Bully Index

Bully Index (B-Index)

Student Bullying is unprovoked conscious and aggressive action by one or more students intended to achieve physical or psychological dominance over others through intimidation or threat.

Teacher Protection is the extent to which teachers try to protect students from intimidation and bullying.

The Bully Index (BI) is a brief descriptive measure that gauges teacher perceptions of the social milieu of the campus in terms of student-student and teacher-student interactions; it has two dimensions: Teacher Bullying and Teacher Protection.

Reliability and Validity of Bully Index

The Bully Index is a 13-item Likert-type scale that measures the degree to which the students in a school are perceived as bullying other students and the extent to which teachers protect students from bullying. The Bully Index yields two scores–a bullying score and a teacher protection score; the higher the score, the greater the degree of bullying and teacher protection respectively.

The reliabilies of the two subscales of the index are reasonably high: .96 for the bullying and .73 for teacher protections (Smith & Hoy, 2004). The construct validity has also been supported in a factor analytic study (Smith & Hoy, 2004).

Administering the Bully Index (BI):

The BI is best administered as part of a faculty meeting. It is important to guarantee the anonymity of the teacher respondent; teachers are not asked to sign the questionnaire and no identifying code is placed on the form. Most teachers do not object to responding to the instrument, which takes about five minutes to complete. It is probably advisable to have someone other than the principal in charge of collecting the data. What is important is to create a non-threatening atmosphere where teachers give candid responses..

Scoring Key

The responses vary along a six-point scale from “Strongly Disagree (1)” to “Strongly Agree (6).”

Step 1: Score items all items, except 3 and 7 as:
Strongly Disagree =1 to Strongly Agree =6

Step 2: Reverse score items 3 and 7; score as:
Strongly Disagree =6 to Strongly Agree =1

Step 3: Compute an average school score for each item: that is, calculate a school average for each item by summing all the teachers’ scores for that item and dividing by number of teachers in that school who responded to that item. Some teachers occasionally skip items; make sure you divide by the number of teachers in the school who responded to that item.

Step 4: Compute the school score for Student Bullying:
Add the following items: 1,2,5,6,8,9,10,12. The sum is the school score for Student Bullying.

Step 5: Compute the school score for Teacher Protection:
Add the following items: 3,4,7,11,13. The sum is the school score for Teacher Protection. The higher the scores, the greater the degree of student bullying and teacher protection, respectively.

Click here to download a copy of the Bully Index

Reference:

Smith, P. A. & Hoy, W. K. (2004). Teachers’ perceptions of student bullying: A conceptual and empirical analysis. Journal of School Leadership, 14, 308-326.