Understanding Cyberbullying Victimization from an Integrated Approach: Offline Preventive Attributes and Behavior Problems Do Matter

ABSTRACT

The nascent concept of cyberbullying has attracted researchers to study online victimization by employing a variety of criminological theories. The issues of how traditional aspects of victimization constructed in the physical environment could be applied to virtual settings and the extent to which people experience cyberbullying victimization along with their victim characteristics are still underexplored. Utilizing data from the Canadian General Social Survey and a framework of routine activities, the findings of the current study indicate that target suitability and offline guardianship derived from routine activity theory are influential attributes of cyberbullying victimization. Those who have unhealthy socio- and psycho-behavioral issues also have a higher risk of being cyberbullied. Moreover, individuals who bond with people providing guardianship have a weak association with cyberbullying victimization. Results of this study also show that the propositions derived from collective efficacy perspective could be considered as a proxy safeguard against cyberbullying victimization.

KEYWORDS:

• Cyberbullying
• collective efficacy
• guardianship
• routine activity theory
• victimization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Briefly, low self-control theory postulates that children with a lower level of self-control would be more prone to delinquency and unlawful behavior, and in turn, may further develop criminality in their later lives (see Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990).

2. According to Agnew (1992), general strain theory argues that individuals who fail to obtain or lose positively-valued stimuli and gain negatively-valued stimuli and experience a lack of access to coping mechanisms would be more open to deviance.

3. According to the codebook, all participants have valid answers for the variable marital status, and there is no case of a “valid skip.” Moreover, given the current research does not focus on age and marriage, this should raise no further concern. For additional information, approximately 1% of 15–19-year-olds in Canada were married or in common law unions in 2016. Although marriage before 16 years old has been prohibited by law since 2015, there were few cases married at 15 before 2015 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7053727/). And, 16–18 year olds can get married with consent from parents/guardians or a court order. There are some rare situations that allow individuals below 16 to get married (see https://www.law-faqs.org/alberta-faqs/family-law/marriage/).

4. Treating categorical measures as ordinal is based on the elemental operationalization of levels of measurement and appropriately meets the criteria such as “the numbers to be substituted for categories have order implicit in them” (Williams, 2009, p. 14). It should raise no concerns in this regard. For additional information on the levels of measurement and in particular, converting different levels of measurement and coding issues, the following references are provided (Arnold, 2015; Blalock, 1968; Field, 2009; Stevens, 1946; Velleman & Wilkinson, 1993).

5. The factor loadings range from .728 to .836 among the above six indicators.