Normative Beliefs About Aggression

• Dataset Code: CyH
• Scored Data: NBAySCc
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Abstract

Guerra and Huesmann (1992) developed the Normative Beliefs about Aggression measure (NOBAG) as a measure for assessing a child's beliefs about the acceptability of specific aggressive behaviors in specific contexts. The 20 items vary along the dimensions of severity of provocation, severity of response, gender of provoker, and gender of responder. The first eight items are brief scenarios where a child (A) is verbally aggressive to another child (B); these scenarios vary by the gender of the children involved (same sex and opposite sex). Following each of these scenarios, the interviewer first asks the respondent if it is wrong or okay for B to respond with verbal aggression (screaming) toward A and then asks the respondent if it is wrong or okay for B to respond with physical aggression (hitting).

This measure is first scored by rescoring each item in order to correspond with the scoring system used by Guerra and Huesmann. The rescoring occurs as follows:

Ten items whose wording includes "it is wrong" are reverse-scored in the measure itself, still using the same scale so that 1 = Really Wrong and 4 = Perfectly OK.

Seven derived subscales (some with overlapping items) are created by calculating the mean of the items included in the subscale. For each subscale, means range from 1 to 4, with higher means indicating greater endorsement of the acceptability of aggression. In addition to these subscales, logarithmic transformations are calculated for each subscale to help deal with skewness. All of the subscales showed a high level of internal consistency for both the control and the normative samples.

Analysts should note that four of the subscales showed a fairly normal distribution for both the normative and control samples. These subscales were Approval of Retaliation, Approval of Retaliation with a Weak Provocation, Approval of Retaliation with a Strong Provocation, and Approval of Retaliation against Males. Both the normative and the control samples were positively skewed for the Total Approval of Aggression, General Approval of Aggression, and Approval of Retaliation against Females.

One subscale, General Approval of Aggression, indicated a floor effect for both the normative and the control samples. 85% of the normative sample and 83% of the control sample had responses score between 1.0 and 1.5 (4.0 was the highest possible score).

In addition, analysts should note that six of the logarithmic subscales were normally distributed for both the normative and control samples. Only one subscale, General Approval of Aggression LOG, was positively skewed for both samples.

Keywords: Aggressive Behavior, Verbal Aggression, Anger, Gender.

Administration History

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