Definition, Nature, and Prevalence
In its first stage, research on cyberbullying focused on trying to define the phenomenon and check on the possible similarities or discrepancies between offline school bullying and online bullying. The very first studies (Smith et al. 2008; Kowalski et al. 2008) adapted the Olweus definition of bullying (Olweus 1995) to the online world, simply adding the precision that bullying was performed via electronic means of communication within the cyberspace:
The authors resort to the same mechanism as for bullying, that is repetition, intentionality, and imbalance of power, and stress that offline bullying was more common within the school environment while cyberbullying happened often off the school grounds (Smith et al. 2008).an aggressive intentional act carried out by a group or individual, using electronic forms of contact, repeatedly and over time against a victim who cannot easily defend him or herself. (Smith et al. 2008, p. 376)
If to start with, researchers argued that cyberbullying was the âsame wineâ in a new bottle (Li 2007), further investigations showed there were some important differences between traditional school bullying and cyberbullying and overcame the first restrictive definition to focus on the characteristics of online communication. As a matter of fact, the cyberspace facilitates anonymity through the use of pseudonyms (Steffgen and Konig 2009) that contribute to increasing the feeling of insecurity of the victims and that can disinhibit individuals who would have never engaged in bullying in the face-to-face world. The distance between the perpetrators and their victims reduces the feelings of empathy towards the targets (OâBrien and Moules 2010). Moreover, the dissemination capacities offered online are huge, with a wide audience and an unlimited number of potential supporters who could contribute to the dissemination of the humiliation or degrading messages/pictures in a snowball effect, and cyberbullying can be ongoing (7 days a week, 24 hours a day). As a consequence, victims have no respite.
Within the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) project IS0801 âCyberbullying: coping with negative and enhancing positive uses of new technologies, in relationships in educational settingsâ, research was conducted to get a more accurate definition and understanding of what was cyberbullying within Europe (Smith and Steffgen 2013). It focused on the studentsâ perception and definition of cyberbullying and showed that there were some differences between the participating countries: âCybermobbingâ was more used in Germany, while in Spain the students would refer to âharassment via Internet or mobile phoneâ and in Italy the terms used were virtual or cyberbullying. Further investigation on the characteristics of cyberbullying (repetition, intentionality, anonymity, imbalance of power, and private vs. public) was conducted within six European countries. The findings showed that the imbalance of power, intentionality, and anonymity were core common characteristics for the participants in the survey, whatever the country, although intentionality and anonymity were less important in Italy and Germany than in Sweden, Spain, Estonia, and France (Menesini et al. 2012).
As stressed by Berne and colleagues (2013) as well as by Corcoran et al. (2015), although âcyberbullyingâ is the most used terminology, there is a great variety of concepts and measuring tools to evaluate online aggression. The validity and reliability of all of these terms has not been investigated and the prevalence of cyberbullying varies much from one study to the other, including within the same country. While some researchers use the term âcyberbullyingâ (Smith et al. 2008; Calvete et al. 2010), others refer to more specific terms such as electronic bullying, cyberaggression, cyberviolence, cyberstalking, or cyber harassment (Grigg 2010; Vance 2010; Wachs 2012; Blaya 2013; Sticca et al. 2013), which influences the quality of responses. For instance, findings from research by Corcoran and Mc Guckin (2014) show that studies that use a more restrictive definition of cyberbullying find a lower prevalence of online victimization.
At the time of writing this chapter, the authors can only stress that there is still a lack of consensus regarding the terminology and concepts as well as the criteria to be included in the definition of cyberbullying (repetition, power imbalance, intention to harm, etc.) and there is a clear need for further research on these topics (Kowalski et al. 2014; Bauman and Bellmore 2015). These issues might never be resolved and represent a real impediment to performing genuine comparative research. Up to now very few cross-national research studies have been conducted using the same measurement tools and methods apart from the ones by Menesini et al. (2012) and Livingstone et al. (2011a, b). The TABBY project is one of them.
An International Perspective
By bearing in mind the above mentioned difficulties in comparing cyberbullying and cybervictimization prevalence rates across studies, we have also to consider that, to date, few studies have been carried out adopting a cross-cultural or a cross-national perspective. Furthermore, very few cross-national or cross-cultural research studies have been conducted using the same measurement tools and methods. Adopting such a common methodology could be necessary in order to consider the role that culture could have in influencing youngstersâ involvement in cyberbullying and cybervictimization (Barlett et al. 2014) and to compare cyberbullying and cybervictimization prevalence rates across countries. To this aim, in this chapter, we will report the main cross-national and cross-cultural studies adopting the same methodology to compare cyberbullying and cybervictimization rates across countries (see Table 1.1 for details).
Table 1.1
Cyberbullying and cybervictimization cross-national/cross-cultural comparisons
Study | Nation | Sample size, age, method, time frame | Instrument | Criteria CB/CV | Main results | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Del Rey et al. (2015) | Poland, Spain, Italy, England, Germany, and Gr... | |||||