The relationship between traditional role patterns of school bullying and different forms of cyberbullying in elementary and secondary school

Abstract

In our research, we sought to answer how some of the traditional role patterns found during school bullying (attacker, victim, intervener participant, helper participant, bystander) relate to different forms of cyberbullying. The study involved 461 elementary school students and 421 high school students. We used the School Bullying Questionnaire (Vassné Figula et al., 2008) to identify patterns of behavior during school bullying, and the Cyber Bully and Cyber Victim Scale (Margitics et al., 2020) to explore forms of cyberbullying. According to our research, of some of the traditional role patterns that occur during school bullying, the attacker role pattern showed the closest relation with cyberbullying. For this role model – in elementary school and high school as well – we mostly found it to be ignored in the online environment, as the most typical way of internet harassment. In addition, for elementary school attackers, talk (spreading secrets or harassing information about the victim) and impersonation (pretended to be the victim’s online personality), and for high school attackers, flame war (sending enemy and vulgar-language electronic messages to the victim) and blackmail (sending offensive images, video or gossip about others to destroy the victim’s reputation or social connections) were found to be significant forms of internet harassment. We also found characteristic patterns of cyberbullying for other role patterns that occur during school violence.