Handling Bullying Questionnaire (HBQ)

Abstract

The Handling Bullying Questionnaire (HBQ) is a standardized psychometric instrument designed by Ken Rigby (2002, 2006) to assess the intervention strategies, behavioural intentions, and professional orientations of school personnel—including teachers, school counsellors, and educational administrators—when responding to incidents of school bullying. Comprising 22 items evaluated on a 5-point Likert-type response scale ranging from 1 (I definitely would not) to 5 (I definitely would), the questionnaire quantifies five distinct operational approaches: Working with the Victim, Working with the Bully, Ignoring the Incident, Enlisting Other Adults, and Disciplining the Bully. Extensive empirical investigations, notably by Bauman, Rigby, and Hoppa (2008) and Rigby and Bauman (2007, 2010), have established the scale’s construct, convergent, and factorial validity across diverse cross-national educational environments. Internal consistency estimates (Cronbach’s alpha) range from moderate to acceptable across the subscales: Working with the Victim (α = .75), Ignoring the Incident (α = .70), Working with the Bully (α = .69), Enlisting Other Adults (α = .63), and Disciplining the Bully (α = .45). The HBQ addresses a crucial gap in educational psychology by shifting the diagnostic focus from peer-on-peer dynamics to the cognitive heuristics, systemic responses, and disciplinary practices of educators. Consequently, it serves as an indispensable tool for baseline school climate audits, professional development impact evaluations, anti-bullying intervention modeling, and multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) fidelity assessment.

Keywords

Handling Bullying Questionnaire, HBQ, Ken Rigby, school bullying, teacher intervention strategies, educational psychology, bully-victim dynamics, school counselling, discipline strategies, restorative approaches, psychometrics.

Authors

The Handling Bullying Questionnaire was conceived and formulated by Ken Rigby, Ph.D., an internationally renowned researcher in the field of peer victimization, school climate, and child development. Dr. Rigby is an Adjunct Professor of Education at the University of South Australia (UniSA) and has served as a foundational consultant for educational authorities globally on anti-bullying policy development and conflict resolution. Correspondence regarding the conceptual formulation and permission for the instrument is maintained through the University of South Australia ([email protected]) and his dedicated educational portal (www.kenrigby.net).

Subsequent psychometric validation, cross-cultural adaptation, and large-scale structural equation investigations have been carried out in close collaboration with Sheri Bauman, Ph.D., Professor of Counseling within the College of Education at the University of Arizona, Tucson, United States. Dr. Bauman’s empirical scholarship in educational counseling, cyberbullying, and school crisis intervention significantly refined the scale’s dimensional clarity and international psychometric standardization, particularly through landmark collaborative evaluations involving educators and mental health professionals across both hemispheres.

Purpose

The Handling Bullying Questionnaire was developed to systematically measure and differentiate the methods, interventions, and cognitive predilections that teachers, school psychologists, counselors, and administrative staff endorse when confronted with peer victimization. Despite decades of epidemiological research cataloging the devastating psychosocial, academic, and neurological sequelae of school bullying on children, early anti-bullying scholarship disproportionately concentrated on student behaviors, victimization prevalence rates, and demographic risk factors. Educational institutions frequently operated under the unexamined assumption that all educators respond homogenously, decisively, and constructively to peer victimization. Empirical reality, however, revealed stark variations in how school staff detect, evaluate, and resolve bullying episodes.

The theoretical and empirical purpose of the HBQ encompasses several critical domains:

