Cyberbullying Among High School Students

Abstract

Bullying, a typical occurrence in schools, has gone digital. As a result, cyberbullying has become ever more present among youth. The current study aimed to classify high school students into four groups based on their cyberbullying experiences and to examine the characteristics of these groups based on the sex and age of the participants and the level of parental monitoring. Participants were 133 high school students located in central Texas. A cluster analysis revealed four distinct groups of students who were “highly involved both as bully and victim,” “more victim than bully,” “more bully than victim,” or “least involved.” Significantly more girls and more students in lower grades were classified into the “more victim than bully group” while older students were more likely to be classified into the “more bully than victim” group. No significant differences were found between cluster membership and the degree of parental monitoring.

Cyberbullying and Social Anxiety: A Latent Class Analysis among Spanish Adolescents

“…So, Aoyama, Bernard-Brak, and Talbert (2011), using cluster analysis with a sample of 133 US adolescents, identified four groups of roles involved in cyberbullying. The majority of the sample belonged to the "least involved" group (51.1%), 12.8% were "highly involved as bully and victim", 10.5% were "more bully than victim", and 9.8% were "more victim than bully" [12]. Along these lines, Schultze-Krumbholz et al (2015), using LCA in an extensive sample of 6260 youth from six European countries, found that the majority of the sample belonged to the "non-involved" group (70.1%), while the "bully/victim" group was made up of 26.1% of the students and, a last group, the so-called "perpetrator with mild victimization" group, consisted of 4% of the selected sample [13].…”

Examining the roles young people fulfill in five types of cyber bullying

“…For example, although the "typically victim" group may be indicative of a victim-only group, there was no evidence of a bullyonly group. From the theoretical accounts of the roles young people fulfil in face-to-face bullying (e.g., Salmivalli et al, 1996) and the previous research that has used similar techniques to identify roles in cyber bullying (e.g., Aoyama et al, 2011), the lack of a clear bully group for cyber bullying in the current study is perhaps surprising. There are three potential explanations for this lack of a clear bully group.…”

“…This group are likely to be akin to bully/victim groups identified in the previous literature (e.g., Aoyama et al, 2011;Lovegrove & Cornell, 2014;Schultze-Krumnholz et al, 2015).…”

“…Previous research has focused on whether involvement in cyber bullying varies according to cyber bullying type (e.g., Aoyama et al, 2011). However, this effect may also be influenced with regards to whether the behaviour is received or made and the role young people fulfil in cyber bullying.…”

“…The roles that young people fulfil may also vary according to whether the cyber bullying is direct verbal or direct non-verbal as Barboza (2015) identified different groups of victims based on the type of bullying and cyber bullying they experienced. Previous research (e.g., Aoyama et al, 2011) has also reported that the roles in cyber bullying can also be distinguished by quantifiable differences in the frequency of being a victim or target. Therefore, the roles that young people fulfil and the type of cyber bullying will also be explored according to the direction of cyber bullying (i.e., the extent to which young people report they are the victim or bully in a cyber bullying episode).…”