Teasing and Bullying Surveys

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Overview of the Teasing and Bullying Surveys

I hope the Teasing and Bullying Surveys (TABS-S and TABS-C) and Workplace Bullying Surveys (WBS and WBS-S) encourage and enable educators, clinicians, employers, and researchers to reduce school and workplace teasing and bullying and their toxic effects.

I have developed four surveys plus a supplemental Questions for Class Discussion:

Teasing and Bullying Survey: School Version (TABS-S): For schools (student use).

Questions for Class Discussion: To be used with the TABS-S.

Teasing and Bullying Survey: Clinical Version (TABS-C): For clinicians.

Workplace Bullying Survey (WBS): For employers.

Workplace Bullying Survey: School Version (WBS-S): For schools (staff use).

Teasing and Bullying Survey: School Version (TABS-S)

The Teasing and Bullying Survey: School Version (TABS-S) may take about 10-25 minutes for 4th grade students. The TABS-S is designed to measure prevalence of bullying, attitudes toward school, and impact of intervention programs. The TABS-S is taken anonymously so as to encourage student candor and does not include questions about child abuse, sexuality, or other topics of potential concern to parents. These factors may help principals decide whether or not to seek parental permission. The anonymity eliminates worry about child abuse reporting. The TABS-S can provide an instrument for schools, school systems, and researchers to measure the prevalence of teasing and bullying according to self-categorizations as bullies, victims, bully-victims, and non-bullies/non-victims and to measure their attitudes toward school, feelings of safety, impact on grades, impact on school attendance, and impact of intervention programs.

The TABS-S is at the Fourth Grade reading level on a word-by-word basis and according to “The Lexile Framework for Reading” (710L). In the few instances of words beyond the Fourth Grade reading level I have tried to overcome the difficulty by adding one or two simple synonyms so that the child is likely to be able to read at least one of the words. The TABS-S can be used with students in grades 4 through 12 in elementary, middle, and high schools. In some schools, third grade students may be able to complete the instrument with a little assistance.

A reliability and validity study was conducted using data from 5111 students from 33 schools: 49.6% were male and 50.4% were female, with a mean age of 13.8 years (SD = 2.4 years).

Reliability coefficients obtained using Cronbach’s Coefficient Alpha (KR-20) were as follows:

Validity of the Victim score was studied by comparing mean scores for students who responded positively and negatively to the statement “I think of myself as someone who gets teased/bullied by others.” For the comparison, p<0.001.

Validity of the Bully scales was studied by comparing mean scores for students who responded positively and negatively to the statement: “I think of myself as someone who teases/bullies others.” For all comparisons, p<0.001.

Benefits of the TABS-S

The experience of completing the instrument may raise a student’s awareness, thus activating what I term the “squirm effect,” which may well start to lower the school’s teasing and bullying level even before any organized curriculum or other reduction program. Thus, measuring the impact of such programs would best be done by administering the instrument on two occasions, at least one month apart, before initiating the program. This would allow the program evaluation to be prepurged of some of the artifactual inflation due to the squirm effect.

The teacher or consultant who administers the TABS-S can invite students to contact a designated person in the school if the experience of completing the instrument aroused awareness of being teased or bullied a lot or of doing a lot of teasing or bullying – awareness which may lead some students to want to discuss individually or in a group their involvement in teasing and bullying. These possibilities may encourage schools to set up some appropriate ways this can be accomplished.

