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Cyberbullying podcast

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Interviewer: Hello and welcome to the Sage podcast for School Psychology
International. I am very pleased to welcome our two guests, Dr
Nandoli von Marees and Dr Robin Kowalski who will be
speaking today on the subject of cyberbullying in schools. This
discussion is being recorded to accompany a special issue of
School Psychology on the subject of cyber bullying, guest edited
by Dr von Marees and Professor Frantz Peterman and published
as volume 33, number 5 of the journal. Thank you both for
joining me today.

Interviewer: Dr von Marees, can you explain what kind of activities are
classed under the term ‘cyberbullying’ and also what motivated
you to commission a special issue on cyberbullying in schools.

Dr von Marees: Well I’ll certainly try but as you know it is not that easy to define
since cyberbullying is a phenomenon which appears in many
forms and is also exercised in a multitude of modes. So the
definition for cyberbullying varies but at lease most researchers
agree that it is an intentional repeated and also an aggressive act
of behaviour which is carried out by a group or an individual who
employs information and communication technology as an
instrument. So, cyberbullying is actually bullying via the use of
internet, mobile phone or even a combination of both and over the
past years the modes chosen have diversified so that by now we
don’t only have bullying by a phone call or text messages but also
my instant messaging, by emails, by posting of embarrassing
photos or video clips or even by creating hate websites.

What has motivated me to commission this special issue on

cyberbullying is that as a practicing school psychologist I’m
confronted with children and adolescents peer experiences on a
regular basis. Over the course of the past years a growing number
of parents, teachers and children have actually sought our help
and cyberbullying incidents and along with the immense increase
regarding the use of information and communication technology,
especially amongst children and teenagers, this special form of
bullying is becoming a growing challenge for the schools, so in
cooperation with my former research colleagues, Professor
Peterman we started to look into what current research said about
the cyberbullying experiences of children and adolescents. And,
not surprisingly, as this is a fairly recent phenomenon we found
that there was little research on prevalence, early warning signs
and effects of cyberbullying.

For a school psychologists, among my colleagues, it is especially

important to know about effective preventive and intervention

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measures, so we were looking to find out what international

research has in store for practitioners and of course we were also
keen to incite researchers to investigate this pressing matter
further which is very important for schools, educators and parents
and motivate researchers to come up with helpful suggestions in
dealing with cyberbullying in schools.

Interviewer: We’re interested to hear about the cyberbullying research that

we’ve published in this special issue. Can you outline what has
been done and why?

Dr von Marees: Yeah, we start by offering readers an overview of the current state
of research regarding prevalence and forms of cyberbullying. We
report its psychosocial correlates in victims, bullies, and bully-
victims and we try to highlight possible avenues for prevention
and intervention approaches for the school practitioners.
However, like I have already mentioned, there is little published
research on this last mentioned, on prevention and intervention,
when it comes to cyberbullying and so we have to rely heavily on
what bully research tell us. So when it comes to primary schools
we notice that few researchers have actually investigated
cyberbullying among children under the age of 11 and we
therefore ask parents and colleagues to contribute their research
on the nature and extent of the phenomenon among primary
school children.

They gained very interesting insight on children’s perceptions of

the effect cyberbullying has on victims and their feelings and they
share their findings on children’s recommended coping strategies
for victims of cyberbullying, and when it comes to what
researchers can actually do to help children who are cyberbullied,
while we had this question which is very often asked by school
personnel and psychologists, and so to date we have little
knowledge about the effect of intervention measures, and one
very promising method involved the so-called quality circles in
schools and so in this issue [unintelligible 0:04:56.8] and her
colleagues report on their related experiences in schools. Their
approach offers very interesting results when it comes to
gathering information on bullying and cyberbullying in schools
and it also enables us to support pupils and producing their own
solutions for this growing problem.

Then when it comes to prevention one important aspect is of

course the ability of teachers and parents to identify early warning
signs for cyberbullying and the research contributed by Robin
Kowalski and her colleagues offers extremely valuable insight
into this issue. They show, like Robin will outline later, they
show has traditional bullying perpetration and victimisation are
associated with their electronic counterparts and what the warning
signs to look for in children and adolescents. Unfortunately,

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counsellors and parents not only need to be informed about

cyberbullying and its various forms and effects they also need to
feel confident and confident enough to intervene when
cyberbullying occurs. This is outlined by Wanda Cassidy and
her colleagues in this issue. They found that tragically many
teachers are not aware of the extended cyberbullying among their
students and even if they do see prevention as a priority and are
able to, well, name possible solutions and very often in schools
policies or programmes are not implemented. So this leads
Cassidy and colleagues to a fairly daring hypothesis – they
suspect that schools prefer cyberbullying to remain under their
radar and to date we can only speculate on why this seems to be
the case.

So now we hope that this issue warrants much needed debate on

this matter and encourage further research on possible causes for
this apparent ignorance amongst school personnel.

Interviewer: You touched on the fact that there is not really enough awareness
amongst teachers and that it is often kept under the radar by
schools, is there anything that you would particularly recommend
teachers do to help children who are cyberbullied?

