Peer Victimisation Scale (PVS)

Abstract

The Peer Victimisation Scale (PVS; Neary & Joseph, 1994) is designed to assess victimization from bullying behaviours at school. It consists of 6-forced choice items, three of which relate to victimization from negative physical actions (e.g., hit and pushed, picked on, bullied) and three relating to victimization from negative verbal actions (e.g., teased, horrible names, laughed at). The rationale for the development of the scale was to attempt to overcome some of the inherent problems with assessing such behaviours in schools. For example, Austin and Joseph (1996) report that whilst many children are reluctant to admit to being a victim of such negative behaviours (e.g., Rigby & Slee, 1990; Smith, 1991; Tattum, 1988), most questionnaire studies of bullying behaviours are conducted on a class basis (e.g., Whitney & Smith, 1993) which may inadvertently lead to socially desirable responding from the children once the nature of the study has been made known to the children. The reasoning for this is that despite assurances of anonymity from the researcher, any bully in the class group may subtly manipulate the situation and impede any disclosure of victimization. As such, the argument is that the issue of bullying and victimization should not be made known to the class. To further this aim, the Peer Victimisation Scale was designed by Neary and Joseph (1994) to be immersed within Harter?s (1985) 36-item Self-Perception Profile for Children (SPPC) so as to reduce the saliency of the items concerning victimization. Responses are scored according to the scoring instructions for scoring the SPPC sub-scales (i.e., sum of six items divided by six).