The eight contributions to this special issue provide an informative focus on many aspects of peer-based victimization in schools. Often using sophisticated quantitative and analytic procedures, they advance our knowledge in several important domains, pointing out important contextual variables, interactions, and mediating factors in the negative…

Harry Stack Sullivan maintained that competition between friends in early adolescence would generally destroy their friendship. Working with early adolescent samples in Canada, Costa Rica, and Cuba, we found that hypercompetitiveness--a form of competition involving the need to prove one?s own superiority--was linked with conflict between friends,…