The ABCs of Bullying
Addressing, Blocking, and Curbing School Aggression

Module 4: Screening and Assessment - Page 7 of 22

Assessment Techniques

There are two main techniques that can be used in an assessment: the indirect assessment and the direct assessment.

Indirect Assessment

This is sometimes referred to as an "informant" assessment. It relies heavily on structured interviews (mostly in the form of a questionnaire) with students, teachers, parents, guardians, or other adults who have direct responsibility for the student.ref The Inventory of Wrongful Activity is another example of a questionnaire. There are many commercially available assessments and questionnaires that can help a school or mental health professional conduct an indirect assessment. Questionnaires also may be given to teachers to conduct a school-wide assessment of problems such as bullying, substance abuse, and violence. One example is Handling Bullying: A Staff Questionnaire.

The National School Safety Center has developed a short checklist of characteristics of youth who may be at risk for causing school violence. These characteristics serve to alert school administrators, teachers, and other support staff of the needs of students, especially those with emotional or behavioral issues.

Direct Assessment

Direct assessment involves observing and recording situational factors surrounding a problem behavior (e.g., antecedent and consequent events). The observer, usually an evaluator, examines the student in the setting where the problem behavior is most likely to occur. The evaluator records this data using an Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence (ABC) approachref and creates a matrix or scatter diagram to identify patterns of relationship among variables. Direct assessment requires observation over a longer period.

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