Social aggression is the use of social relationships to damage and inflict emotional harm on others, and includes behaviors that can be expressed overtly (e.g., calling names) or covertly (e.g., gossiping). Social aggression is often assumed to be the “girl form” of aggression, but previous investigations of sex differences have yielded notably inconsistent results. Unfortunately, there is no “gold standard” assessment for social aggression. Instead, there are many formal and informal measures, each of which contains unique behavioral items. This creates a lack of definitional and measurement clarity that may contribute to the inconsistent sex differences observed in prior work. It also raises an important question: is it possible that the inconsistencies in sex differences reported at the level of the overall scale are related to the specific items? Put another way, are there consistent sex differences for specific behaviors? Similarly, are previously reported sex differences due to true differences in the latent trait of social aggression or are they consequences of measurement bias? The current study addressed these possibilities by examining the presence and direction of sex differences in the perpetration of specific socially aggressive behaviors and testing whether observed sex differences are due to measurement non-invariance. Social aggression in middle childhood (N=2,000) and young adulthood (N=1,200) was assessed using the Subtypes of Antisocial Behavior questionnaire. We observed small but significant sex differences for a large number of socially aggressive behaviors, but these differences were largely a function of measurement non-invariance. These findings suggest that the inconsistencies found in prior studies examining sex differences in social aggression may be in part due to measurement non-invariance or similar forms of measurement bias. Moreover, these results illustrate the importance of taking a psychometrically informed approach to the study of group differences in social aggression and similar phenotypes.
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