Cyberbullying prevention and treatment interventions targeting young people: an umbrella review

ABSTRACT

This umbrella review combines the evidence from existing literature reviews on cyberbullying prevention and treatment interventions, describes their characteristics, summarises the findings, and assesses their methodological quality. A systematic search of four databases and Google Scholar was applied to locate peer-reviewed, national and international literature reviews on cyberbullying interventions, published between 2000 and 2019, in the English language. Half of the included reviews were narrative reviews, and while these did provide rich contextual information about cyberbullying interventions, the 11-point AMSTAR checklist was utilised to assess the quality of only systematic reviews included in our summary.

KEYWORDS:

• Cyberbullying
• prevention
• intervention
• adolescents
• youth

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Miss Bronwyn Foster of James Cook University for her assistance in developing the search strategies. The authors acknowledge the Centre of Research Excellence - Integrated Quality Improvement project for its support, of whom co-author Komla Tsey is Chief Investigator.

Author contributions

MH designed and executed the study, analysed the data, and wrote and formatted the paper. MC collaborated with the design, writing, and editing of the study. SML assisted with the data analysis and the writing of the study. AL and ST collaborated with the design of the study and writing of the paper. KT collaborated with the design of the paper and writing.

Compliance with Ethical Standards

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors.

Ethics and dissemination

We did not seek ethical approval for this study because the data collected cannot be linked to individuals. The findings of this study make a significant contribution to the knowledge base of cyberbullying prevention and intervention responses. We anticipate that our review will be useful to national and international stakeholders interested in designing cyberbullying programs.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

No funding was received for this study.