Benchmarks and Bellwethers in Cyberbullying: the Relational Process of Telling
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Benchmarks and Bellwethers in Cyberbullying: the Relational Process of Telling Faye Mishna 1
&
Arija Birze 1
&
Andrea Greenblatt 1 & Mona Khoury-Kassabri 2
# Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract There is a lack of research that examines and compares the perspectives of students and their parents and teachers with respect to cyberbullying. Qualitative data were drawn from a mixed methods study on cyberbullying among students in grades 4, 7, and 10, in a large urban school board. Interviews with 13 students and their parents and teachers took place during year one and with students and parents in year three. Data analysis occurred through an ongoing process of open, axial, and selective coding. Overall, the youth and adults demonstrated similar understanding of cyberbullying. It emerged, however, that for the youth participants, telling about their cyberbullying experiences was a relational process. In contrast, the adult participants made little mention of these relational aspects in their explanations. We characterize this relational process as students’ use of benchmarks (point of reference) and bellwethers (someone or something that is used as a predictor), throughout their decision-making (both implicit and explicit). It is important that this relational process of telling, for example, deciding whether and to whom to disclose, informs education and intervention strategies. Keywords Cyberbullying . Relational aspects of cyberbullying . Cyberbullying perspectives of youth and adults . Understanding cyberbullying . Cyberbullying disclosure
Introduction Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are ubiquitous among youth (Mishna et al. 2010; Lenhart et al. 2015). ICTs offer enormous benefits, as well as risks such as cyberbullying (Mishna et al. 2010). Research on cyberbullying has been conducted across the globe (Mishna et al. 2016; Bjereld et al. 2015; Cassidy et al. 2013; Giménez-Gualdo et al. 2018; Green et al. 2013; Huang and Chou 2013). Prevalence rates vary due to inconsistencies in definitions, notable differences in the characteristics of participant populations, and the timeframes and methods used in data collection (Brochado et al. 2017; Kowalski et al. 2014; Kowalski et al. 2019; Modecki et al. 2014). One scoping review reported that within the previous year, between 1 and * Faye Mishna [email protected] 1
Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, 246 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON M5S 1V4, Canada
2
School of Social Work & Social Welfare, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Mount Scopus, 91905 Jerusalem, Israel
61% of youth were victims and between 3 and 39% were perpetrators (Brochado et al. 2017), whereas another scoping review found that the median reported cyberbullying prevalence was 23.0% (Hamm et al. 2015). The occurrence of cyberbullying is highly correlated with traditional bullying (Modecki et al. 2014), both of which are forms of aggression, with the intent to harm (Smith 2015). Bullying can be direct or indirect and can ent
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