Cyberbullying trough Mobile Phone and the Internet in Dating Relationships among Youth People – by Dr. Mercedes Durán, Dr. Roberto Martinez-Pecino
Comunicar, n. 44, v. XXII, 2015
Nowadays, the Internet and information and communication technologies (ICT) has played an important role in people’s lives. Despite the numerous benefits of ICT, the risks of using ICT are emerging with its rapid and constant growth. Cyberbullying is one of the negative phenomenon which with significant risks for the health of victims and have great impact on people’s communication in virtual world, especially for the youth.
This study took 336 students (which comprising 180 females and 155 males, aged between 18 and 30) at the University of Seville as research sample, aiming to understand cyberbullying through the use of mobile phones and the Internet in romantic relationships. There were three objectives in this research. Firstly, the study aimed to describe the levels of victimization and cyberbullying through the use of mobile phones and the Internet. What’s more, gender differences in cyberbullying that took place in the context of romantic relationships were analyzed in this study. The third objective of this study was to analyze the relationship between having been victimized by a partner via mobile phones or the Internet and the involvement in cyberbullying as a perpetrator via the same medium. The study asked the participants to respond to the questionnaire in their classes, analyzed the data with the SPSS (version 18) statistical software and contributed some valuable findings related to the research objectives. In conclusion, the study offers new contributions by analyzing the phenomenon of cyberbullying in an older group (young adults), which is different to that normally studied in literature (adolescents), also using different relationship context (romantic relationships), and contributing data on these characteristics in a Spanish context.
This study gives us a new perspective in cyberbullying research. In order to make the research field to be more valuable, there are still something we should take into consideration.
- At first, how many kinds of relationships contexts in cyberbullying? What are they? What are the differences between them?
- What’s more, the gender differences in cyberbullying should be further explored. Actually, there are already some researches considered the gender differences in cyberbullying, while the research results seems to be various, sometimes even the opposite. The research context should be further analyzed and compared to explore the reasons of this phenomenon. Then we can better understand how to take these differences into consideration in practice, such as design suitable curriculum for girls and boys respectively, and take different protection measures for different group.
Composed by Ms. XIAO Wan
Doctoral student
Nanjing Normal University, CHINA
