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

Aggressive) and Justification Choice subscales (Justice/Fair, Prosocial/Care,
Aggressive/retribution) were taken from examples in the literature. See Appendix C.
The CBVS consists of four bully victimization scenarios: two from the perspective of a
victim who is being bullied and two from the perspective of a bystander who witnesses bullying.
Of the two victim stories, one is about physical bullying and one about relational humiliation
bullying. Of the two bystander stories, one is about physical bullying and one about relational
social exclusion bullying. Each story is designed to get children to imagine what the main
character in the story might do. Each story involves either physical or relational bullying.
The following is an example of one of the stories written for the CBVS.
Josh’s Story
(Bystander – Physical Bullying)
Josh watches as mean kids pick on Charlie.
Charlie, who is small for his age, is just like most other boys in his school. Charlie gets
picked on every day by some bigger kids. Charlie often gets pushed or bumped on
purpose while waiting in the class lines. Once when the teacher was busy with another
student, a mean kid poked Charlie with a sharp pencil. It really hurt. Another time after
school, Charlie was tripped so hard that he fell down and tore his shirt. The mean kids
think it is fun to pick on Charlie.
Initially, eight stories were reviewed by teachers and school administrators (n=18) of
older elementary school-aged children. Teachers made suggestions for improving the realism and
content validity of the stories based on their classroom observations of children’s bully/victim
experiences. Teachers made suggestions for rewriting the stories so that the stories would be on a
4 th -grade reading comprehension level. For the revised stories, Flesch-Kincaid reading levels,
computed by the Microsoft Word Spelling and Grammar function, ranged from 2.4 (2 nd grade, 4 th
month) to 4.3 (4 th grade, 3 rd month).
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