The frequency in the past year of each child disciplinary

practice, and the group of practices that comprise the power-assertive and punitive discipline and inductive discipline scores that presented skewed distributions were categorized into quartiles of exposure; the first quartile (lowest frequency) was the group of reference for analysis. Child disciplinary practices presenting more than 50% of zero frequency were dichotomized into the presence or absence, instead of using quartiles. Differences between bullies and non-bullies were investigated regarding sociodemographic characteristics using Pearson’s chi-squared test for dichotomous variables and using Student’s t-test for independent this website samples for continuous measures (or non-parametric substitutes). The main hypotheses were tested using binary logistic regression and robust estimators in order to relax the model assumptions. Independent variables were entered into two independent models – one for mothers’ and one for fathers’ behaviors – and were adjusted

for gender, age, and whether the parental figure was the biological mother or father. The dependent variable was grouped (bully, non-bully). Potential confounders were defined as those associated with the outcome with p-values lower than 0.20 or by theoretical relevance. 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) were used. Statistical significance was set at 0.05 (two-tailed). The statistical software used was SPSS for Windows, version 18.0. From the 276 children and adolescents eligible to join the study, 20 (7.25%) declined invitation, and 9 (3.26%) were not authorized AZD2281 cost by their parents to participate. The final sample consisted of 247 students, from which 98 (39.7%) were classified as bullies. Bullies differed significantly from non-bullies in the fact that they were older and had identified as their father figure someone other than their biological father. The sample characteristics are depicted in Table 1. From the bully group, 52 (53.06%) admitted to bullying at least mafosfamide once a day, and approximately half of them within this frequency threshold were female (n = 28, 53.84%). When different types of bullying were

analyzed separately, males and females did not significantly differ (Table 2). As described in Table 3, the more frequent the use of power-assertive and punitive discipline by both mother and father, the higher the odds of the child becoming a bully, suggesting a dose-response association. Examining each specific child disciplinary practice, psychological aggression presented the highest association with bullying behavior, and it was also the most frequent practice. Forms of mild corporal punishment, such as spanking and harsh corporal punishment by mother, were also associated with bullying. Nearly half (n = 107; 43.3%) of the present sample reported having been corporally punished in the previous year by at least one parent, and 35.5% (n = 38) of them were corporally punished at least once a week.