New Turkish Tool Measures Bullying Against Autistic and ADHD Teens

Bullying is one of the most damaging and persistent experiences a young person can face at school, and for neurodivergent youth the risk is substantially elevated. Adolescents with autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or both conditions together are repeatedly shown in international research to be victimized by peers at rates far above those of their neurotypical classmates. Yet measuring that victimization accurately has long been a methodological headache, because most bullying questionnaires were designed for and tested on general population samples. A research team in Türkiye has now addressed part of that gap by adapting the Assessment of Bullying Experiences (ABE) Questionnaire into Turkish and rigorously testing whether it works for the very population that needs it most: autistic adolescents, adolescents with ADHD, and those with co-occurring autism and ADHD.

The study, published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, was led by Nihal Serdengeçti of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Clinic at Haydarpaşa Research and Training Hospital in Istanbul, together with colleagues from Düzce University, Amasya Research and Training Hospital, Seyrantepe Hamidiye Etfal Training and Research Hospital, and Istanbul University-Cerrahpaşa. The team recruited 253 participants across three Turkish cities, a sample deliberately structured to capture the diagnostic diversity that real clinics encounter. It included 47 typically developing controls, 89 adolescents with ADHD, 57 autistic individuals, and 58 young people with co-occurring autism and ADHD. That fourth group matters scientifically: many studies treat autism and ADHD as separate categories, but in clinical practice the two conditions overlap frequently, and youth with both diagnoses may face compounded social vulnerabilities that neither single-diagnosis group fully represents.

Diagnoses were not taken at face value. The researchers administered the Childhood Autism Rating Scale to assess autism severity and the Kiddie Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia, a structured clinical interview widely regarded as a gold standard for psychiatric diagnosis in children and adolescents, to confirm ADHD and other conditions. Parents also completed the Conners Parent Rating Scale, providing an additional standardized index of ADHD symptoms. This layered diagnostic approach strengthens the study because the validity of any group comparison rests on the accuracy of the diagnostic groupings themselves. The bullying data were collected with the Turkish adaptation of the ABE, alongside the Olweus Bullying Questionnaire, a classic instrument in the field that served as a benchmark measure.

The ABE Questionnaire itself is a relatively recent addition to the measurement toolkit. It was developed and validated specifically for neurodivergent youth by Morton and colleagues, with the explicit goal of capturing forms of victimization that generic bullying scales may miss. Its structure covers four domains: relational and verbal bullying, physical bullying, cyberbullying, and bullying related to personal features, the last of which includes victimization targeting characteristics such as neurodevelopmental differences. This last subscale is particularly important for autistic and ADHD youth, who are often bullied precisely because of how their brains and behavior differ from peer norms. A questionnaire that cannot distinguish disability-targeted victimization from general peer conflict risks underestimating the problem or mischaracterizing its nature.

Adapting a psychological instrument across languages is a delicate technical exercise, not a simple translation task. Cross-cultural assessment researchers have long warned that literal translations can introduce bias and destroy measurement equivalence, meaning that a scale may no longer measure the same construct in the new language. The Turkish team therefore followed established psychometric procedures, and the Olweus questionnaire had already been adapted into Turkish in earlier work, giving the researchers local precedent and a comparison instrument. The central empirical question was whether the ABE’s original four-factor structure, established in the English-language validation, would replicate in a Turkish-speaking clinical and community sample of neurodivergent adolescents.

The answer, by conventional statistical standards, was an emphatic yes. Confirmatory factor analysis, the technique used to test whether a hypothesized set of underlying dimensions fits observed response data, supported the original four-factor structure with exceptionally strong fit indices. The ratio of chi-square to degrees of freedom was 0.48, the root mean square error of approximation was 0.005, the comparative fit index reached 0.999, the Tucker-Lewis index 0.998, and the goodness-of-fit and adjusted goodness-of-fit indices came in at 0.984 and 0.980 respectively. The standardized root mean residual was 0.064. Fit values this close to perfection are rare in psychometric research, where indices above 0.95 for the CFI and TLI and below 0.06 for the RMSEA are typically considered evidence of good model fit. In plain terms, Turkish adolescents appeared to experience the questionnaire’s items as reflecting the same four distinct dimensions of bullying that the original developers intended.

