Measurement of antisocial behaviour in early adolescence and adolescence: psychometric properties and substantive findings

Abstract

Background/Aims This article describes the development of a new self-report instrument, the

Bullying Experiences of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service-users: A Pilot Survey

“…Olweus (1994) quoted correlations of 0.4 -0.6 between self-reports of bullying experiences and independent peer ratings. Bendixen and Olweus (1999) found significant positive correlations between the Olweus Bully/Victim Questionnaire 'victim' behaviour items and a separate peer rejection scale, as well as between 'bully' behaviour items and independent measures of antisocial behaviour.…”

Development and Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Non‐Violent and Violent Offending Behavior Scale (NVOBS)

“…Potential items were selected by reviewing existing measures of delinquency (which included items relating to general violence and non-violent offending) and partner violence and, in order to include a broad range of both violent and non-violent criminal acts (e.g., Bendixen & Olweus, 1999;Borjesson, Aarons, & Dunn, 2003;Dahlberg, Toal & Behrens, 1998;Huizinga, Esbensen, & Weiher, 1991;Mak, 1993;Moffitt & Silva, 1988;Moffitt et al, 1997;Straus, 1979;Straus, Hamby, Boney-McCoy, & Sugarman, 1996). Initially, 119 items were selected from the literature review and a pilot study was conducted to investigate the prevalence of the behaviors in women as violent and criminal scales tend to be developed on men.…”

Deviant behavior variety scale: development and validation with a sample of Portuguese adolescents

“…Bendixen and Olweus 1999;Junger-Tas et al 2003;Smith and McVie 2003), and a Portuguese self-reported frequency scale measuring adolescents' deviant behavior (see Sanches et al 2012). Items had different severity levels and pertained to 11 categories: thefts, alcohol and drugs consumption, verbal and physical aggression, possession of weapons, vandalism, truancy, driving without a license, assault, use of public transport without paying, lies and defiance of authority, and selling drugs.…”

“…Although variety scales are considered a reliable and valid measure and have been used for long (e.g. Bendixen et al 2003;Bendixen and Olweus 1999;Caspi et al 1994;Junger-Tas and Marshall 1999;Weerman and Bijleveld 2007), they seem to be gaining an increasing relevance recently, given the growing number of publications using this kind of scale (e.g. Brown and Jennings 2014;Cohn et al 2012;Donner et al 2014;Flexon, and Meldrum 2013;Hirtenlehner et al 2014;Intravia et al 2012;Malouf et al 2014;Megens and Weerman 2012;Meldrum et al 2012;Peck 2013;Trinkner et al 2012;Yu et al 2013).…”

“…The second one was based on the seriousness of the infractions and is a two-factor model composed by minor and serious infractions (which correspond to high and low prevalence rates respectively), that is also quite common, namely in research using variety scales (e.g. Bendixen and Olweus 1999;Peck 2013;Weerman and Bijleveld 2007). Although the factorial structure of most deviance scales is organized around different categories of infractions (e.g.…”