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Cyber- and face-to-face bullying: who crosses over?

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Abstract

A total of 3956 children aged 12–13 years who completed the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC Wave 5) were studied about their experiences of traditional face-to-face bullying and cyberbullying in the last month. In terms of prevalence, sixty percent of the sample had been involved in traditional bullying as the victim and/or the offender whereas eight percent had been involved in cyberbullying as victim and/or offender. The vast majority (95 %) of those involved in cyberbullying were also involved in traditional bullying. Children involved in both traditional bullying and cyberbullying were compared with those involved in only traditional bullying. Boys were more likely to be involved in both types of bullying than girls. Children with friends involved in delinquent activities and who did not have trustworthy and supportive friends were more likely to bully both traditionally and in cyberspace. Computer proficiency and use did not differentiate children who had crossed over from those who had not, although computer use for socializing purposes had some predictive value in identifying those children who crossed over. The study reflects the value of school interventions for children as they approach adolescence, covering both traditional bullying and cyberbullying, and targeting social relationships in order to teach children how to manage them safely and intelligently.

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Notes

  1. Traditional bullying is a term used by Smith et al. (2008) to refer to (general) bullying which has been researched extensively over a long period of time. It is also referred to as offline bullying (Cross et al. 2009), conventional or face-to-face bullying to differentiate bullying in general from cyber-/online-bullying. In the present study, these terms will be used interchangeably, as with cyberbullying and online bullying.

  2. This is the first wave when data have been collected on both cyber bullying and traditional bullying.

  3. The sample was selected from the Medicare enrolment database held by the Health Insurance Commission, as the database is the most comprehensive database of Australia’s population (Soloff et al. 2005). The Health Insurance Commission selected children of the appropriate ages and sent an invitation letter to the Medicare cardholder (http://www.growingupinaustralia.gov.au/).

  4. Responses of those children without mobile phones were recoded as “0” message sent/received for the analysis.

  5. Cross et al. (2009) found that the overall rates of being victimised using technology was 6.6 % and of being engaged in cyberbullying 3.5 % “in the last term of school”. According to the findings from “the AU Kids online” survey between 2010 and 2011 (Green et al. 2011), 5 % of children reported that they had been bullied online in the past 12 months. Using an English longitudinal study by Rivers and Noret (2010), Rigby and Smith (2011) showed that the proportion of children who cyberbullied regularly (at least once a week) over a 4-year period (2002–2006) was between 2 and 3 %. Taking the timeframe used for LSAC (i.e., 30 days) into account, the prevalence seems to be comparable with these other studies. With regard to the age group studied, Cross et al. (2009) found the rate of cyberbullying increased with age, from 2.2 to 4.6 % when children in Year 6 were compared with children in Year 7.

  6. Further support for this position came from scores on a measure of empathy (SSRS; Gresham and Elliott 1990). Scores for the 5 item scale ranged from 1 to 3. The means for both the OTB and BTCB groups were extremely high, 2.72 and 2.69, respectively.

  7. Wave 6 LSAC included various online bullying activities; it will increase the robustness of models.

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  1. Regulatory Institutions Network, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Hwayeon Helene Shin, Valerie Braithwaite & Eliza Ahmed

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  1. Hwayeon Helene Shin
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Table 6 A list of variables used in the analysis
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Shin, H.H., Braithwaite, V. & Ahmed, E. Cyber- and face-to-face bullying: who crosses over?. Soc Psychol Educ 19, 537–567 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-016-9336-z

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