Running head: PREVENTING CYBER BULLYING

Tracy Hawthorne
SW 3810 Phrase III
Dr. Harrison
July 21, 2015

PREVENTING CYBER BULLYING

Statement of the Problem

Many families are experiencing at least one adolescent family member being a victim of
cyberbullying. In fact, bullying varies among different age groups, but the effects cyberbullying
has on adolescents are usually negative. Adolescents suffering from stress are significantly
affected. Cyberbullying is similar to the type of bullying that transpires in school where others
can attack a single youth. Also like traditional forms of bullying, cyberbullying is unacceptable.
The serious effects of cyberbullying cause numerous schools and institutions to implement
different interventions to assist and ultimately eliminate the incidents of cyberbullying taking
place during adolescence.
To achieve interventions and examine their usefulness, it is of great significance to
understand the situation at hand. Moreover, it is also important to understand the characteristics
of cyberbullying. Gordon (2014) states cyberbullying is when an adolescent uses electronic
technologies to terrorize, humiliate, attack, and single out another person. The social problem of
cyberbullying has become the topic of considerable media coverage in present years. The
situation has reached the awareness of teachers, the House of Representatives, and public
officials. This is of personal interest to me because I had an acquaintance who was betrayed by
someone she trusted. For some reason, the person she trusted posted confidential information of
Facebookmy acquaintance was HIV-positive. When my acquaintance asked why, the other girl
turned around and used documents she had illegally collected stating her test was positive, and
she posted it on Facebook. After this, the girl began to call my acquaintances job, texted her, and
broke her car window as a result of jealousy over a shared love interest.
My acquaintance did not know why her supposed friend turned on her and she killed
herself after this incident. It was an entirely evil act to cause harm to someone when all she

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sought was support. If youths who are involved in cyber bullying are admitted to institutions that
implement anti-cyberbullying interventions and are assisted by school administrators and
parents educational program, will it result in fewer incidents of cyberbullying?
Youth is the succeeding of everything. They will be the future's leaders of tomorrow, and
young people are such a vulnerable population. It is extremely crucial for adults of today to do
all possible to shelter these youths. Therefore, in having a career as a social worker, a plan needs
to be put together to work with young people who have been through the cyberbullying
experience and most likely have some trouble dealing with it. It would be great to reach and help
youth at risk of being bullied so that social workers can help catch it in time, and the damage
does not need to occur. There are many interventions that aim to help prevent cyberbullying from
damage and /or feelings of neglect and also many to help youth after the damage/feeling of
neglect has already happened. The question should be the following: If youths who are involved
in cyberbullying are admitted to institutions that implement anti-cyberbullying interventions and
are assisted by school administrators' and parents' educational programs, will it result in fewer
incidents of cyberbullying?
This is a great article that was found to help answer the above-mentioned research
question: http://library.wayne.edu from 2013. This peer-reviewed research article is entitled
"Individual and Contextual Predictors of Cyberbullying: The Influence of Children's Provictim
Attitudes and Teachers' Ability to Intervene." This article, by Boulton, DePaolis, Elledge, Little,
Salmivalli, Williford, discusses intervention and the why and how of electronic social
communication: why it is important and the many methods used to collect and analyze the data.
This article will assist in answering the question as to whether or not the revised "Olweus
Bully/Victim Questionnaire" intervention will help in preventing cyberbullying. Although the

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article does not compare many interventions, it goes into such aspects. Due to this reason, I
believe it will be beneficial to obtain a deeper understanding of this particular intervention and
the effects and outcome it will have on youth. The Bottom-Up Method was used in this paper.
Research Design
The reason of this study was to obtain evidence from school-based leaders who have
effectively dealt with cyberbullying behaviors. The research used was qualitative to gather the
final analysis from a sample of 16,634 students. It means that the students aim to understand how
the participants derive meaning from their surroundings, and how their meaning influences their
behavior. The effect of these tests was compared to see if the intervention method was successful
in decreasing.
The opportunities for, and exhibition of, cyberbullying behaviors it appears that this
research controlled for many threats to internal validity, which is the possibility of discussion
arising from testing. The students were assign to an online school survey, administered in the
computer laboratories. The student was given unique user identification names and passwords to
access the questionnaire instruments online. Before answering survey questions, the definition of
cyberbullying outlined in the top of the computer screen (OBVQ Olweus 1996). Due to this,
there would be little justification to conclude that the students were possible to show lower
statistics associated to cyberbullying behaviors. This research study was also administered using
a mixed method explanatory design. The explanatory design has two phases: phase one contain
collecting quantitative data; Stage two includes of collecting qualitative data that links to data
from phase one. The student selection survey instruments online of the explanatory design used
for the study. In this level, the quantitative data obtained from the first stage of the study was

