Sexualized gender stereotypes (SGS) are commonly endorsed by adolescent girls. These stereotypes include the notion that girls can enhance their social status by prioritizing their sexualized attractiveness, which necessitates downplaying other traits such as intelligence. According to the stereotype emulation hypothesis, a girl will be more…

In middle school, adolescents are particularly focused on peer interaction to help form their identities. For marginalized students, especially refugees, peer interaction is especially important. To be successful in schools and gain cultural and social capital, refugee students must learn and internalize the specific norms of their classrooms. In…

Sexually objectifying messages about girls and women are common in U.S. popular culture. As a consequence of exposure to such messages, girls may develop "internalized sexualization," or internalization of the belief that sexual attractiveness to males is an important aspect of their identity. We hypothesized that internalized…

Within physical education and sport, girls must navigate discourses of valued athletic and gendered bodies that marginalise or "other" non-normative performances through systems of surveillance and punishment. The purpose of this paper is to share girls' perspectives on how these discourses affected their gender performances and activity…

The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine provides physicians with an opportunity to have conversations with girls about sex and sex-related topics. Current research suggests that these conversations are not happening. This study was designed to assess whether physicians would use the HPV vaccination as an opening to communicate with nine-year-old to…

Relatively little is known about the prevalence of physical dating violence behaviors and perceived norms about dating violence among early adolescents. A sample of 5,404 sixth-grade students was recruited from four diverse U.S. sites. Over half of the respondents reported that girls hitting their boyfriends was acceptable under certain…

The collection of articles in this special issue on relational aggression gives a glimpse into the complex social networks, first, of children's relational aggression and, second, of the collaborators who develop and validate children's prevention programs. The programs described in this special section are among the first to address relational…

This article proposes an unusual identification strategy to estimate the effects of disruptive students on peer behavior and academic outcomes. Because boys with names most commonly given to girls may be more prone to misbehavior as they get older, they may become differentially disruptive in school. In elementary school there is no relationship…

This article explores the nexus between digital literacies and identity in the online graphical chat environment of the "palace". With a focus on the adolescent cybergirl, it examines how girls use words and images to create a digital presence, and in so doing, "write" their bodies and their selves. I discuss how the cybergirl is discursively…