Cyberbullying in schools: mobile phone and internet effect in adolescents

Abstract

The study objective is focusing on the different cyberbullying forms (mobile phone and internet), and how these are influenced by the personal and scholar variables. The final sample was composed for a total of 749 students from the Secondary Education, between 12 and 15 years old (M = 13.77 years; DT = 1.12). To collect information, we use a survey “ad hoc” (data about social factors at school) and the Adolescent Victimization through Mobile Phone and Internet Scale (CYBVIC) (Buelga, Cava & Musitu, 2012). In spite of obtaining a similar percentage with the first descriptive analysis, there is a soft prevalence of bulling via mobile phone (18.6%) over bullying via internet (12%) in teenagers. Likewise, among the different behaviours to assault someone, the denigration and the intimacy violation excel in both case, mobile phones and internet. Furthermore, data shows us that teenagers with more predispositions to suffer cyberbullying via mobile phone and internet are girls between thirteen and fifteen years old, who failed some subject and with an unstructured family.