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used to select the students for online survey purposefully. In the qualitative portion of the study
effects of age, gender, attitudinal norms, provictim.
The quantitative data obtained in this study came from cross-sectional surveys issued to
elementary and middle school in the state of Finland. Cross-sectional surveys collect all data at a
single point to record data about present views on the issue. The surveys aim was to determine
which influence of childrens provictim attitudes and teachers ability to intervene beliefs their
actions related to cyberbullying have been effective. Since the term effective is very subjective, a
working definition of the phrase for the context of this study was provided to each participant.
Once all of the data were received identified their schools as having effective cyberbullying
intervene and who agreed to participate in a one-on-one online survey were selected to complete
the qualitative portion of this study.
The qualitative data obtained in this study came from student conducted by participants
who identified during the first phase of the study. The participants in phase two were selected
through purposeful sampling since their survey data indicated an existing effective related to
cyberbullying. A phenomenological approach was to gain a full understanding of the essence of
the phenomenon by each. Each of the participants selected engaged in a one-on-one computer
survey. The survey consisted of open-ended questions related to their approach to cyberbullying.
Using the quantitative approach, which asked them to answer questions regarding their
cyberbullying behaviors. Also, these experiment being based on self-reporting, the response may
not be totally accurate.
Pupils may respond to questions falsely in an attempt to make it appear that they are not
engaging in cyberbullying behaviors due to disturb over how teachers may view them if they
confess to being part of cyberbullying behaviors. Accordingly, because of the reason given this

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could be a threat to the internal validity of the research. Overall, it seems that this research has
controlled for many components that could potentially be a threat to the internal validity of this
study. This external validity of this research does not seem to be controlled permanently
effectively as internal validity. In this research, the sample includes a mixture of third, fourth,
fifth, seventh, and eighth grades students within from schools in Finland. The research does not
state whether the schools selected the classes that would participate; third, fourth, fifth, seventh,
and eighth grades; or hand selected the categories. Along with this, a parental consent form was
needed to allow the pupils to participate and consequently, this population was necessary made
up of individuals who were ready to participate and was not randomly selected population.
However, not knowing much about demographics or psychologists educational history, this
deficiency of information could pose threat to external validity.
Sampling
However, this sampling was obtained from a large cluster-randomized trial of the KiVa
anti-bullying program (Salmivalli et al. 2010) that occurred in Finland between 2007 and 2009.
Given the facts that are provided, this is the first study examining teachers' behaviors in the
classroom and if they influence cyberbullying by using interventions to target cyberbullying in
the elementary population in the third through fifth grades and middle school pupils in the
seventh and eighth grades. The advantages of this sampling strategy are that it targets third,
fourth, fifth, seventh, and eighth graders, the age population where bullying begins, and if
successful, it can reduce the aggression of cyberbullying considering the teachers are
intervening. Also, the cost of doing an online survey in the pupils' school computer laboratories
is cheap. The disadvantage of the sampling strategy with the elementary students is this that

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population has to have an independent understanding of the activities. The research question
made it abundantly clear, similar to the age population of the intervention analysis.
Measurement
The key variables measured in this study are cyberbullying, provictim attitudes, teacher
intervention, youth, and adolescence. There was a separate page with each online cyberbullying
survey following the prompt stating "Have you bullied, been bullied by another pupil like this at
school during the past few months?" (Revised Olweus Bully/Victim Questionnaire [OBVQ];
Olweus 1996). However, a 12-item scale assessing provictim attitudes was measured, assessing
attitudes toward defending, victimization, and bullying. The 4-item scale demonstrated students'
perceptions of cyberbullying being intervened by the teacher's assistance in the classroom. For
example, teacher participants addressing the bullying, attitudes toward bullying, skills to
decrease bullying, and ability to reducing bullying. This study tested how students viewed
contextual effect interests of attitudinal norms, provictim attitudes, gender, age, and the ability to
have a perception of the teacher addressing bullying in the classroom. Cyberbullying behaviors
change based on either the existence or insufficiency of the intervention methods. Overall, the
variables might have been different if the student did role-play or other activities to see what it
felt like to be a victim of a cyberbully.
Data Collection
The researchers used multilevel ordinal regression to analyze the data; the population
study target that was sampled consisted of ordered frequency categories classrooms and the
response scale of the outcome variable (Snijders and Bosker 2012). The purpose of this
qualitative study is to observe provictim attitudes among the pupils to see if teacher interventions
will lessen cyberbullying behaviors. An advantage is that the researcher's study explores the
cyberbullying phenomenon within the classroom from a teacher's perspective, allowing pupils to

