PEER GROUP’S NORMATIVE BELIEFS ABOUT BULLYING ROLES
This measure was devised for the present study. Normative beliefs of peer
group were measured by asking participants the following task: “In this
table there are several behaviors that can be observed in young people.
Say what your peer group would think if someone of the group behaved
like that with other peers.” This operationalization is in agreement with
the definition of normative beliefs as expectancies of what referents (in
this case the peer group) think the person should or should not do (Fishbein
& Ajzen, 1975). Several behaviors were listed and participants evaluated
them on a 5-point Likert-type scale: 1 = very bad, 2 = bad, 3 = more
or less, 4 = well, and 5 = terrific. Eleven of the behaviors referred to the
role of bully (a = .91) with four behaviors were taken from the
Participants Role Scale (Salmivalli et al., 1996) for bully role and we introduced
seven (see Table 2) new behaviors. Four of the behaviors referred
to the role of defenders and were taken from Participants Role Scale
(Salmivalli et al., 1996) for defender role (a = .69). Principal components
analysis of all the items with varimax rotation revealed the presence of
two components with eigenvalues greater than 1, explaining 36.28% and
17.57% of the variance (53.84% in total). The factor loadings presented a
simple two-factor structure, with the items related to the bully role loading