Investigating Question Order Effects on the Prevalence of Bullying Victimization of Middle School Students

• In Event: Conducting and Validating Surveys

Abstract

Bullying among youth is recognized as a serious concern. The most common approach to measuring bullying is through self-report surveys which ask students a series of questions related to different types of bullying victimization. However prior studies have shown that the question order may affect the responses given. The question-order effect though has not been tested with regard to bullying with middle school students. Using a randomized experiment (n = 5951), we investigated the question-order effect and show that changing the sequence of questions can result in bullying prevalence rates that can be higher by 45%. As a result, several bullying surveys may be under reporting victimization prevalence rates.

Authors

• Francis Howard Lim Huang, University of Missouri

• Dewey G. Cornell, University of Virginia