Poster #131 - Measures of How Teachers Handle Bullying Incidents: Teachers’ and Students’ Reports in Upper Elementary School

• In Event: Poster Session 09

Abstract

An ecological emphasis on the dynamics of peer victimization has highlighted the critical role of teachers and other school personnel in prevention and early intervention (Yoon et al., 2022). Specifically, how teachers respond to bullying incidents has been conceptualized as an influential process of socialization that takes place at schools, reinforcing perpetration or deterring future perpetration, creating classroom norms that affect victimization and defending behaviors, and encouraging or discouraging students’ reporting behaviors (Wachs et al., 2018). With this strong theoretical rationale, there have been emerging interests in teacher responses to bullying and their impact on students’ peer relationships. However, measuring teacher responses to bullying has proven challenging, in part due to a lack of instruments with strong psychometric support. Most studies have relied on teacher reports and have rarely examined student reports of how teachers address bullying.

One teacher-report measure that has been used globally is the Handling Bullying Questionnaire (HBQ, Bauman et al., 2008), albeit with mixed findings specific to its psychometric properties. The purpose of the study was to examine psychometric evidence for the HBQ-Teacher Report. We also developed and examined the psychometric properties of the HBQ-Student Report. As part of a larger study of peer victimization, we recruited 69 teachers and 1,086 students in Grades 4 (52%) and 5 (48%) from four school districts in the US. Teachers were primarily female (88%), White (45%), and Latinx (41%). Students identified as female (48%), White (16%), and Latinx (43%). Teachers responded to an online survey and students completed their survey on an iPad during classroom visits. The HBQ-T is a measure of how teachers would handle a hypothetical bullying situation. Teachers were presented with 22 strategies (e.g., “I would ignore it.”) and asked to indicate how likely they are to use each strategy on a scale of 1 (“I definitely would not”) to 5 (“I definitely would”). The HBQ-T has five subscales: Working with the Victim, Working with the Bully, Ignoring the Incident, Enlisting Other Adults, and Disciplining the Bully. The HBQ-S used the same hypothetical situation, but the wording was changed to “what you think your teacher would do.” All strategies from the HBQ-T were included on the HBQ-S except one item (“The teacher would tell the bully that they are worried about the victim”).

Table 1 includes the results of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on the HBQ-T and internal consistency estimates. Results indicated psychometric support for all five subscales. However, one item from the Ignoring the Incident Subscale (“I would just tell the kids to “grow up.”) and one item from the Disciplining the Bully (“I would make it clear to the bully that his or her behavior would not be tolerated”) were dropped. Table 2 includes the results of CFA on the HBQ-S and internal consistency estimates. All 22 items were retained for the five subscales. The findings provide additional psychometric support for HBQ-T and preliminary empirical support for the five subscales when reported by students. Limitations and implications for future research will be discussed.

Authors

• Jina Yoon, University of Arizona
  Presenting Author

• Sheri Bauman, University of Arizona

• Russell B Toomey, University of Arizona

• Connor Kendzora, University of Arizona

• Sara Townsend, University of Arizona