Question order affects the measurement of bullying victimization among middle school students

Bullying among youth is recognized as a serious student problem, especially in middle school. The most common approach to measuring bullying is through student self-report surveys that ask questions about different types of bullying victimization. Although prior studies have shown that question-order effects may influence participant responses, no study has examined these effects with middle school students. A randomized experiment (n = 5,951 middle school students) testing the question-order effect found that changing the sequence of questions can result in 45% higher prevalence rates. These findings raise questions about the accuracy of several widely used bullying surveys.