Original articleElectronic Bullying Among Middle School Students
Section snippets
Participants
Participants included 1,915 girls and 1,852 boys in grades 6, 7, and 8 who attended any of six elementary and middle schools in the southeastern and northwestern United States. The schools were selected because they were planning to begin a bullying prevention program after the collection of baseline data about bullying at their schools. Table 1 provides a description of the school locales, ethnicity of students, and socioeconomic status (SES) of students (as measured by the percentage of
Prevalence of electronic bullying
We divided students into four groups: those who had been electronically bullied at least once in the last 2 months (victims only), those who had electronically bullied others (bullies only), those who had both been electronically bullied and also had electronically bullied others (bully/victims), and those who had no experience with electronic bullying as either victims or perpetrators. (Much of the research on school bullying has used a more conservative criterion [“2–3 times a month” or more
Discussion
The data suggest that, among middle school students, electronic bullying is a problem. Of the students, 11% had been electronically bullied at least once in the last couple of months; 7% were bully/victims; and 4% had electronically bullied someone else at least once in the previous 2 months. If anything, the statistics underestimate the true frequency of electronic bullying. Our survey assessed children’s experiences with electronic bullying over the previous 2 months. It is quite possible
Acknowledgment
The authors thank Melinda Keith for helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.
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