Prevalence of Cyberbullying Among Youth: Causes and Prevention

Prevalence of Cyberbullying Among Youth: Causes and Prevention

Cyber-bullying is a proliferating, pervasive phenomenon that affects large numbers of youth. A sample of 268 grade seven and eight Northern Ontario students were surveyed with regards to their experiences with, and perceptions of cyber-bullying. The study results support the notion that cyber-bullying is prevalent, with 70% of participants indicating at least one occurrence of cyber-bully perpetration or victimization (Miller & Vaillancourt, 2009).

Nearly half of the youth reported that adults knew what they were doing on the internet always or most of the time and, as participant's ratings of internet supervision increased so too did their perceptions of cyber-bullying being reported. For the most part students agreed that cyber-bullying is hurtful; however, participants who self-reported participating in cyber-bully behaviours were significantly less likely to agree that cyber-bullies should be reported and that they should receive consequences for their actions.

The slightly higher percentage of prevalence rates reported in the Canadian study (Li, 2007) is potentially due to discrepancies in construct measurement. Kowalski and Limber (2007) provided participants with a detailed definition of bullying with an adage (via electronic tools) and asked whether such behaviour had occurred in the last couple of months, while Li (2007) did not provide participants with a definition of cyber-bullying and did not have a timeline, asking the participant if they had ever been cyber-bullied (Lawrence & Mueller, 2003).

Even though the term cyber-bullying is used in the current study, this term is not used consistently in the literature. Electronic bullying, internet bullying, internet harassment and online harassment are all terms that have been used to identify the same or similar behaviours. Further inconsistencies in the operationalization of bullying can be found in the various time frames and methodologies used to analyze this OCCUlTence in research studies. For example, some researchers measure absolute cyber-bullying occurrences while others measure OCCUlTences in the past couple of months.

Methodologically, some researchers have used self-reports while others have used peer nomination. Thus far, no cyber-bully studies have used the same definition, time frame, and measurement tool to assess cyber-bullying, therefore consolidating and comparing research across this domain can be difficult. Further research is required to develop a universally acceptable and consistently used definition of cyber-bullying.

Given that the internet may be accessed from a variety of locations with or without the supervision of various adults, it may be ...