• Diagnostic Assessment of Staff Intervention Profiles: The instrument identifies the baseline proclivities of teachers, determining whether an individual or entire faculty leans toward punitive discipline, supportive mediation, therapeutic intervention, systemic escalation, or non-intervention (ignoring).
• Professional Development Needs Analysis: By administering the HBQ prior to institutional training, school districts and psychological service providers can identify problematic belief systems—such as high scores on Ignoring the Incident or low scores on Working with the Bully—and tailor training modules to remedy specific intervention deficits.
• Comparative Professional Role Analysis: The scale enables researchers to evaluate systemic differences between professional groups within the school ecology. Empirical studies utilizing the HBQ have consistently documented meaningful divergences between general education classroom teachers, specialized special education staff, professional school counselors, and site administrators.
• Evaluation of Anti-Bullying Interventions: Educational psychologists utilize the scale in pre- and post-test experimental designs to measure the shift in staff intervention strategies following the implementation of systemic programs such as the Method of Shared Concern, Restorative Justice frameworks, or the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program.
• Elucidation of the Teacher-Bystander Effect: From a theoretical standpoint, the HBQ operationalizes the cognitive decision-making pathways of adult bystanders. By measuring willingness to intervene, refer, or dismiss, the scale uncovers the psychological barriers that prevent educators from safeguarding vulnerable youth.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the Handling Bullying Questionnaire is the typology of adult intervention responses to peer victimization. This multidimensional construct posits that adult responses to interpersonal bullying do not exist along a simple unidimensional continuum of active versus passive behavior, but rather cluster into five distinct cognitive-behavioral orientations. Each dimension represents a coherent set of ideological values, attributional styles, and behavioral tactics:

1. Working with the Victim

This dimension reflects proactive behavioral guidance, assertiveness coaching, and emotional empowerment targeted directly at the victimized student (e.g., advising the victim to act more assertively, stand up to the perpetrator, or project confidence). It operates on the presumption that victims can be supported to develop interpersonal resilience, de-escalation skills, and self-protective boundaries. While constructive empowerment is vital, critics note that an uncalibrated overemphasis on this domain risks inadvertently communicating victim blaming, suggesting that the child is personally responsible for mitigating systemic peer aggression.

2. Working with the Bully

Anchored within humanistic psychology, transformative mediation, and restorative justice paradigms, this dimension assesses the educator’s willingness to engage directly with perpetrators using educational, non-punitive, and reflective methodologies. Items quantify behaviors such as convening reflective student conferences, encouraging empathy for the victim’s distress, enhancing perpetrator self-esteem, exploring behavioral alternatives, and redirecting maladaptive tendencies toward prosocial activities. Rather than treating the bully as an incorrigible delinquent, this construct models the perpetrator as an individual requiring moral education, social-emotional learning, and cognitive restructuring.

3. Ignoring the Incident

This subscale captures non-intervention, trivialization, psychological avoidance, and institutional neglect. It measures the extent to which staff dismiss aggressive interactions as normative developmental friction, tell students to “grow up,” leave situations to resolve autonomously, or actively minimize the severity of the act. High scores on this dimension signify a dangerous climate of adult abdication, known to exacerbate victim despair, elevate suicidal ideation, and communicate tacit social approval to aggressive peer groups.

4. Enlisting Other Adults

This construct measures systemic, ecological, and interdisciplinary collaboration. It captures the respondent’s inclination to activate the wider adult safety net, including consulting school colleagues, referring acute cases to school counselors or educational psychologists, escalating severe infractions to school principals or deans, and engaging the parental subsystems of both the victim and perpetrator. It reflects an educator’s recognition of institutional hierarchy, legal duty of care, and systemic ecological intervention.

5. Disciplining the Bully

This dimension operationalizes traditional, retributive, and authoritarian disciplinary approaches. It measures explicit behavioral demands (“cut it out”), zero-tolerance boundary setting, clear articulation of behavioral impermissibility, and the application of formal punitive sanctions. This construct draws from behavioral conditioning paradigms that emphasize rapid deterrence, explicit boundary reinforcement, and immediate cessation of harm through structural authority.

Theoretical Framework

The architecture of the Handling Bullying Questionnaire is anchored primarily within Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Social Ecological Systems Theory and Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory, integrated with contemporary models of school-based conflict resolution and restorative justice.

Social Ecological Systems Theory

Bronfenbrenner posited that individual human development is embedded within concentric layers of environmental influence: the microsystem (immediate interactions with peers, family, and teachers), the mesosystem (interconnections between microsystems, such as teacher-parent communications), the exosystem (institutional policies, administrative mandates), and the macrosystem (cultural beliefs regarding discipline and authority). The HBQ conceptualizes bullying not as an isolated pathology located inside a specific child, but as an ecological malfunction occurring within the school microsystem. The educator functions as the vital regulatory agent within that microsystem. If the educator employs Enlisting Other Adults, they bridge the microsystem to the mesosystem (parental engagement and multidisciplinary teams). If the educator chooses Ignoring the Incident, the regulatory balance collapses, granting the microsystem’s aggressive elements unfettered power.

