Assessing elementary students' bullying and related social behaviors: Cross-informant consistency across school and home environments

The authors examined the cross-informant consistency and level of agreement of ratings on the Social Skills Improvement System (SSIS) Bullying Subscale. They explored the effectiveness of using this set of multi-informant (i.e., teacher, parent, and student) social skills rating scales with an established record of yielding reliable and valid scores to define and measure perceptions about elementary students who bully others. The study examined a sample of 112 elementary children from the SSIS national standardization sample who each received a rating regarding the frequency of their bullying behaviors by a teacher, parent, and the student himself/herself. The results showed similar findings to the existing research. Although demonstrating some overall consistency, bullying behavior scores do differ between students and across informants supporting the importance of understanding informant variance. Students showed a difference in bullying scores across informants with scores on average increasing between informants. Teacher and parent reports provided lower ratings on bullying behavior than those provided by student self-report with overall ratings remaining consistent across informants. Higher levels of consistency existed on ratings by parents and students than by teachers and students. Teachers gave higher ratings than parents did, in particular for males. An examination of study limitations and future research concludes the report.