Purposes of the TABS-S

	To help researchers, teachers, school psychologists, and administrators learn how much teasing and bullying goes on in a school.
	To help children and school staff clarify the nature and severity of teasing and bullying.
	To help children and school staff measure the frequency of teasing and bullying.
	To accumulate normative data on teasing and bullying.
	To relate student liking their school, happiness with classes, and with school outside of classes to students’ involvement either on the giving or the receiving end of teasing and bullying – or both.
	To discern how much school teasing and bullying upset students, how safe students feel at school, how much school teasing/bullying causes them worry or fear, how much teasing/bullying harms their grades, and how much students believe teasing and bullying is stimulated by good grades or showing a lot of interest in school work, and to relate these perceptions to students’ involvement either on the giving or the receiving end of teasing and bullying – or both.
	To elicit students' self-ratings about their grades, so as to have this additional reference point for deeper understanding of their other responses.
	To obtain information about whether students have ever skipped school because of teasing or bullying and, if yes, how many days in the past month.
	To relate all these variables to how many good friends a student has.
	To learn what proportion of students have been teased or bullied in the past month, by how many students, and what proportion have told any adult(s) – and which adults.
	To learn what proportion of students have teased or bullied in the past month and how many students they have teased or bullied.
	To develop a picture of how many times students see teasing or bullying in a school day.
	To identify “hot spots” for the occurrence of teasing and bullying so that school administrators can take this information into account when briefing staff or others about what locations need particular attention.
	To garner information about student perceptions of what the school does about teasing and bullying – in both prevention and response.
	To garner information about students’ perceptions of what they do when they see teasing and bullying; closing the instrument with this question is designed to spark the “squirm effect.” The hope is that this effect will be like that of a pebble dropped in a smooth pond: the ripples can go out a long way.
	To have a roughly hierarchical scale -- containing positive and negative behaviors -- potentially useful in school violence reduction programs as well as in clinical and educational research.
	To make possible the inclusion of teasing and bullying as a descriptive and quantifiable category in characterizing school atmosphere.
	To provide a concise yet broad and sensitive inventory for measuring changes in teasing and bullying, i.e. for conducting outcome evaluations by repeated administrations. The TABS-S should be administered once or, far better, twice before the start and once after the completion of any special program(s) or other action(s) designed to reduce teasing and bullying. I suggest a two-week interval between administrations. The reason for my strong recommendation that the TABS-S be administered twice before the implementation of any intervention is elaborated further in the description of the "squirm effect" presented below.
	Explore with a school or with an individual child to what extent teasing and bullying may be reduced just by taking the TABS-S. Such a decrease could result from experiencing the "squirm effect," a probable consequence of an increase in awareness of self and of others, and the shock of self-recognition. In other words, taking the TABS-S may spur self-awareness, self-monitoring, and self-control.

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Questions for Classroom Discussion

A supplemental Questions for Classroom Discussion, has been developed as a means of gathering data on initial attitudes and as a springboard for discussion which can be used by teachers with their students after the TABS-S is administered. The Questions for Classroom Discussion consists of four questions: (1) Why do some students get teased more than others?, (2) Why do some students tease or bully more than others?, (3) How well various responses will work if someone is teased or bullied, and -- where applicable -- (4) How the student reacts when teased or bullied.

The student should use the two-page form to provide their own individual answers to these questions before the class discussion. This will provide the students familiarity with and engage their interest in the questions. It is important that the discussion leader be aware that many of the proposed answers to why some students get teased or bullied more than others and why some students tease or bully more than others are simply repetitions of common views about these matters. These particular views may or may not be accurate in particular instances and, even if they are accurate, they may be interpreted as "blaming the victim." Thus, the discussion leader must use consummate tact in explaining this concept, helping the students be less ready to blame, and yet not condemning anyone for having such thoughts. They could point out that even if in some instances there is a grain of truth in these thoughts, they may fall far short of providing a complete understanding of the person who is getting teased or bullied or of the person who does the teasing or bullying.

Online Request Form | About the TABS-S | TABS Bibliography | TABS-S Statement to Students | Usage Fees

Teasing and Bullying Survey: Clinical Version (TABS-C)

The Teasing and Bullying Survey: Clinical Version (TABS-C) can provide an instrument for clinicians to measure the prevalence of teasing and bullying according to bullies, victims, bully-victims, and non-bullies/non-victims and to measures their attitudes toward school, feelings of safety, impact on grades, impact on school attendance, and impact of intervention programs.

The TABS-C may take about 20-40 minutes, depending on grade level. The TABS-C is at the Fourth Grade reading level on a word-by-word basis and according to “The Lexile Framework for Reading” (720L). In the few instances of words beyond the Fourth Grade reading level I have tried to overcome the difficulty by adding one or two simple synonyms so that the child is likely to be able to read at least one of the words. The TABS-C can be used with students in grades 4 through 12 in elementary, middle, and high schools. In some schools, third grade students may be able to complete the instrument with a little assistance.

