” These impairment scores were generally lower than we expected for the types of bullying each reported. It may have been that youth were confusing the degree of impairment with frequency of bullying events and impairment. To ensure that youth are using the full range of scores, it might be necessary to provide reminders to respondents that they should be thinking about the degree of impairment (once a bullying event has occurred) rather than an averaged amount of impairment

over a fixed period of time. The MBIS also appeared sensitive to change as the three youth with more favorable diagnostic and symptom outcomes also reported lower posttreatment MBIS scores. selleckchem The one youth with poorer outcomes reported an increase in bullying impairment. Future research will want to recruit larger samples and conduct formal psychometric evaluation (e.g., reliability, validity testing), but the MBIS may be a promising tool to evaluate functional impairment experienced from bullying. One important area for future development would be to enhance

how a group like GBAT-B addresses bullying in sexual-minority youth (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender). In our pretreatment interviews, two of the five youth reported being teased with homophobic slurs. It was unclear to us if either of these students identified as a sexual minority or was questioning his sexual identity. In deciding whether click here to introduce this topic explicitly in the group, we struggled with several considerations. First, research shows that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth experience higher levels of victimization and report more emotional and behavioral adjustment difficulties than heterosexual youth (Williams, Connolly, Pepler, & Craig, 2004). We recognized the strong impact that such attacks could have on any student, even if these youth did not identify as sexual minorities. Second, the authors’ interest in developing this program was directly tied to related contemporaneous social-political issues. In Sitaxentan 2010, Tyler Clementi, an undergraduate student

at Rutgers University in New Jersey, committed suicide after he was bullied because of his sexual orientation. Clementi’s death brought local and national attention to the special needs of sexual-minority youth and helped galvanize support for amendments to the New Jersey Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights Act in 2011. The group leaders and supervisor weighed the pros and cons of various ways to incorporate the topic of homophobic slurs. We decided not to introduce information into the group that was reported in intake interviews unless the group members introduced the topics themselves. We felt this was important to protect each member’s privacy and to enable each student to “introduce” themselves without past labels. Neither boy ever introduced the topic of homophobic slurs to the group.