Introduction/Background
Curwen, Tracey, Ryan, Kaityln, (2013) conducted a qualitative study to examine the incidence, impact and intervention of the victims of cyber bullying. Bullying seems like an ever present problem, but with the ever increasing rise in technologies, smart phones and web usage in both studies and schools, cyber bullying scope and potential has also increased.
Then typically only the behavior and impacts of those students are examined who bully other students and often the victims are neglected, but the researchers here reflect the impacts that can be emotional impacts, social impacts and academic impacts, the victims suffer as a result of cyber bullying.
Another key issue in present society is that teachers following traditional means often ignore the symptoms and impacts of cyber bullying, so the study also emphasizes the need for teachers to learn the impacts and also get trained for the cyber bully phenomena so that they better address this issue effectively. An important area is the proposal of programs and support for the cyber bullied victims to minimize the severe impact and repercussions of cyber bullying.
Study Findings
Researchers identify that the intentional cyber bullying is an extension of traditional bullying and up to 35% students are victims of cyber bullying worldwide. The methods vary but they include text, websites and emails, similarly the researchers identify that intermediate age groups (12-15 years) are high targets for mobile phone bullying. In terms of gender, the threats to females more target on their reputation whereas males are more threatened by their safety and life.
The impacts varies, a large number of victims reported emotional impacts such as embarrassment, fear, loneliness, depression or helplessness in a qualitative study. There is a significant relationship found between cyber bullying and self-harm or suicidal thoughts in children. Similarly females report more depression as compared to male victims reporting more aggression.
Study also identified a correlation between lower popularity in social media platforms such as chat rooms and cyber victimization. Similarly for some victims, poor academic performance has a relationship with cyber bullying victimization as well. Teachers who need to identify cyber bullying victims shall also keep an eye on students with poor academic performance as targets of cyber bullying.
Study suggested that since cyber bullying is relatively newer issue, in two Canadian studies, out of 177 seventh grade students, 52% reported they know someone being cyber bullied and 25% reported cyber victimization. 67% interviewees gave their opinion that informed adults try stopping bullying when they found a case but 66% also reported that victims didn’t report their bullying.
In the same Li’s research, a large number of students between Grade 7 and 12 either didn’t report the incident or didn’t report to the right person, less than 15% respondents reported to an adult so there was an improvement of a mere 14% in reducing cyber bullying after the report. These figures surely lead us to believe there is an urgent need to take measures and make everyone realize the importance of reporting to the right persons. As another report suggested that only one third reporting victims were properly taught about how, where and whom to report cyber bullying incidents.
Supporting victims is another key area that the study and research focused in this article. As the authors emphasize the need of “structured and scheduled support groups” for cyber bullying victims as well as drop in centers and peer mentors that may regularly mentor victims so that they can recover and avoid the emotional or social impacts of bullying.
Conclusions
The study concludes that the focus of addressing cyber bullying issue needs to be looked at from the victim’s point of view instead of the traditional means of looking at the students who bully others. Similarly there is a need to take initiatives that provide enough support and help to victims. There initiatives must be at school level as well as individual teacher level to intervene if any such incident is reported or even they found someone having such issues. There is also a need to train victims and teachers/support staff about cyber bullying and the areas where that differs from traditional bullying.
What I found there could have been a better way of conducting the research such as having some more data on both set of students, like who bully others and the victims. Then both data sets could have been analyzed under few hypothesis testing scenarios to do some comparisons. I would have been taking a data set of students who bully and compare to the set of students who got bullied to better analyze in terms of gender and age.
Similarly study focused on some existing researches like in the case of reporting, the article only considered the percentages of those who reported but they could have been further tested by conducting variance analysis or to explore more on the likelihood of reporting versus non reporting. That could have given better results to strategize the training, the need and which data set to focus. Then the reported incidents needs to be further carefully analyzed by exploring the success scenarios versus reported but unsuccessful scenarios, such as if the incident is reported to an adult, why it didn’t help in reducing the bullying.
These answers can be driven from performing extensive data analysis based on reporting victim’s as well as the reported adult age, gender, relationships, type of bullying etc. Even if they had to avoid quantitative analysis, still there was a lot of room of performing more induction on these parameters and getting through some conclusion.
Similarly poor academic performance or change in grades for same set of students could have been analyzed further by doing some sort of analysis on data and that may help a great deal in initiating prevention techniques. Then there was lot of room for performing ranking among the data as doing analysis on emotional impacts of cyber bullying, victims could’ve been ranked by both grade and age and then the negative feelings, fear or suicidal thoughts could have been measured instead of just reporting as percentages, they can have analyzed in better ways.
