Abstract
The Internet and Adolescent Safety: Peer Influence and Gender Difference as Potential Risk-Factors of Cyberbullying among Nigerian Secondary School Adolescents
Highlights
The speedy diffusion of mobile and smartphones has tremendously paved the way for children and adolescents to gain access to a vast array of inappropriate and hurtful digital content online such as brainstorming acts of violence, hard-core pornography and other extremely obnoxious material (Livingstone et al, 2011; Okorie, Ekeanyanwu, 2014)
In Nigeria, not all students in the same grades always belong in the same age groups as obtained in most advanced countries (UIS, 2018), a negligible percentage of under-15year-old and over-17-year-old adolescents (1.51 % and 2.11 % respectively) were surveyed but not focused on because of the insignificance of the differences (Brown, 2006)
This study found that peer groups’ influence highly impacted teenagers’ likelihood to get involved in any form of cyberbullying incident as victims with the higher impact of peer influence on the female teenagers as compared to the males
Summary
The speedy diffusion of mobile and smartphones has tremendously paved the way for children and adolescents to gain access to a vast array of inappropriate and hurtful digital content online such as brainstorming acts of violence, hard-core pornography and other extremely obnoxious material (Livingstone et al, 2011; Okorie, Ekeanyanwu, 2014). Despite the skyrocketing incidence of cyber risks in countries across the globe and the rising wave of research interest the phenomenon arouses, there is an observed dearth of research in the incidence of cyberbullying in Nigerian secondary schools. The researchers chose to conduct this study with a sample of older adolescents, i.e., students in senior secondary school (SSS) grades for pragmatic reasons: access and the use of the internet, as well as the higher likelihood of involvement in cyberbullying and reporting same, are most observed phenomena among my sample, ensuring a larger sample and high power. The literature has established that the time a child spends online is one of the yardsticks for the measurement of children’s internet use level, which research correlates to the likelihood of kids’ involvement in cyberbullying. A popularly investigated cyberbullying factor, peer influence (peer approval or disapproval) (Okanlawon et al, 2015) was examined in this study
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