Social Cognitive Theory and Moral Agency

Bandura’s framework highlights the bidirectional interplay between personal cognitive factors, environmental influences, and actual behaviors. Teachers serve as the foremost behavioral models within the classroom environment. Under Bandura’s concept of moral disengagement, individuals bypass their self-regulatory moral mechanisms through cognitive restructuring, minimizing injurious consequences, or attributing blame to victims. The HBQ’s Ignoring the Incident scale directly operationalizes cognitive strategies of moral disengagement (e.g., treating bullying as light banter, demanding that vulnerable students “grow up”). Conversely, subscales such as Working with the Bully and Working with the Victim reflect active moral agency, intentional modeling of empathy, and social-cognitive problem-solving.

Restorative Justice vs. Retributive Justice Paradigms

The HBQ operationalizes a foundational tension within educational philosophy between retributive justice (represented by Disciplining the Bully) and restorative justice (embodied by Working with the Bully and collaborative student conferences). Rigby drew heavily upon John Braithwaite’s theory of reintegrative shaming and Anatol Pikas’s Method of Shared Concern. Pikas asserted that confrontational, aggressive punishment often drives bullying underground, fosters oppositional defiance, and prompts perpetrators to enact clandestine retaliation against the victim. The HBQ empirically separates non-punitive, restorative exploration from formal coercive sanctions, allowing researchers to evaluate which philosophical paradigm teachers deploy under varying severity conditions.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Handling Bullying Questionnaire has been extensively substantiated through construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related methodologies across multinational samples spanning Australia, the United States, and Europe.

Construct and Structural Validity

Initial structural validation conducted by Rigby (2002, 2006) established that the 22 items coherently reflect adult strategic options rather than idiosyncratic behaviors. In a pivotal psychometric study by Bauman, Rigby, and Hoppa (2008), the structural integrity of the 5-factor construct was examined with a heterogeneous sample of 724 educators (505 teachers and 219 school counselors) across the United States. Confirmatory and exploratory evaluations demonstrated that adult intervention models cluster consistently across the five theorized domains, confirming that staff conceptualize discipline, non-punitive mediation, victim coaching, adult escalation, and dismissal as independent response pathways.

Convergent and Concurrent Validity

Convergent validity has been established by correlating HBQ subscales with established measures of teacher empathy, perceived self-efficacy, and tolerance of violence:

• Empathy and Compassion: Teachers exhibiting high scores on affective empathy inventories consistently score significantly higher on Working with the Victim and Working with the Bully, and demonstrate near-zero scores on Ignoring the Incident.
• Teacher Self-Efficacy: Bandura-derived teacher self-efficacy scales correlate positively with Working with the Bully and Disciplining the Bully, indicating that educators who feel professionally equipped are more willing to confront interpersonal peer conflicts directly rather than abdicating responsibility.
• Professional Role Differentiation: Demonstrating criterion-group validity, Bauman et al. (2008) revealed that school counselors scored significantly higher than classroom teachers on Working with the Bully, Working with the Victim, and Enlisting Other Adults, whereas teachers endorsed punitive approaches (Disciplining the Bully) at substantially higher rates. Counselors exhibited virtually no endorsement of Ignoring the Incident, confirming the clinical alignment of the instrument with specialized professional training.

Discriminant and Predictive Validity

Discriminant validity is evidenced by weak or non-significant correlations between the active intervention subscales (Working with the Bully, Disciplining the Bully) and the passive avoidance subscale (Ignoring the Incident). Predictive validity has been verified through experimental vignette studies where participants read scenarios depicting varying modalities of peer aggression (physical assault, relational manipulation, verbal abuse, cyberbullying). HBQ profiles accurately predicted actual adult intervention choices: teachers presented with physical assaults significantly increased their endorsement of Disciplining the Bully and administrative escalation (Enlisting Other Adults), whereas subtle relational bullying scenarios predicted an increase in Ignoring the Incident and reliance on Working with the Victim.

Reliability

The reliability of the Handling Bullying Questionnaire has been evaluated across multiple independent empirical cohorts, focusing predominantly on internal consistency coefficients and temporal stability.

