP responses and reports of aggression, and modest to moderate correlations between hostile SIP responses and self-reported anger. Finally, neither aggression nor anger made a unique contribution to predict SIP hostile intent attribution. However, anger did contribute above and beyond SIP intent attribution to predict self-reported aggression.