What is (not) cyberbullying?

Although the term ‘cyberbullying’ is being used more frequently in academic research, there is no standard definition of this phenomenon. Most descriptions consider that cyberbullying is ‘a new form of aggression … that occurs through modern technological devices, and specifically mobile phones or the internet’ (Slonje and Smith, 2008, p 147), but also displays some characteristics typical of traditional bullying (Slonje and Smith, 2008), for example, aggressive and intentional actions undertaken by a group or an individual (repeatedly over time) against a victim (Whitney and Smith, 1993; Olweus, 1999). However, some aspects of traditional bullying (for example, repetition or imbalance of power between perpetrator and victim) may be less directly ‘translatable’ to online contexts, and less reliable for determining incidences of cyberbullying as opposed to offline bullying (Smith, 2011b).

Incidence of cyberbullying

The populations researched and the methodologies employed (for example, children's face-to-face, online and written surveys; teacher or parents’ accounts, etc) vary considerably among studies of cyberbullying. Quantitative studies may use different types of measurement instruments (for example, several adaptations of the subscales of the ‘Bully/Victim Questionnaire’ developed by Olweus, 1999), and various operationalisations of cyberbullying. Samples vary in terms of respondents’ sociodemographic characteristics and backgrounds. This methodological variety is reflected in the diverse and sometimes inconsistent results on the prevalence of cyberbullying.

Recent reviews of cyberbullying literature (see, for example, Kowalski et al, 2008; Schrock and Boyd, 2008; Tokunaga, 2010) find that results can vary between 4 and 46 per cent for the victims of cyberbullying, and from 11 to 33 per cent for its perpetrators. This wide disparity in results would seem to be a reflection of the range of approaches adopted towards researching the cyberbullying phenomenon and the influences of other factors such as cultural and technological differences (Mora-Merchán and Ortega-Ruiz, 2007, cited in Specht, 2010).

Sociodemographic and personal factors affecting cyberbullying

There is no clear consensus on how various sociodemographic and personal factors influence cyberbullying behaviour (Specht, 2010). For instance, Smith et al (2006) find no effect of age among 11- to 16-year-olds, whereas Ybarra and Mitchell (2004a) find that students aged over 15 are more often internet aggressors than children in the younger age group of 10-14.