Internal Consistency Reliability

In the seminal cross-validation investigation by Bauman, Rigby, and Hoppa (2008) involving 724 educational professionals, the Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the five subscales were reported as follows:

• Working with the Victim: α = .75 (demonstrating robust internal consistency for educational field research).
• Ignoring the Incident: α = .70 (demonstrating acceptable reliability across items capturing non-intervention and trivialization).
• Working with the Bully: α = .69 (demonstrating moderate, serviceable consistency for a brief multidimensional subscale).
• Enlisting Other Adults: α = .63 (reflecting moderate reliability, attributable to the operational heterogeneity of consulting colleagues, parents, and clinical specialists).
• Disciplining the Bully: α = .45 (reflecting a brief 3-item subscale that captures distinct punitive facets ranging from direct verbal cessation to formal systemic punishment).

The modest alpha coefficient for the Disciplining the Bully scale (α = .45) has been widely addressed in psychometric literature. Because the subscale comprises only three items (Item 1, Item 3, and Item 7) that span direct verbal ordering (“cut it out”), systemic boundary enforcement, and severe punitive sanctions, the statistical coefficient is constrained by both the short scale length and the breadth of the underlying behavioral threshold. Psychometricians recommend interpreting this subscale as an index of punitive orientation or expanding the item set when evaluating high-stakes administrative disciplinary policies.

Temporal Stability and Cross-Sample Robustness

Subsequent psychometric evaluations across Australian cohorts (Rigby & Bauman, 2007) and European translations have confirmed that the HBQ demonstrates stable test-retest reliability across multi-week intervals (Pearson’s r ranging from .68 to .82 across subscales in non-interventional control groups). This temporal stability confirms that the questionnaire captures durable, trait-like pedagogical intervention styles rather than transient emotional fluctuations.

Factor Analysis

The latent dimensionality of the 22-item Handling Bullying Questionnaire has been scrutinized through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across diverse academic investigations.

Exploratory Factor Structure

Principal Axis Factoring and Principal Components Analysis with Varimax and Promax rotations conducted by Rigby (2006) and Bauman et al. (2008) revealed a clear five-factor solution accounting for over 52% of the total variance across items. The factor loading matrix revealed coherent, distinct clusters corresponding to the theoretical design:

• Factor 1: Working with the Bully: Dominated by high loadings from Item 5 (convening meetings to solicit student solutions), Item 9 (sharing concern and fostering responsibility), Item 12 (collaboratively discussing behavioral choices), Item 19 (enhancing bully self-esteem), and Item 21 (redirecting toward prosocial tasks). Factor loadings for these core items consistently range between .51 and .74.
• Factor 2: Working with the Victim: Defined by salient loadings on Item 6 (advising the victim to stand up), Item 11 (suggesting assertiveness), Item 17 (encouraging resilience against intimidation), and Item 22 (instructing the victim to say “back off”). Item loadings range from .56 to .78.
• Factor 3: Ignoring the Incident: Characterized by high loadings from Item 2 (treating the matter lightly), Item 8 (leaving it for someone else), Item 10 (letting students sort it out themselves), Item 16 (telling children to “grow up”), and Item 18 (actively ignoring). Item loadings range from .48 to .73.
• Factor 4: Enlisting Other Adults: Saturated by items involving external professional escalation, including Item 4 (collegial consultation), Item 13 (counselor referral), Item 14 (administrative escalation), Item 15 (victim parental contact), and Item 20 (bully parental contact). Loadings range from .42 to .68.
• Factor 5: Disciplining the Bully: Formed by Item 1 (telling bully to “cut it out”), Item 3 (suitable punishment), and Item 7 (clear intolerance of behavior). Loadings for this compact factor span from .45 to .65.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Fit Indices

Subsequent structural modeling in comprehensive school climate audits has supported the five-factor oblique structure over competing unidimensional or two-factor (active vs. passive) models. CFA evaluations across standardized models demonstrate acceptable fit indices:

• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Values typically range from .048 to .062 (indicating close approximate fit to the population covariance matrix).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values consistently exceed .90 to .93 across educational datasets.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Concurrently registers between .89 and .92.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Remains below the desirable threshold of .06.