Dr von Marees: Well, for one thing it is always the issue of being in touch with
students and taking the gut feeling seriously when teachers notice
that there is something wrong with students or with a pupil, that a
pupil changes over the course of the year or children don’t come
to school regularly anymore, or that they don’t participate during
school time, they just behave differently from what they used to,
that could be one warning sign obviously. From my practical
experience I can just say it is very important that teachers are in
touch with their pupils that they have positive relationships with
pupils so that they are also close to what happens, that the pupils
feel they can turn to their teachers for help, that they show
confidence.

Interviewer: You mentioned that more research is definitely needed in this

area. What would you like to see in terms of future research?

Dr von Marees: This is a really important question and some from fairly extensive
research on bullying we have a fairly good overview of what
constitutes effective bullying prevention and intervention
measures, and we know that it is requires ongoing systematic
efforts on the individuals, school and community levels.
However, when it comes to cyberbullying more research is just
needed on what components of these anti-bullying programmes
actually make up effective prevention or even intervention
measures when it comes to cyberbullying. Well today most
experts actually agree that schools have a crucial role in dealing
with cyberbullying but unfortunately very few schools have

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incorporated this subject into their school curriculum or school

policy or even educated their staff and students on information
and communication technology and cyberbullying to date. So we
think that a crucial pre-requisite for all preventive and
intervention measures is teacher and school leadership knowledge
about the extent and form of cyberbullying and the effective anti-
bullying measures but of course knowledge is not enough. We
know that intervention policies or programmes are not
automatically implemented in schools and from our experience
we can say that schools need support when it comes to assessing
cyberbullying, to planning and implementing interventions and
especially to evaluating the effectiveness.

So here we see an important avenue for cooperative efforts

between research and practice and due to their systematic
knowledge and their psychological education we think that school
psychologists could build bridges between these two fields,
between practice and research.

Interviewer: Thank you Dr von Marees. Dr Kowalski, could we now discuss

your research finings? Given all the information that we currently
have on traditional bullying can’t we just apply that same
information to cyberbullying?

Dr Kowalski: Actually, no. Cyberbullying and traditional bullying share several

features and comment, they are both acts of aggression, they are
both typically repeated over time and they both occur among
individuals between whom there is a power imbalance, but there
are several key ways in which they differ. For example, with
cyberbullying in many cases there is anonymity surround
cyberbullying, so in one study just under 50% of the victims did
not know the identity of the perpetrator, whereas in traditional
bullying, you know, most traditional bullying occurs at school
during the school day so the perpetrators are a known entity and
we know that that has some implications for the effects that
cyberbullying can have relative to traditional bullying.

We also know that it opens this anonymity factor; it opens up a

potential pool of individuals who might be willing to perpetrate
cyberbullying. People will say and do things anonymously that
they would never say and do directly to someone’s face. There’s
also an acceptability difference between cyberbullying and
traditional bullying. Like I said earlier we know that most
traditional bullying occurs at school during the school day. The
accessibility for cyberbullying given all the different venues by
which is can occur, text messaging, the internet, online gaming,
and the accessibility is 24/7. So, for example, if somebody was
being cyberbullied on a web page or though text messaging, even
if they chose to turn off their incoming messages feature those

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messages may still be be being left and some may still be being
left on a web page.

There is always differences in the [unintelligible 0:11:47.8] that

surround traditional bullying and cyberbullying. With traditional
bullying in focus groups that have been conducted they say that
their fear in telling, and we know that many of them, most of
them actually, don’t tell anyone if they are a victim of traditional
bullying or cyberbullying, but the reason that they were not telling
is because they are afraid that the perpetrator will find out and
then re-victimise them and that is a legitimate fear. The
[unintelligible 0:12:15.9] with cyberbullying that these report are
different. Those usually report that they don’t want to disclose
that they have been a victim of cyberbullying because they are
afraid that someone in a position of authority, namely their
parents, will take the technology, the means by which they are
being victimised away.

I’m a parent and I can tell you that that would be part of my gut
instinct as a researcher, and as an educator that’s not something
that we would recommend. We would recommend
communication about effective ways to use that technology. So,
while we certainly can take some of what we know about
traditional bullying and apply it to cyberbullying is one of our
definitional issues and things like and meanwhile the two
phenomenon are related on some levels they are not one and the
same phenomena.

Interviewer: And how are the warning signs that accompany traditional
bullying similar to and also different from those that accompany
cyberbullying? So in other words what should parents be looking
for in both?

Dr Kowalski: Here cyberbullying and traditional bullying are actually very

similar with one minor distinction, so some of the warning signs
for both traditional bullying and for cyberbullying are that the
victim will withdraw from their family and friends. Depending on
their age they may demonstrate a drop in academic performance.
They often, at times, will appear to be depressed or sad or
anxious. The biggest difference in warning signs and this is a sort
of an obvious difference is that with cyberbullying a key warning
sign is that the individual will appear to be upset after using
technology and obviously with traditional bullying you don’t have
that warning sign.

