Cyberbullying: a systematic review of research, its prevalence and assessment issues in Spanish studies

Abstract

Research on cyberbullying started at the beginning of the 21 st century and the number of studies on the topic is increasing very rapidly. Nevertheless, the criteria used to define the phenomenon and evaluation strategies are still under debate. Therefore, it is still difficult to compare the findings among the studies or to describe their prevalence in different geographic areas or time points. Thus, the current systematic review has been conducted with the objective of describing the studies on the phenomenon in Spain taking into account its different definitions and evaluation strategies in relation to its prevalence. After conducting systematic searches and applying the inclusion criteria, 29 articles reporting the results of 21 different studies were included. It was found that the number of studies on the topic in Spain is growing and that most of the definitions include the criteria of repetition, intention, and power imbalance. It was also found that timeframes and cutoff points varied greatly among the studies. All the studies used selfreports with one-item or multi-item instruments. The prevalence also varied depending on the evaluation strategies and when assessed with multi-item instruments it was about twice as high as when assessed with one-item instruments. It is suggested that specific instruments should be chosen depending on the research questions posed in each investigation and that it could be useful to unify the criteria for further advancement of the field.

Psychometric properties of the triangulated version of the European Bullying Intervention Project Questionnaire: Prevalence across seven roles

“…Our results also show that 28.5% of the total sample had experienced victimization and 14.9% had perpetrated aggression. These data fell within the range reported by Modecki et al () and Zych, Ortega‐Ruiz, and Marín‐López (), although it is not exactly transferrable due to the differences in the criteria employed, and because we allowed for more overlapping roles. We suggest that many data from previous studies and reviews (Brochado, Soares, & Fraga, ; Modecki et al, ; Vivolo‐Kantor et al, ; Zych et al, ) could be discussed under this new triangulation perspective, as neither pure victimization nor pure aggression may be as frequent as we thought.…”

“…For example, Modecki, Minchin, Harbaugh, Guerra, and Runions () found an aggression rate of 35% and a victimization rate of 36% in their meta‐analysis. In Spain, Zych, Ortega‐Ruiz, and Marín‐López (), who examined traditional bullying, reported a similar prevalence. None of these studies addresses the role of bystanders.…”

“…(González-Cabrera, León-Mejía, Machimbarrena, Balea, & Calvete, 2019;Yudes-Gómez, Baridon-Chauvie, & González-Cabrera, 2018). In this study, we created two items with five response options so bystanders and cyberbystanders are asked to pick which subrole suits her/him best (two subroles favor the victim, two favor the bully, and one is neutral or uncommitted).…”

A Longitudinal Study on Stability and Transitions Among Bullying Roles

“…Bullying roles and transitions among these roles were discovered and analyzed with a novel methodology using LTA analysis. Therefore, children were classified into bullying roles according to the actual response patterns of the participants instead of traditionally used theoretical criteria, overcoming some of the methodological problems related to these theoretically based bullying roles (see Zych et al., ). Our results showed that the actual bullying roles are not as pure as the roles established theoretically.…”

“…Nevertheless, this is not usually done in the case of bullying where roles are usually established based on only one item (e.g., if a participant answers “once a month” to any item about victimization and “never” to all the items on perpetration, he or she is considered a pure victim). This classification might increase error and decrease reliability even further than single item measures (an error on any item would lead to an erroneous classification; see Zych, Ortega‐Ruiz, & Marín‐López, , for further discussion of this topic). Thus, instead of the traditionally used theory‐based classifications of participants into bullying roles, this study used a latent transition analysis (LTA) that allows the classification of participants based on their actual response patterns that arise from all the items on a scale.…”