Following you home from school: A critical review and synthesis of research on cyberbullying victimization

Abstract

More than 97% of youths in the United States are connected to the Internet in some way. An unintended outcome of the Internet’s pervasive reach is the growing rate of harmful offenses against children and teens. Cyberbullying victimization is one such offense that has recently received a fair amount of attention. The present report synthesizes findings from quantitative research on cyberbullying victimization. An integrative definition for the term cyberbullying is provided, differences between traditional bullying and cyberbullying are explained, areas of convergence and divergence are offered, and sampling and/or methodological explanations for the inconsistencies in the literature are considered. About 20–40% of all youths have experienced cyberbullying at least once in their lives. Demographic variables such as age and gender do not appear to predict cyberbullying victimization. Evidence suggests that victimization is associated with serious psychosocial, affective, and academic problems. The report concludes by outlining several areas of concern in cyberbullying research and discusses ways that future research can remedy them.

Introduction

The number of children and teens who use the Internet at home is rapidly growing, with now over 66% of fourth to ninth graders able to go online from the comfort of their bedrooms (ChildrenOnline, 2008). Children can engage in numerous Internet-based activities such as game playing, seeking information, and talking with friends. The constellation of benefits, however, has been recently eclipsed by numerous accounts of the Internet’s undesirable social implications, which appear in both scholarly literature and popular media. A fair amount of attention has been given to Internet offenses, including cyberstalking (Seto, 2002), sexual predation (Dombrowski, Lemasney, Ahia, & Dickson, 2004), and cyberbullying (Bhat, 2008, David-Ferdon and Hertz, 2007), which collectively place the safety of children and teens who use the Internet into question.

Cyberbullying victimization has ascended to the forefront of the public agenda after a number of anecdotal cases unfolded in the media (Benfer, 2001; Doneman, 2008, Tomazin and Smith, 2007). Concerns were raised after several children and teens reported experiencing health and psychological harms after being bullied through electronic devices (e.g., cellular phone, e-mail, etc.). In particular, the story of 13-year-old Megan Meier brought notoriety to the subject of cyberbullying when she committed suicide after being harassed through a popular social networking site (ABC News, 2007). The cyberbully, a mother of Megan’s former friend, created a false identity to correspond with and gain information about Megan, which she would later use to humiliate Megan for spreading rumors about her daughter.

Cyberbullying victimization is associated with a host of negative problems similar to those of traditional bullying. Victims of cyberbullying have lower self-esteem, higher levels of depression, and experience significant life challenges (Ybarra, Mitchell, Wolak, & Finkelhor, 2006). Children and teens also have greater internalized negative affect toward the cyberbully (Patchin and Hinduja, 2006, Topcu et al., 2008). The psychosocial and physical problems that emerge with cyberbullying underscore the serious nature of the phenomenon.

There is a noticeable paucity of research on cyberbullying and victimization, despite the high level of concern associated with its occurrence (Patchin & Hinduja, 2006). The available research on cyberbullying to date relates to its prevalence, frequency among specific groups, and negative outcomes; information that would be expected in the early formative stage of research. The way research on cyberbullying can advance beyond this stage is by surveying what is already known and establishing a roadmap of where future research should be directed. The end goal of the present review is to direct research toward exploring those areas that still remain uncharted.

The broad aim of this report is to examine findings in quantitative research on cyberbullying victimization through meta-synthesis. Meta-synthesis is a process of summarizing an entire body of literature by providing a comprehensive overview on a specific subject (Zimmer, 2006). Meta-synthesis can be used to amass the body of cyberbullying literature, which aids in ascertaining consistencies among the findings. Additionally, areas of agreement and discrepancy may be isolated and evaluated against studies’ research designs. Although the methodological technique is conventionally used to interpret findings in qualitative research, meta-synthesis has been recently applied to quantitative research as well (see Byun et al., 2009). Cyberbullying victimization is an ideal topic for review and synthesis for two reasons. First, there is an inherent need to located trends and methodological inconsistencies in cyberbullying research, considering the wide areas of disagreement in its study. Second, there is enough research to make the synthesis meaningful, but not enough data to conduct a traditional meta-analysis. In the following sections, a composite definition of cyberbullying is offered, the differences between traditional bullying and cyberbullying are explained, areas of convergence and divergence in the literature are considered, and critical concerns and subsequent directions for future research are discussed.