Bullying, Cyberbullying and the Overlap: What Does Age Have to Do with It?

Rafael Pichel,Antonio Rial,Jesús Varela,Sandra Feijóo,Mairéad Foody,James O’Higgins Norman

doi:10.3390/su13158527

Abstract

School bullying and cyberbullying represent the most common forms of victimization during childhood and adolescence in many countries across the globe. Although they can be studied as distinct phenomena with their own defining characteristics, there is evidence to suggest that they are related and often co-occur. The present research aimed to estimate the rates of school bullying and cyberbullying, studied their evolution by age, and analyzed any possible overlap between the two. An empirical study was carried out with a large sample of children and adolescents in Galicia, Spain (N = 2083), where 10–17 year olds were presented with The European Bullying Intervention Project Questionnaire and European Cyberbullying Intervention Project Questionnaire. School bullying was found to be more prevalent than cyberbullying, with 25.1% involved as victims and 14.3% as bully-victims, while the cyberbullying rates were 9.4% for victims and 5.8% for bully-victims. Perpetration rates were similar for school and cyberbullying (4.4% and 4.3% respectively). The overlap between both phenomena adds to the evidence for a whole-community approach to tackling all types of bullying and victimization experiences, as opposed to each in silo. The clear age differences in bullying behaviours also suggest the appropriateness of tailoring anti-bullying programs to target specific age groups.

Highlights

School violence and bullying constitute some of the most common forms of victimization during childhood and adolescence, generating an important public health problem worldwide [1,2,3]
This debate generated around the conceptualisation and operationalisation of cyberbullying has been reflected in the disparity of prevalence reported in the literature [13,14], which joins the previous controversy and variability of rates reported for school bullying [15,16]
The present study aimed to investigate the prevalence rates of school bullying and The present study aimed to investigate the prevalence rates of school bullying and cyberbullying in a large sample of 10–17-year-olds in Spain

Summary

Introduction

School violence and bullying constitute some of the most common forms of victimization during childhood and adolescence, generating an important public health problem worldwide [1,2,3]. There are currently authors who defend that cyberbullying should be understood as a subtype of bullying [10] and others who describe it as a separate phenomenon to offline or school bullying [11,12] This debate generated around the conceptualisation and operationalisation of cyberbullying has been reflected in the disparity of prevalence reported in the literature [13,14], which joins the previous controversy and variability of rates reported for school bullying [15,16]. These conceptual problems extend to the terminology used when describing bullying and the actors involved

Objectives

Methods

Conclusion