Prevalence, Forms, and Predictors of Cyberbullying Perpetration

Abstract

With the spread of social interactions from the physical into the “electronic world”, a new form of bullying has emerged among children and young people – cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is bullying through the use of information and communication technologies. Given that the safety of children on the Internet is one of the main preoccupations of parents, educational experts and the media in the digital age, in this paper we investigate the prevalence rate, forms and predictors that encourage children to commit this type of bullying. The research was conducted by surveying 269 students (5th and 8th graders), from two elementary schools in Zagreb. The results show that in the last two months 24,5 % of students found themselves in the role of cyberbullies, that the most common forms of this behaviour are saying ugly things, mocking, and ignoring others on social media platforms, and that its most important predictors are traditional bullying perpetration, affirmative attitude towards violence, cyberbullying victimization, poorer school performance and authoritarian parenting. The authors conclude that the key to preventing cyberbullying lies in the cooperation of educational experts, students, parents and the media, as well as their adaptation to the changing cyber environment.

Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Cyberbullying and Cybervictimization Prevalence among Children and Adolescents? A Systematic Review

“…Twenty-six articles were excluded due to not meeting the inclusion criteria: two studies focused on wrong outcomes [64,65], ten were conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic [66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75], seven articles involved participants aged > 18 years [51,[76][77][78][79][80][81], two articles included participants aged > 18 years and examined the phenomenon before the COVID-19 pandemic [82,83], three did not report the period of data collection nor made any reference to the COVID-19 pandemic [84][85][86], and two studies were no empirical investigations, being a scoping review [87] and a systematic review [88] (Supplementary material, Table S2).…”

Cyberbullying: Education Research

“…It is worth noting that several research projects have used the European Cyberbullying Intervention Project Questionnaire (ECIPQ), a 22-item Likert-type instrument designed to be used with adolescents. The ECIPQ measures the frequency of cyberbullying and the level of victimisation associated with this phenomenon [65].…”