The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Injury Center has announced the release of Measuring Bullying Victimization, Perpetration, and Bystander Experiences: A Compendium of Assessment Tools.
This compendium provides researchers, prevention specialists, and health educators with tools to measure a range of bullying experiences: bully perpetration, bully victimization, bully-victim experiences, and bystander experiences. This compendium represents a starting point from which researchers can consider a set of psychometrically sound measures for assessing self-reported incidence and prevalence of a variety of bullying experiences.
Bullying, particularly among school-age children, is a public health problem both domestically and internationally. In a 2009 nationally representative sample of youth in grades 9-12, 20 percent reported being bullied at school in the previous year. Five percent of students did not go to school because they felt they would be unsafe at school or on their way to or from school at least once in the previous 30 days.
Given that numerous measures of bullying experiences exist, researchers and practitioners may find it challenging to identify which of the available measures is appropriate for assessing a particular bullying experience. Some researchers continue to examine the risk and protective factors associated with bullying experiences. Others are working to design, implement, and evaluate bully prevention interventions aimed at reducing bully victimization and perpetration, as well as increasing pro-social bystander involvement in bullying situations.
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