The Weak aspects of conflict management skills of youth: considering weak features

ENThis chapter presents a study designed to explore the role that age and power difference plays in relation to the types of distributive conflict resolution strategies, specifically forcing, avoiding, and accommodating. The study reports data from a student conflict resolution skills survey collected by the author during two academic years between 2012 and 2014. The sample comprised 238 students from Mykolas Romeris University and 586 pupils in grades seven to nine from six schools in Lithuania. The results show that older adolescents tend to report higher rates of direct accommodating and avoiding. Younger adolescents tend to report higher rates of direct humiliating, damaging, and direct and indirect physical and verbal offensive contending. The analyses show no age impact on indirect humiliation and damaging. Overall there was a greater use of accommodating strategies in the unequal power dyads, and there were no meaningful differences in the use of avoiding strategies. Although offensive contending and direct humiliating contending were more frequent in the dyads of equal power, power dyads seem to have no impact on indirect damaging and humiliating.