The complexity of addressing Cyberbullying.

So full disclosure, I have (or at least like to think I have) a lot of insight into this topic as it was the overarching theme of my masters thesis. I also ended up, unfortunately at the time, having to redo my entire literature review near the tail end of my thesis as my external reviewer, an expert in this field, felt that anything older than 2016 was too dated to use due to the quickly evolving filed of cyberbullying.

There are two factors that I'd like to highlight that I learned redoing my literature review, which also happen to be two of the focuses of some of my external reviewer current research (I guess it helps when you cite your external reviewer a lot??).

First is that a huge amount of cyberbullying studies were done without consideration for other types of bullying (Holfeld & Leadbeater, 2018) when we know there is a lot of overlap. This is a huge oversight because it means we really can't be certain if the impacts/results/whatever of the study were due to cyberbullying, or due to another form of bullying (relational, physical, verbal). As an example, students who complete a quantitative survey might indicate they experience high rates of cyberbullying on social media, and may show a statistically significant rate of suicidal thoughts. This may be presented as a positive association between cyberbullying and suicidal thoughts but failed to control for experiencing say relational bullying. This means we can't really say for certain if those thoughts are due to experiencing cyberbullying, as they may be a result of only relational bullying the participants were asked about, or more likely it has to do with both but part of that is missed without controlling for it.

The other interesting focus of some of his research is that addressing or "solving" cyberbullying up to this point has been difficult, and while there has been some success with direct interventions, it often doesn't get to the root of the problem, we are still seeing high rates of cyberbullying (suggesting interventions in the last decade aren't as successful as they could be), is frequently reactive, and many times ends up being a case by case intervention. Some of his research indicated schools that report lower rates of cyberbullying among students, also report having a positive school climate (Holfeld & Leadbeater, 2017). This result suggests an effective way to treat cyberbullying may be through interventions that improving over all school climate vs say intervention involving direct instruction on resiliency, doing presentation identifying cyberbullying and developing strategies to avoid it as these these can have limited success since avoiding cyberbullying often means avoiding a platform or section of a platform their peers are using.

Cyberbullying is a complex topic with a lot of factors that influence the how, when, where, why, who. It's relationship to other forms of bullying are also complex, and it's difficult for any educator, especially ones not tech savvy to deal with the ever changing virtual locations this can take place. I think some of the big changes to overall school climate make sense to me as it can be an effective means to reduce bullying over all.

Edit Feb 7th: Forgot the references

Holfeld, B., & Leadbeater, B. J. (2017). Concurrent and longitudinal associations between early adolescents' experiences of school climate and cyber victimization. Computers in Human Behavior, 76, 321-328.

Holfeld, B. & Leadbeater, B.J. (2018). The interrelated effects of traditional and cybervictimization on the development of internalizing symptoms and aggressive behaviors in elementary school. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 64 (2), 220-247.