The Brother-Sister Questionnaire: Psychometric assessment and discrimination of well-functioning from dysfunctional relationships.

The purpose of this investigation was to document the utility of the 35-item Brother-Sister Questionnaire (BSQ), which could be used to discriminate dysfunctional from wellfunctioning sibling relationships. Two studies are reported. In the first, 202 college students were selected by self-report on prescreening questions to represent four groups: (a) high sibling-conflict victims, (b) high sibling-conflict perpetrators, (c) those with reciprocal conflict, and (d) those with low levels of conflict (a comparison group). Group classification was validated by scores on the Conflict Tactics Scale (M. A. Straus, 1979). Ss' responses to the BSQ about sibling relationships were subjected to factor analysis with varimax rotation, confirming four reliable factors: Empathy, Boundary Maintenance, Similarity, and Coercion. In the second study, 50 students who self-reported that they were abused by a sibling and 50 comparison Ss completed the BSQ. With the four factors as predictors, discriminant analyses correctly classified 82% of the abused group and 81% of the comparison group. Given these results, the BSQ is proposed as a self-report measure capable of characterizing four distinct qualities in sibling relationships. Violence between siblings has been shown to occur more frequently than either violence between parents and children or violence between spouses (Gelles & Straus, 1988; Steinmetz, 1981). In a large college student sample, 28% of the students surveyed rated the level of conflict with their siblings as much higher than in other families they knew (Graham-Bermann, Cutler, Litzenberger, & Schwartz, 1994). In a previous study of another large sample of college students, Graham-Bermann and Cutler (1992) reported that 8% felt that they had been abused by a sibling during childhood. In these two studies, Graham-Bermann and her colleagues found that individuals from high-conflict sibling dyads experienced greater levels of anxiety and depression, as well as lower levels of self-esteem, than did those from sibling dyads having less conflict. Finally, college students who felt abused by a sibling reported a lower sense of self