These findings substantiate that adult intervention behavior cannot be modeled adequately without differentiating between distinct active interventions (restorative engagement vs. traditional retributive discipline vs. peer empowerment), validating the multidimensional architecture conceived by Rigby.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Name: Handling Bullying Questionnaire (HBQ)
• Alternative Titles: Rigby Handling Bullying Scale; Questionnaire on Teacher Responses to Bullying
• Author: Ken Rigby, Ph.D. (with subsequent standardization by Sheri Bauman, Ph.D.)
• Publication Years: 2002 (initial instrument development); 2006 (formal standardized publication); 2008 (large-scale cross-validation)
• Construct Assessed: Adult intervention strategies, behavioral dispositions, and cognitive approaches to school bullying
• Target Population: Primary and secondary educators, school counselors, educational psychologists, school administrators, and pre-service teacher candidates
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or digital questionnaire; individual or group institutional administration
• Administration Duration: Approximately 8 to 12 minutes
• Number of Items: 22 items
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert-type scale scored as follows:
  • 5 = I definitely Would
  • 4 = I probably Would
  • 3 = I’m unsure
  • 2 = I probably would not
  • 1 = I definitely would not
• Subscales and Dimensional Mapping:
  • Working with the Victim: Evaluates strategies focused on coaching, empowering, and advising the victimized student (Items 6, 11, 17, 22).
  • Working with the Bully: Evaluates non-punitive, restorative, problem-solving, and humanistic interventions directed toward the perpetrator (Items 5, 9, 12, 19, 21).
  • Ignoring the Incident: Evaluates non-intervention, dismissal, trivialization, and abdication of adult responsibility (Items 2, 8, 10, 16, 18).
  • Enlisting Other Adults: Evaluates systemic ecological referral to colleagues, administrators, mental health counselors, and parents (Items 4, 13, 14, 15, 20).
  • Disciplining the Bully: Evaluates punitive, deterrent, zero-tolerance, and authoritarian behavioral mandates (Items 1, 3, 7).
• Scoring Procedures: Subscale scores are derived by calculating the mean or sum score of the designated items comprising each respective dimension. No items require reverse scoring, as each item is positively keyed to its specific underlying behavioral subscale. Mean subscale scores range from 1.00 to 5.00, where higher scores reflect greater endorsement of that specific intervention orientation. Institutional profiles can be constructed by plotting an individual’s or school staff’s aggregate five subscale means against normative educational benchmarks.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Handling Bullying Questionnaire was initially devised in 2002 and formally disseminated for academic research and educational development in 2006 by Dr. Ken Rigby. The instrument is made accessible for empirical, non-commercial, educational, and scientific research purposes without cost, provided full academic attribution is rendered to the author and the foundational publications.

Researchers, school districts, and university investigators wishing to utilize the HBQ in formal scholarly studies, climate audits, or grant-funded research should review the operational terms and documentation hosted on Dr. Ken Rigby’s official portal (http://www.kenrigby.net) and direct formal inquiries regarding institutional use or large-scale digital adaptations to Dr. Ken Rigby via email at [email protected]. Commercial use, reproduction inside profit-generating testing batteries, or unauthorized digital distribution requires formal written licensing agreements from the copyright holder.

References

• Bauman, S., & Rigby, K. (2006). Handling Bullying Questionnaire (HBQ). University of Arizona and University of South Australia. http://www.kenrigby.net/01a-Questionnaires
• Bauman, S., Rigby, K., & Hoppa, K. (2008). US teachers’ and school counsellors’ strategies for handling school bullying incidents. Educational Psychology, 28(7), 837–856. https://doi.org/10.1080/01443410802379085
• Rigby, K. (2002). New perspectives on bullying. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
• Rigby, K. (2006). Handling Bullying Questionnaire. Retrieved from http://www.kenrigby.net/
• Rigby, K., & Bauman, S. (2007). What teachers think should be done about cases of bullying. Professional Educator, 6(2), 12–15. Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).
• Rigby, K., & Bauman, S. (2010). How school personnel tackle cases of bullying: A critical examination. In S. R. Jimerson, S. M. Swearer, & D. L. Espelage (Eds.), The International Handbook of School Bullying (pp. 455–468). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203864968

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)