Purposes of the TABS-C

	To help the clinician assess the range and frequency of teasing and bullying as these pertain to that particular child and his/her distress level at both the time of occurrence and now.
	To help the clinician become aware of instances in which a child's distress level is increasing rather than decreasing over time. This highlighting can guide the clinician in eliciting further information about the child's thoughts and feelings. This can result in the clinician becoming aware of an increasing sense of hopelessness and helplessness or of growing anger and destructive thoughts or plans thus, exploring escalating emotional distress may assist the clinician in helping the child learn to defuse the accumulating distress and plan constructive responses to the situation and strategies for reducing their occurrence.
	To help identify and reduce the repeated negative incidents about which the child is more distressed -- which may be eroding the child's self-esteem, self-confidence, ability to concentrate, and willingness or even willfulness to be at school. These chronic stressors may even erode a child's trust in others and pleasure in life.
	To enable the clinician to use all the additional information gathered before and after the behavioral items in order to better understand the student’s situation, and associated thoughts and feelings, since such understanding may help in gaining rapport and building a useful intervention approach.
	Explore with a school or with an individual child to what extent teasing and bullying may be reduced just by taking the TABS-C. Such a decrease could result from experiencing the "squirm effect," a probable consequence of an increase in awareness of self and of others, and the shock of self-recognition. In other words, taking the TABS-C may spur self-awareness, self-monitoring, and self-control.

Online Request Form | About the TABS-S | TABS Bibliography | TABS-S Statement to Students | Usage Fees

Reading Level of the TABS-S and TABS-C

The construction of the initial version in 2000 was guided by the following:

Taylor, S. E., Frackenpohl, H., & White, C. E. (1989). EDL core vocabularies in reading, mathematics, science, and social studies: A revised core vocabulary. Austin, Texas: Steck-Vaughn.

The EDL Core Vocabularies was used to eliminate words higher than the fourth grade reading level and replace them with words at or below the fourth grade level. In a few instances, we were unable to find suitable substitutes; in those cases we used two or three synonyms in the hope that fourth graders would know at least one of them.

In view of the many additions after the 2000 version culminating in the 2006 version, I wanted another check on the reading level. At that point I learned of a fairly recent development known as the Lexile Framework®. Its development was begun in 1984, funded by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Development. The work has been conducted at MetaMetrics®, which continues to refine the Lexile Framework. Thus, Lexile measures reflect more than twenty years of research. They are based essentially on word rarity and sentence length – two well-established predictors of text comprehension difficulty. A text at a given Lexile level means that students at the corresponding grade level can be expected to comprehend 75% of that text.

The Teasing and Bullying Survey – School Version (TABS-S) was run through the Lexile Analyzer and found to be at the 710 Lexile level (710L) of text difficulty. Similarly the Teasing and Bullying Survey – Clinical Version (TABS-C) was found to be at the 720L level of text difficulty. According to “The Lexile Framework for Reading,” both are, indeed, at the 4th grade reading level.

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Workplace Bullying Survey (WBS)

The Workplace Bullying Survey (WBS) is taken anonymously so as to encourage employee candor and can provide an instrument for employers and researchers to measure the prevalence of workplace bullying according to many specific bullying behaviors experienced – as recipient or originator, self-categorizations as bullies, victims, bully-victims, and non-bullies/non-victims and to measures their attitudes toward their job, feelings of safety at work, impact on work performance and attendance, and impact of workplace bullying intervention programs.

The WBS does not ask for the employee's name but does ask for the company name, the employee's job title/position and gender, the length of time the employee has worked at the company, the length of time the employee has worked in their department or group, the employee's ethnicity, and the employee's highest level of education completed.

After a brief demographics section is a series of questions concerning the employee's overall satisfaction with their job, co-workers, supervisors, and work environment. Following this are questions asking about the extent and ways in which workplace bullying has affected the employee. This is followed by questions that ask about the frequency of bullying - both as victim and as perpetrator.

