Psychological motives of cyberbullying among Malaysian young adults

ABSTRACT

This study identified the underlying psychological motives of cyberbullying among young adults in Malaysia, focusing on the victims, bullies, bully-victims and bystanders. Focus group interviews were conducted to identify cyberbullying themes, followed by self-administered surveys. There were a total of 399 respondents: bystanders (N = 194), bully-victims (N = 117), victims (N = 62) and bullies (N = 26). Findings indicate Revenge, Entertainment and Empowerment to be the main motives for cyberbullying perpetration, regardless of the roles. However, the motives were the strongest among the bully-victims. Entertainment emerged as the strongest predictor for all the cyberbullying roles, except for victim.

KEYWORDS:

• Cyberbullying
• psychological motives
• young adults
• self-administered survey
• cyberbullying roles

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to extend their heartfelt gratitude to Fulbright Research Scholar Grant 2018 for partially supporting this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fulbright Association [Visiting Scholar 2018/2019].

Notes on contributors

Vimala Balakrishnan

Vimala Balakrishnan is an Associate Professor, and Data Scientist affiliated with the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya since 2010. Dr Balakrishnan’s main research interests are in data analytics and sentiment analysis, particularly related to social media. Her research domains include healthcare, education and social issues such as cyberbullying. She has published approximately 55 articles in top indexed journals and 44 conference proceedings, has four patents and eight copyrights.

Azah-Anir Norman

Azah Anir Norman received the Ph.D. degree in Information Systems Security. She was a Security Consultant with MSC Trustgate.com (subsidiary body of MDEC Malaysia) a certification authority in Malaysia for more than four years. She actively supervises many students at all levels of study from the bachelor’s up to master’s and Ph.D. degrees supervisions. She is currently a Senior Lecturer with the Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. Her research interests include e-commerce security, information systems security management, security policies and standard.