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see the efficient strategies that will be used when an adult intervenes. Also, it's training skills for
social learning theory and disengagement, which are used to recognize aggression. A
disadvantage is that ignoring multilevel structures can result in biased test statistics (Snijders and
Bosker 2012), and using a normal theory model for ordinal variables can negatively bias
parameter estimates (Bauer and Sterba 2011). When analyzing data, a multilevel structure has to
be recognized and accounted for to get an accurate conclusion and to explore the contextual
effects and opportunities. If the data was use differently, the result may not been successful since
this is the first time this research has been examined to see if the influences of cyberbullying
come from children's attitudes and perceptions of their teachers' classroom behaviors.
Ethics and Cultural Considerations
According to (Hirschstein et al. 2007; Salmivalli et al. 2010; Salmivalli et al. 2005) This
study is the first to examine whether children's attitudes and perceptions of their teachers'
classroom behavior influences cyberbullying. This study is also the first to consider whether
cyberbullying behavior, a form of bullying that is more likely to occur off school grounds or
outside of the classroom context, is subject to classroom contextual influences. This intervention
has a significant effect on this article because of the teacher interest to intervene at the classroom
level; it found the students' perceptions to be positive. The researcher prevention strategies
reduce cyberbullying behavior and are aimed both inside and outside the classrooms. The
intervention method uses these various activities and processes in helping educate pupils
understand, emphasizing cyber safety, enhancing students' skills for engaging in healthy
relationships, and teaching students the behavior that is associated with cyberbullying and to
seek an adult assistance. The researcher address the ethical issues by getting a parent consent
form for each student who participates, and since this is the case study dealing with children,

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there is not much more that can be done differently in terms of ethics. However, I do believe the
researchers should have involved the social worker and principals.
Result and Implications
The intervention addresses the particular practice discussed in phase 1 targeting the
population adolescents and the serious effects cyberbullying cause numerous schools. The article
identified with pupils being online electrons, Facebook, Instagram, world stars, and Twitter.
These are a few website that can leave to trouble if a child is not educated on the responsibility
come along with the internet. The activities relate to the problem allowing pupils to experience
the responsibility even as someone not doing the bullying to get a teacher or adult involve by
speaking up. Also, to be able to answer the question about bullying allow students who are
bullies and pupils who are not bullies something to think about when a question is looking you in
the face. The school districts will have to contribute to help a student attain and retain a safe
environment with intentional and unintentional injuries to reach a satisfactory academic success.
One of the challenges is for cyberbullying or to protect the students from so many harmful things
coming through the internet it going to be an out of pocket expenses to have software outside of
school into the pupils homes computers. The barrier is parents need to understand and take the
time to monitor their child actives on the internet and assume a responsibility of a child miss
using the internet for any purpose. For this to be the first study case combining student with
teacher to make this researcher consider a success it definitely targets the population behavior
that contribute to cyberbullying and the article did state it was a positive respond with the
teachers intervene.

Work Citied

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10

Gordon,Sherri.(2014,December14)6TypesofBullyingBullyingAdvicefromAbout.com
[Weblogpost].Retrievedfromhttp://bullying.about.com/od/Basics/a/6TypesOfBullying.htm

Boulton, A.J., DePaolis, K.J., Elledge, C.L., Little, T.D., Salmivalli, C., Williford, A. (2013,
February 1). Individual and Contextual Predictors of Cyberbullying: The ... (n.d.). Retrieved
from http://www.researchgate.net/publication/235391781_Individual_and_Contextual_Pred