Abstract
Cyberbullying and its consequences is a little-investigated public health issue. We investigated the correlations between cyberbullying involvement, either being a victim or being a preparator, and psychological distress among a group of Chinese adolescents. A representative sample of 4978 students from Jiangsu province covering all types of pre-college schools was surveyed using a stratified sampling method. Both being a victim and being a perpetrator correlated with higher degrees of psychological distress, and the former’s effect is stronger. Family cohesion and school cohesion are protective factors of psychological distress, but only family cohesion plays a moderating effect between cyberbullying involvement and distress. Moreover, the positive correlations between cyberbullying involvement and psychological distress become non-significant when the interactions are included in regression models. Last but not least, female students and students in a higher grade or students with worse academic performance have higher degrees of distress. Our study reveals that, instead of school cohesion, family cohesion is more important to mitigate the psychological impact of cyberbullying involvement and eventually heal the trauma.
Highlights
Both the nice and the ugly aspects of humanity, such as bullying and violence in the physical world, can emerge and migrate to cyberspace with the increase of human activities in cyberspace and the integration of the physical and virtual world
The best option is to restrict the cyberbullying before it happens, while another option is to provide support for those involved in cyberbullying, and studies regarding the benefits of the interventions to increase support are needed in the future
Our analysis focuses on discovering the potential intervention stages by finding the impact mechanism between cyberbullying involvement and psychological distress
Summary
Both the nice and the ugly aspects of humanity, such as bullying and violence in the physical world, can emerge and migrate to cyberspace with the increase of human activities in cyberspace and the integration of the physical and virtual world. Generation Z, born after the late 1990s, are growing up as the Internet blossoms, and activities in cyberspace have become an unneglectable component of their daily life. The percentage of youth connected to the Internet in the United States was 97% ten years ago, and has reached a much higher share [1]. With the fast development of smartphones, tablets, and smartphone applications and the integration of online-offline services in the last decade, more and more people have become dependent on the Internet and smartphones. According to the 46th China Statistical Report on Internet Development, there are 940 million netizens in China in June 2020, sharing 67.0% of the total population [2]. Another report about children and adolescents’ adoption of the Internet showed
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