Reliability, the second pillar of psychometric quality, was equally robust. Internal consistency, measured by Cronbach’s alpha, quantifies how coherently a set of items measures a single construct, with values above 0.70 generally deemed acceptable and values above 0.90 considered excellent. The relational and verbal bullying subscale achieved an alpha of 0.903, the physical bullying subscale 0.778, the cyberbullying subscale 0.784, and the bullying related to personal features subscale 0.835. The total scale reached an alpha of 0.936, indicating that the instrument as a whole hangs together remarkably well. Item-level analyses further supported the measure’s robustness, suggesting that individual questions performed their diagnostic roles rather than dead weight dragging down the scale. For clinicians, this means the Turkish ABE can be trusted both as a comprehensive total score and as separate subscale profiles showing which forms of victimization a particular adolescent endures.

The broader scientific context explains why this validation matters beyond Turkish borders. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health documented elevated school bullying across children and adolescents with neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions, and national survey data from the United States have linked bullying victimization to heightened rates of anxiety and depression specifically among autistic and ADHD youth. Longitudinal studies add a temporal dimension: ADHD symptoms predict later victimization in within-person analyses, and peer victimization in turn feeds forward into anxiety, self-harm risk, and, in some research, even psychotic experiences in early adolescence. Cyberbullying adds another layer, with studies showing that autistic traits and ADHD-related impulsivity and frustration intolerance shape involvement in online victimization as well. None of these research programs can advance in a language community without a validated local instrument, which is precisely the bottleneck the Turkish team has removed.

The clinical implications are equally concrete. Child and adolescent psychiatry clinics in Türkiye can now quantify victimization in their neurodivergent patients with an instrument whose psychometric credentials match the diagnostic tools they already use, such as the Turkish versions of the K-SADS and the Conners scales. A reliable victimization profile could flag adolescents who need anti-bullying interventions, inform school placement decisions, and serve as an outcome measure in intervention studies. Because the ABE was designed with neurodivergent respondents in mind, its language and structure are better suited to capturing how these youth actually experience peer aggression, including subtle relational forms and disability-targeted harassment that generic scales often overlook. The study received no external funding, was approved by the Istanbul University-Cerrahpaşa Scientific Research Ethics Committee, and was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the authors report no conflicts of interest.

There are, of course, limits inherent in any single validation study. The sample of 253, while well composed diagnostically, was recruited from clinical and community settings in three cities, and further work could test the measure in broader school-based samples, examine test-retest stability over time, and evaluate how the Turkish ABE performs in longitudinal designs tracking victimization and mental health outcomes. Group comparison analyses in the study pointed toward differences across diagnostic groups, consistent with the international literature showing heightened risk in neurodivergent youth, though the primary contribution here is the measurement instrument itself rather than new prevalence estimates. Still, the core achievement stands: a four-factor structure replicated with near-perfect fit, excellent internal consistency across every subscale, and a validated Turkish-language tool now available for research and clinical practice. For a population whose suffering at the hands of peers has been documented for decades but measured with instruments built for someone else, that is a meaningful step forward, and one that researchers studying bullying among neurodivergent youth in Türkiye and beyond are likely to pick up quickly.

Subject of Research: Turkish-language validation of a bullying victimization questionnaire for autistic youth and youth with ADHD

Article Title: Turkish Validation of Assessment of Bullying Experiences Questionnaire for Neurodivergent Youth

Article References: Turkish Validation of Assessment of Bullying Experiences Questionnaire for Neurodivergent Youth. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-026-07568-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10803-026-07568-x

Keywords: bullying, autism, ADHD, neurodivergent youth, psychometrics, questionnaire validation, peer victimization, cyberbullying, Turkish adaptation, confirmatory factor analysis, internal consistency, adolescent mental health