Abstract
Besides its several threats to health, welfare, social and academic development and performance of kids and teenagers, school bullying remains highlighted as one of the most relevant related challenges for educational, behavioral and legal sciences worldwide. Moreover, the lack of research on the field and the crucial but unattended need to count on psychometrically suitable and valid tools to detect school bullying make difficult understanding its contexts, dynamics and possible solutions. Objective The aim of this study was to thoroughly present in detail the psychometric properties and validity issues of the School Bullying Questionnaire (CIE-A) among secondary students. Methods A regionwide sample of 810 (47.2% girls) secondary students attending to 21 schools across the Valencian Community (Spain), aged M = 14.40 (SD = 1.61) years, responded to a paper-based questionnaire containing the 36-item version of the CIE-A and various scales related to psychosocial health and wellbeing, used as criterion variables. Results The outcomes of this study suggest that the CIE-A has a clear factor structure, an optimal set of item loadings and goodness-of-fit indexes. Further, that CIE-A has shown good internal consistency and reliability indexes, coherent associations with other mental health and academic performance variables, and the possibility to assess gender differences on bullying-related factors among secondary students. Conclusion The CIE-A may represent a suitable tool for assessing bullying in a three-factorial approach (i.e., victimization, symptomatology, and intimidation), offering optimal psychometric properties, validity and reliability insights, and the potentiality of being applied in the school environment. Actions aimed at improving the school coexistence and the well-being of secondary students, targeting potential bullied/bully profiles or seeking to assess demographic and psychosocial correlates of bullying among teenagers, might get benefited from this questionnaire.
Highlights
Current thinking about bullying reflects a growing understanding of the concept as a social and cultural issue associated with long-term serious physical and psychological consequences for victims, aggressors, and those kids and teenagers simultaneously oscillating between these two roles [1, 2]
The model fit for the bifactorial solution was considerably inadequate: χ2(593) = 3378.183, p< .001; Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) = .076 with 90% CI of .074-.079; Confirmatory Fit Index (CFI) = .769; Normed Fit Index (NFI) = .734; IFI =
The baseline three-factor model showed better fit indexes, with: χ2(591) = 2205.321, p< .001; RMSEA = .058 with 90% CI of .056-.061; CFI = .866; NFI = .826; IFI =
Summary
Current thinking about bullying reflects a growing understanding of the concept as a social and cultural issue associated with long-term serious physical and psychological consequences for victims (the bullied), aggressors (the bullies), and those kids and teenagers simultaneously oscillating between these two roles [1, 2]. The prevalence is similar across genders, the available statistics show how, same as for other aggression-related situations, boys tend to be more involved in fights or physical attacks, whereas girls act more indirectly or relationally [4, 6, 7]. A study identified a prevalence of 35% for traditional bullying (both perpetration and victimization roles) and 15% for cyberbullying involvement [8, 9]. Consistent with this data, other studies rated peer violence across 11 European countries and revealed a similar pattern: 20% of youth between 8 to 18 years reported being bullied, 43.1% of boys and 40.1% of girls remained frequently bullied during secondary school [10]. The youth peer abuse can be persistent across time and across settings [11]; and lastly, victimization was more prevalent among boys and tended to slightly decline with age, especially when interventions, environmental changes (e.g., school transfer, enter the university) or great variations on social dynamics take place [5, 12, 13]
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