National Middle-School Survey: School Violence and Beliefs About Self, Others, and the
Future

Scott Miller
 Assent Script for Middle-School Participants

 We're from the University of Florida and we're doing a project at your school.
The project is for students in middle school, and your principal and teachers have given
us permission to do it at School. We're hoping that you'll decide to help us out.

 The way you can help us out is by answering some questions about
yourself-what you're like, how you feel or think about different things. The questions
are on this survey [tester holds up copy], and you answer them on your own without
anyone seeing your answers. We'll give out the survey here in a few minutes, and it
should take about an hour to finish [if pilot testing reveals a different session length this
wording will be adjusted accordingly].

 We can't tell you in advance about all the questions on the survey, but we'll try to
give you some idea of what they're like. Some of them are about things about yourself
that you're happy or perhaps not so happy about-for example, what you feel you're
good at and what you feel you're not so good at. Some of them are about your relations
with other people-for example, how you feel about other kids, or about your teachers or
parents. And some of them are about things that sometimes worry kids at school-for
example, the problem of bullies or school violence. In each case, we just want to know
what you honestly think.

 There are several things that are very important to understand before we start.
One is that you don't have to do this. You can decide not to do it before we even start. Or
if you start and decide you don't want to do it that's OK too. Nothing bad will happen to
you if you decide not to do the survey-for example, your teachers won't be mad or give
you bad grades. If you decide not to do it [Here, we will describe whatever alternative
activity the teachers have decided is appropriate for nonparticipants.]

 Another thing that's important is that you don't have to answer any question that
you don't want to answer. If there's anything that you just don't want to think about or
don't want to give an answer to you can leave it out. Now, if there's ever simply
something that you don't understand you should raise your hand and ask us. We want
you to skip a question only if you really don't want to answer it.

 One last thing is very important. All the answers you give on the survey will be
confidential. This means that no one will ever know how you answered. Your teachers
won't know, your parents won't know, and those of us doing the project won't know. We
won't know because you won't put your name on the survey. Also, all the copies of the
survey are the same, so no one can tell which one you got. Finally, when you're done you
drop your survey in this box, and when we take them out later we'll have no way to know
which one is yours. We set it up this way for a couple reasons. One is that what we're