Exploring Chinese Youth’s Internet Usage and Cyberbullying Behaviors and their Relationship

Abstract

Cyberbullying (CB) is an important issue that has received a fair amount of attention in the past decade. However, little attention has been paid to exploring young people’s Internet usage and CB behaviors and the relationships between the two. The purpose of this study was to research these two types of behaviors and how they are related. For this purpose, 2327 Chinese youths aged 9–22 years (the mean age was 14.6) were invited to participate in our study. The participants answered a youth Internet usage behavior questionnaire and completed a cyberbullying questionnaire. Based on the surveys, we found that of the technology we surveyed, the participants mainly used mobile phones (72.07%); the most popular social platform among the participants was QQ (78.1%); they spent most of their time online watching movies and cartoons (28.1%), and mobile phone games were their favorite type of game (38.4%). In terms of CB, 6.2% of the participants were bullies, and the proportion of boys (69.9%) was higher than that of girls (30.1%). Our results also showed that the participants who used the Renren social network platform, participated in celebrity forums and played online games more frequently engaged in CB. In contrast, participants who used the Sina microblog, watched video news and read online magazines were less likely to engage in CB. Based on our results, several implications and suggestions for future research are presented.