The individual or the group: A multilevel analysis of cyberbullying in school classes

Festl Rut, Scharkow Michael, Quandt Thorsten

Research article (journal)

Abstract

In this study, we focus on the relevance of social influence to explain cyberbullying experiences among German high school students. Social influence is discussed in the context of computer-mediated communication. To obtain individual and sociostructural data, we conducted a survey study among German high school students (N = 4,282). Using multilevel modeling, we found that the attributes of the school class only contributed to the risk of being involved in cyberbullying to a small extent. Still, procyberbullying norms in class did enhance the risk of perpetration and victimization for students, even more so than their individual beliefs. Previous experiences with bullying and intensive, unrestricted use of the Internet were the strongest individual predictors of cyberbullying involvement.

Details zur Publikation

Pages: 22
Release year: 2015
Language in which the publication is written: English