Graduate Program

School Psychology

Degree Name

Specialist in School Psychology

Semester of Degree Completion

2016

Thesis Director

Lyndsay Jenkins

Abstract

The goal of this study was to investigate the factor structure, reliability, and validity for the Bullying Participant Behaviors Questionnaire (BPBQ) in an elementary sample. Previous research provided preliminary evidence of reliability and validity of the BPBQ scores with middle school students (Demaray, Summers, Jenkins, & Becker, 2014). The BPBQ is a self-report survey that purports to measure participation in five roles of bullying. These roles include bully, victim, assistant to the bully, defender of the victim, and outsider. Another goal of the study was to analyze possible sex and grade differences in the bullying roles. The current sample included 368 third through fifth grade students (51.6% girls, 98.9% White) from two rural elementary schools in the Midwest. Analyses included item-based exploratory analyses (higher-order EFA with Schmid-Leiman transformation), readability estimates, item to subscale correlations, and a grade by sex MANOVA. Results indicated that in elementary students, only three bullying roles (Bully, Victim, and Defender) are reliably measured. Higher-order factor analysis using the Schmid-Leiman transformation was conducted to determine whether the subscales could be interpreted separately. Moderate to high omega-subcale reliability estimates (ranging from .44-.80) indicated that the subscales uniquely measured different constructs and may be interpreted separately. No sex differences were found among bullying roles in elementary students. The only grade level difference found was that 5th graders showed significantly less defending behaviors than 3rd and 4th graders.

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