Mitigating Relational Aggression Using Visualizations

Peer influence has long been recognized as one of the key factors in many of the social health issues that affect young people. To study peer relationships, scientists use self-report surveys that impose limitations on what can be concluded from the data and that do not allow for immediate intervention. Nowadays, the increase in use of computers for communication provides new ways of studying group dynamics and enables means to affect those dynamics as they are detected. In this project, we propose a way of mitigating relational aggression (e.g., verbal abuse and social exclusion) by means of a visualization of data collected through a social game designed to capture the roles of each of the participants within their social network. Our goal is to help participants reflect on their behavior and ease the analysis of the social dynamics by researchers with the help of a quantified representation of pairwise interactions.