Reactive Aggressors

Anger Response Inventory (ARI)

The qualitative ARI questionnaire used in this study was modified from Tangney, Wagner, Marschall and Gramzow’s Anger Response Inventory (ARI; 1991), which originally comprised 23 scenarios intended to exhibit common situations that might provoke anger. Only two scenarios, one for female students and the other for male students, were modified (e.g. by changing "brother" to "classmate").

This modified ARI is designed to assess the extent of a child’s anger, the response and the understanding of later outcomes in the face of anger. The scenes that are used are all provocative when encountered in everyday life. Participating students must try to imagine the situation described by the interviewer and answer five questions according to each scenario as follows:

1. "Will you be angry under this scenario?" (assessing the extent of the student’s anger that the scenario provoked);

2. "Do you want to fight back against your classmates / deal with the situation / forgive or tolerate your classmates?" (assessing his or her intentions);

3. "What will you actually do?" (assessing which aggressive and nonaggressive action he or she will be responding with);

4. "Why would you do this?" (assessing his or her cognitive perception of him/herself, the other(s) and the situation);

5. "In retrospect, what would be the long-term consequence based on your action as mentioned earlier?" (assessing the ability of the participant to consider the long-term consequences of his / her / other(s) actions and the situation).

Outcome Expectancy

Source: Outcome Expectancy Vignettes (Asher, Chung, & Hopmeyer, 1995; Crick & Ladd, 1990; Hubbard, Dodge, Coie, Cillessen, & Schwartz, 1999; Perry et al., 1986; Slaby & Guerra, 1988)

Participating students are asked to imagine a situation described by the interviewer. After this, the interviewer asks about the consequence to the student resulting from his or her aggression in specific situations. There are three types of scenarios: reactive, proactive (tool) and proactive (mass bullying). The following are inquired into:

1. The consequences of using aggressive behaviour to handle a problem
2. The perception of others towards you
3. The perception of surrounding on-lookers
4. Your own feelings
5. The expectation for becoming hurt or punished

Social Problem Solving

Source: Social Problem Solving Assessment is modified from the Interpersonal Problem Solving Analysis (IPA; Marsh, 1982)

Based on the gender of the participating schoolchildren, the interviewer describes a social problem about peer relationships, and asks six further questions as follows:

1. "What is the problem with that?" (How they analyse and define a situation)
2. "What solutions can you think of to solve the problem?" (Brainstorming possible solutions)
3. "Which solution that you mentioned is the best?" (Selecting the best solution)
4. "How about the second-best?" (Selecting back-up)
5. "What consequences will result from your solutions?" (Expected consequence)
6. "How do you feel after the consequences?" (Emotional response)

Aggressive Victims

Due to the pre-test / post-test design of this study, the students responded to the three scenarios before and after the intervention. The first scenario was obtained from the Home Interview with Child (Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1990), which was originally designed to measure the attribution tendencies and aggressive responses of schoolchildren. It was then modified in this study to create an appropriate assessment tool to understand aggressive victims. The second scenario was obtained from a study on social information processing in children (Camodeca, Goossens, Schuengel, & Terwogt, 2003). The project researcher designed the third scenario based on the characteristics of aggressive victims. The first and second scenarios depict neutral interpersonal relationship settings, whereas the third involves an incident of campus bullying. The students’ responses and the reasons behind them allow the researcher to assess whether students are aggressive victims by identifying characteristics such as hostile attribution, angry responses and rationalisation of their aggression when facing bullying.

Pure Victims

Participating students are asked to respond to four different hypothetical scenarios derived from the Home Interview with Child (Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1990), originally designed to measure attribution tendencies and the aggressive responses of schoolchildren. The measure was modified in this study to create an appropriate assessment tool to understand pure victims. The responses of each student and the reasons underpinning them allow the researcher to assess whether the student is a pure victim by identifying his or her characteristics, including attribution tendency, social withdrawal, anxious responses and self-blaming.