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Arch Womens Ment Health (2006) 9: 349350 DOI 10.1007/s00737-006-0158-4
Book Review Social aggression among girls
Underwood, Marion K., The Guildford Press, New York, 2003, 300 pp, paperback. ISBN 1-57230-866-4.
The area of how girls can display aggression has been under study until the past decade. This large body of work has shown that girls can be physically, verbally and emotionally aggressive. Social Aggression Among Girls focuses on girls social aggression their aggressive behaviours that are specically intended to harm others by harming their social relationship, peer status or friendships.
The research of girls social aggression presents two major challenges. First, social aggression must be distinguished from other forms of childhood aggression because of the high cooccurrence. Second, as some socially-aggressive behaviour can be developmentally appropriate, or at least common, it is dif-cult to determine when it is to be considered abnormal or pathological. A review of the scholarly book on the topic of social aggression in girls that is able to address these research issues is greatly needed.
As an accomplished researcher of the developmental psychopathology of aggression in girls, Dr. Underwood is well suited for the task and she has masterfully addressed all of these issues in her book. Two key conceptual limitations of the research she reviews are revisited throughout the book. First, she reminds the reader that a common denition of social aggression is not shared among researchers in the eld, making it difcult for reviewers to interpret the results of different studies. Second, the ndings of research may vary greatly by the type of methodology used. For example, to study aggression, researchers can observe children in multiple environments, or can ask teachers, parents or peers to rate aggression of others. Each source of information is subject to unique and important types of bias that can affect the measurement of social aggression. Her style is to integrate the consistencies of published work at the end of each chapter, making suggestions for future...