The next section of the WBS consists of paired items: The odd numbered items ask about having been bullied and the even numbered items ask about having bullied someone else. For each item the respondent checks either "Yes" or "No" to indicate whether it (the action described in that item) happened at work in the past month. The last pair of items taps the employee's self concept regarding whether he/she is bullied by others and whether he/she bullies others.

The final section of the WBS asks the employee about whether he/she has talked with anyone about being bullied in the workplace, and, if so, with whom. Following this is a list of "Hot Spots" which allows the employee to indicate how often they or others are bullied at each of various locations in the workplace. Next come three auxiliary questions concerning the employee's perception about what their company does about workplace bullying, since hopelessness about the company’s proactive and reactive efforts may contribute to cynicism or even to desperate behavior. After that is a question about what the employee does upon seeing bullying in the workplace.

Online Request Form | About the TABS-S | TABS Bibliography | TABS-S Statement to Students | Usage Fees

Workplace Bullying Survey: School Version (WBS-S)

The Workplace Bullying Survey (WBS-S) is designed specifically for use with school administrative staff, teaching staff, and other staff. The WBS-S is taken anonymously so as to encourage employee candor and can provide an instrument for schools and researchers to measure the prevalence of workplace bullying according to many specific bullying behaviors experienced – as recipient or originator, self-categorizations as bullies, victims, bully-victims, and non-bullies/non-victims and to measures their attitudes toward their job, feelings of safety at work, impact on work performance and attendance, and impact of workplace bullying intervention programs.

The WBS-S does not ask for the employee's name but does ask for the school district name, the employee's job title/position (teaching, administrative, or other staff), gender, the length of time the employee has worked at the school(s), the length of time the employee has worked in schools in general, the employee's ethnicity, and the employee's highest level of education completed.

After a brief demographics section is a series of questions concerning the employee's overall satisfaction with their job, co-workers, supervisors, and work environment. Following this are questions asking about the extent and ways in which workplace bullying has affected the employee. This is followed by questions that ask about the frequency of bullying - both as victim and as perpetrator.

The next section of the WBS-S consists of paired items: The odd numbered items ask about having been bullied and the even numbered items ask about having bullied someone else. For each item the respondent checks either "Yes" or "No" to indicate whether it (the action described in that item) happened at work in the past month. The last pair of items taps the employee's self concept regarding whether he/she is bullied by others and whether he/she bullies others.

The final section of the WBS-S asks the employee about whether he/she has talked with anyone about being bullied in the workplace, and, if so, with whom. Following this is a list of "Hot Spots" which allows the employee to indicate how often they or others are bullied at each of various locations in the workplace. After this the employee is asked to estimate the percentage of students at the school who think of themselves as someone who (1) gets teased and bullied by others and (2) teases and bullies others. Next are two questions: (1) “When you see teasing/bullying among students how confident are you that you understand how it started?” and (2) “When you hear about teasing/bullying among students how confident are you that you understand how it started?”

Finally, there are a series of three auxiliary questions concerning the employee's perception about what their employer does about workplace bullying, since hopelessness about the employer’s proactive and reactive efforts may contribute to cynicism or even to desperate behavior. After that is a question about what the employee does upon seeing bullying in the workplace.

Online Request Form | About the TABS-S | TABS Bibliography | TABS-S Statement to Students | Usage Fees

Analysis and Scoring

Data entry and reporting service for all surveys is available at a cost of $1.75 per survey for data entry and $250.00 per school for reporting service (includes a narrative summary plus charts and graphs of descriptive statistics).

Online Request Form | About the TABS-S | TABS Bibliography | TABS-S Statement to Students | Usage Fees

Usage Fees

Sample copies of the TABS-S, TABS-C, WBS, and WBS-S can be obtained free of charge through this website by completing an online request form. Sample copies have a watermark stamp on the face of each page. If you would like to obtain an unmarked version of any of these surveys a usage fee of $50 per survey type is required. For more information please click here.

Online Request Form | About the TABS-S | TABS Bibliography | TABS-S Statement to Students | Usage Fees

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