Another thing that parents want to watch for is they want to watch
for involvement in the other type of bullying. So, parents,
administrators, school officials, whoever, if they know that a child
is involved in traditional bullying then they might also want to see
if there is involvement, so that would be the warning sign to see

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that there is involvement in the other type of bullying and vice

versa.

Interviewer: In your study did you find that there was a relationship between
involvement in the two types of bullying and if so what was the
nature of that?

Dr Kowalski: Yeah. So in our study we had samples over 4,000 young people
in 6th to 12th grade and so we assessed their involvement in
traditional bullying as the victim and the perpetrator and their
involvement in cyberbullying as victim and perpetrator and then
we looked at all possible relationships, like what was the
relationship between being a victim of traditional bullying and
perpetrator, traditional bullying and victim of cyberbullying and
perpetrator of cyberbullying and then the cross relationship as
well. And looking at all of the possible relationships, all of those
relationships are merged so, for example, being a victim of
traditional bullying was related to being a perpetrator of
traditional bullying. Being a victim of cyberbullying was related
to being a perpetrator of cyberbullying. But some of the
relationships were stronger than others, so just to sum it up what
we found was that a higher frequency of involvement and
traditional bullying, as victim or perpetrator was associated with a
higher frequency of involvement in cyberbullying and victim or
perpetrator respectively. In other words traditional bullying
victimisation was related to cyberbullying victimisation and
traditional bullying perpetration was related to cyberbullying
perpetration as well.

So what we can conclude from that is that we can expect youths

who are frequently bullied through traditional means to also
become targets of cyberbullying.

We wouldn’t necessarily expect the cyberbullying victims to then

retaliate against the cyberbullying perpetrators, so even though
there was some relationship they didn’t go in all possible
directions but we would expect frequent perpetrators of traditional
bullying to begin bullying electronically and the more frequently
they did that the more frequently those traditional perpetrators
became perpetrators of cyberbullying we would also expect them
to become victims of cyberbullying.

Interviewer: Did you observe any gender differences in these findings and
more generally in the experience of cyberbullying?

Dr Kowalski: Yes. We also observed some gender differences and let me just
prophesise by saying that there’s a lot of variability in the
literature about gender differences in cyberbullying. Some
studies find that the females engage in cyberbullying as victims
and perpetrators more frequently than males do and some say they

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find that there are no differences, but in this particular study we

did find some, we found that the relationship between
perpetrating traditional bullying and being a victim of traditional
bullying was stronger for females than it was for males. We also
found that the effect of being a victim of traditional bullying and
being a victim of cyberbullying was often stronger for females
than it was for males which again is supporting this indirect
nature of aggression for females, whereas in the literature it talks
about males being involved in direct types of aggression and
females being involved in direct types of aggression.

What I think is really important about that agenda difference is

that there is not really a one size fits all model with bullying in
either the traditional sense or the cyberbullying sense and I think
what’s really important about that is that prevention and
innovative efforts need to keep that in line. So when schools, for
example, are thinking about implementing [unintelligible
0:17:54.9] programmes they need to know that what may work
for boys is not necessarily going to work for girls. And then you
just [unintelligible 0:18:02.6] programme specific to the sex of
the child or to the age of the child or to the development stage of
the child. I think that’s what needs to be highlighted about that
gender difference.

Interviewer: Looking forward what would you like to see in terms of future
research in cyberbullying? What kind of topics needs to be
addressed?

Dr Kowalski: There’s so many. One of the muddy issues in the realm of

cyberbullying is that, first of all, I think there needs to be some
consensus in how to conceptualise cyberbullying. One of the
great things of working in this area is that it is a relatively new
fields and that’s a lot of fun and it is such an important area
because there are so many children who are being victimised, so
traditional bullying as well cyberbullying but because it is a
relatively new area there’s some slight disagreements about how
we should best conceptualise what cyberbullying is and that gets
compounded by the fact that technology is changing so quickly
that how conceptualise itself is changing. The way that
cyberbullying was defined even five years ago is slightly different
from how it is conceptualised now because we’re having to add
more technology by which cyberbullying can be perpetrated into
how we are conceptualising it. So, I would like to see consensus
among researchers and how we’re defining it. I would like to see
more research on the relationship between cyberbullying and
traditional bullying and I would like to see more attention given to
cyberbullying along adult populations, the vast majority of
research to date has focused on cyberbullying among young
people and probably that’s the group it should be focused, the
research should be focused on because that the group that’s

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targeted the most. I think we have learned lots but we also know
from some attention that has been given to cyberbullying that has
occurred among college students and there are very few studies
that have looked at adults older than college students that the
phenomenon is alive and well among those samples as well and I
just spent more attention needs to be given there. We know that
traditional bullying rates among children with disabilities are
much higher than they are among children who do not have
disabilities and I think we need to investigate the rates of
cyberbullying amongst children with disabilities.

These are just some of the ideas and we have so much more than
needs to be done in this area and we have so much more
awareness that we need to generate in this field.

Interviewer: Thank to our two guests for joining us for the School Psychology
International podcast. School Psychology International is a bi-
monthly publication published by Sage. For more information
please visit spi.sagepub.com.

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