Forms of Bullying Scale: Evidence of construct validity of the brazilian version

Abstract

This study aimed to validate the Forms of Bullying Scale (FBS) to the Brazilian context, gathering evidence of validity and accuracy. Participants were 377 elementary students from two schools from João Pessoa-PB. Their average age was 12.8 years (SD=1.44), mostly female (52.4%), having answered the FBS and sociodemographic questions. A two-factor structure was corroborated by a confirmatory factor analysis (χ2/df=2.34, GFI=0.90, RMSEA=0.06), which was invariant according to participants- gender (δRMSEA<0.01). Adequate reliability coefficients were observed for the two factors: Perpetration (a=0.80 and CR=0.81) and victimization (a=0.83 and CR=0.83), which also showed evidence of convergent and discriminant validity. In conclusion, this scale gathering adequate psychometric parameters, justifying its use in the Brazilian context.