How Does Guilt, Influence and Attitudes Effect the Role We Play in Bullying? The Self-Perception Measure

Variations in perceived feelings of guilt, influence, and attitudes can alter a person's behavior. The following article focused on the development and evaluation of a measure that explored how these self-perceptions affect the behaviour of the various participant roles involved in bullying situations. The participant roles explored included the bully, assistant, reinforcer, victim, defender, and outsider. The initial measure started with 30-items; 10-items for each measure (guilt, influence, and attitudes). The principal component analysis helped reduced the total number of items to 15 with guilt, influence, and attitudes all broken up into two components. Internal guilt measured the respondent's guilt based on their own actions, external guilt measured the level of guilt based on the presence of others. Internal influence measured the respondent's perceived influence on others and external influence measured the influence of others on the respondent's role. Internal attitudes measured a person's attitudes towards bullying and external attitudes measured a person's perceived disassociation between their attitudes and their role. The results showed acceptable to good reliability on all measures except internal influence. Future researchers exploring participant roles associated with bullying can use this measure to better understand the motives behind specific behaviors.