Douglas C. Smith

Development of the Multidimensional School Anger Inventory for males

Drawing upon research which conceptualizes anger as a multidimensional construct including three associated components—anger experience (affective anger), hostility (anger cognitions), and anger expression (aggression, assertion, and withdrawal)—the preliminary development of a Multidimensional School Anger Inventory (MSAI) for adolescents is described. This scale is a modification and extension of the School Anger Inventory and was developed to assess the affective, cognitive, and expressive aspects of anger using items having school-relevant content. Data were collected through personal interviews of 202 males from three different schools: School 1 included general education students in a parochial school in grades 6 through 12; School 2 included students attending general education or mainstreamed special education classes at a public intermediate school; and School 3 included students participating in a public day treatment program for youths with serious emotional disturbance. Scale development is discussed focusing on item development and scale refinement through item and factor analyses. Four factors were identified that accounted for 43.3% of the common variance. Anger Experience, Cynical Attitudes, and Anger Expression were identified as major clusters with the anger expression items bifurcating into Destructive Expression and Positive Coping components. The resulting 31-item scale has strong psychometric qualities and appears to have promise for use in research, treatment planning, and outcome evaluations.

Effects of Pessimism and Explanatory Style on Development of Anger in Children

In this project 102 students in their first year of high school responded to questionnaires assessing their levels of dispositional optimism and pessimism, explanatory style and anger in relation to the school setting. A Partial Least Squares (PLS) path analysis examined relationships among these variables. Male students with helpless explanatory styles were more likely to experience higher levels of anger intensity and were more likely to resort to destructive school behaviour. Male students with a pessimistic disposition were also more likely to report higher levels of school hostility and destructive school behaviour. For females, helpless explanatory style and dispositional pessimism were related but the overall level of anger intensity did not appear to relate to destructive and aggressive behaviour. Overall the results suggest that anger management programs focusing on cognitive restructuring and related strategies can be a powerful means for reducing aggressive behaviours at school. The content and specific focus of such programs, however, may vary depending upon participants gender and other considerations.

An Examination of the Reliability, Data Screening Procedures, and Extreme Response Patterns for the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey

Abstract This article explores psychometric characteristics of the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey (YRBS), one of the most widely used instruments to assess the prevalence of violent and other high-risk behaviors in secondary school settings. Response patterns were analyzed for a subset of 414 youths who indicated that they had carried a weapon to school six or more times during the preceding 30 days, and were compared to a matched sample of youths randomly selected from the 13,610 participants in the 2001 national administration of the YRBS. Results indicated that extreme responders to the weapon-carrying item were considerably more likely than their counterparts to respond in an extreme fashion to all YRBS items, including risk items pertaining to school (e.g., physical fights on school property) and outside school (e.g., alcohol consumption) factors, as well as positive health behaviors (e.g., healthy eating habits). Overall, the results suggest an ex-treme response bias among some participants that may impact the validity of the YRBS instrument. More specifically, presence of this response bias may inflate estimates of the prevalence of school violence and related concerns. These findings are discussed in light of the need to carefully examine individual response patterns on future administrations of the YRBS in an effort to ensure maximum instrument utility.

Further Development of the Multidimensional School Anger Inventory: Construct Validation, Extension to Female Adolescents, and Preliminary Norms

The responses of 1,166 students in Grades 9 through 12 to the Multidimensional School Anger Inventory (MSAI) were used in four analyses to further examine and extend its psychometric properties. In Analysis 1, the original four-factor structure (Anger Experience, Hostility, Destructive Expression, and Positive Coping) of the MSAI was validated with a subsample of males and extended to a sample of females. Analysis 2 used another nonoverlapping subsample to further improve the MSAI by exploring the utility of adding exploratory items to the two anger expression subscales (Destructive Expression and Positive Coping). Based upon this analysis, four items were added to Destructive Expression and one item was added to Positive Coping. A principal components analysis once again replicated the four-factor structure. Analysis 3 was completed using a third nonoverlapping subsample of males and females to cross-validate the four-factor structure of the refined MSAI. Given the robustness of the MSAI factor structure across nonoverlapping subsamples and its comparability for males and females, Analysis 4 combined data for all 1,166 students to develop preliminary norms for the MSAI. Test-retest data for 508 students found stability coefficients to be moderate (.56 to .62) across the four subscales. Uses of the MSAI for school-based assessment and program evaluation and avenues for further development are discussed.