Measuring bullying victimization through a closed ended question and a validated measure in a population of tunisian adolescents: What difference does it make?

INTRODUCTION: School bullying is a serious problem among tunisian children and adolesent. In our every day practice, we see a considerable number of suicide attempts among bullying victims. Our study tries to provide more information on this phenomenon, in order to organize efficient preventtion measures. OBJECTIVES: Measuring the prevalence of bullying victimization in the town of Sousse-Tunisia Comparing the prevalence found through a validated measurement tool and a closed end question METHODS: It is a cross-sectional study among a sample of 1127 adolescents, aged 12 to 17 years old. The adolescents were divided in two groups the first group, composed of 527 adolescents, answered a closed end (yes/no) question “Have you been a victim of Bullying”; the second group, composed of 600 adolescents, responded to the “adolescent peer relation instrument”. RESULTS: The first group was composed of 48% of boys and 52% of girls with a mean age of 13,24 ± 0,96. The second group was composed of 50% of boys and 50% of girls with a mean age of 13.76 ±1.37. We found a bullying victimization prevalence of 11% for the first group versus 95.1% for the second group. For both groups we didn’t find a significant difference in the prevalence of bullying victimization according to sociodemographic factors except the higher family income that was associates to less bullying victimisation for the first group (p=0,04) CONCLUSIONS: The high prevalence of bullying victimization we found using a validated measurement is alarming in terms of the urgency of interventions to prevent bullying in schools.