Relational and Social Aggression: A Scoping Literature Review

School violence is an omnipresent problem within the United States, at worst, resulting in the death of children and teachers across the nation. Over time, numerous strategies and tools have been introduced in order to reduce aggression within schools. However, as both overt and covert forms of aggression contribute to school violence, it is necessary for researchers to investigate covert, indirect forms of aggression as a way to better identify and prevent a salient contribution to this problem. Although much research has investigated bullying in general, further research is needed in better understanding the forms of covert bullying, relational and social aggression, as these types of bullying are just as detrimental to children as overt forms of bullying. Thus, in this current study, I examine the concepts of social and relational aggression using a scoping literature review in order to investigate the way in which relational and social aggression are conceptualized across the extant literature base. In this study, I specifically investigate the statistical discernment of these respective concepts in the literature as well as distinguishable subtypes and the uniformity of their definitions in the literature. The results of the study indicate that, while social and relational aggression are able to be differentiated from one another, there continues to be a lack of agreement in the literature regarding their distinguishable qualities