Copyright Malvin Porter, Jr. 2010 - acumen - The University of ...

with peers, intellectual ability and bully/victim group membership, with children’s self-report
assessments of what they say they would do when faced with peer victimization and how they
would explain their action choices. Studies have found that indirect teacher report and child
direct assessments are highly intercorrelated and statistically significant (Cabell, Justice, Zucker,
& Kilday, 2009). Cabell et al. (2009) reviewed a number of studies that indirect assessments of
elementary school children’s skills have often been used as a methodological measure of
children’s academic abilities and social competencies. The benefits of using the indirect CBS
measure, the proxy item about children’s intellectual ability and the CSBS and CSEQ measures
to assign children’s bully/victim group membership included time efficiency, requiring only a
few minutes to respond to a list of questions or statements about a specific child without
requiring extended periods of testing and elimination of child fatigue and distractibility, which
can undermine the validity and reliability of behavioral testing. While indirect teacher
assessments may offer more in-depth developmental information on children as compared to
more diagnostic assessments of specific competencies as cited in other studies by Cabell et al.
(2009), the results in this study were non-conclusive. Further research needs to focus on whether
or not indirect teacher ratings of children’s intellectual, behavioral competencies and group
membership assignments in the context of bully victimization adequately predict children’s
behavior and reasoning abilities, which add value to future studies of children’s emergent social
development (e.g., whether a child appears to have mastered a prosocial interpretation and
problem-solving in the context of bully victimization). Considering the wealth of research that
found that teachers and parents provide the most robust and reliable reports of children’s social
behavior, the results of the current study suggests methodological problems with the design and
use of CBVS measure. Another possibility for the discrepancy between the CBS and CBVS may
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