Research on The Problem of Cyberbullying and Cyber Agression

In this modern era, it is very hard to find adolescents who do not remember a world without access to digital technologies and the internet. Many adolescents use personal websites, social networking sites, Internet chat rooms, email, text or digital image messaging in order to obtain information, communicate with people, and play games (Aricak et al., 2008). Although technology has so many advantages cyber aggression however is a downfall of adolescents’ technology usage. Cyber aggression has been defined as “… bullying and harassment of others by means of new electronic technologies…” (Barlett et al., 2013).

Cyber aggression is becoming a serious social issue globally and it is predicted that its prevalence will increase as information and communication technologies continue to develop and become more accessible to young people around the world (Baek and Bullock, 2013). Several studies have found that those who are cyber-victimized experience a wide array of negative psychological and behavioural outcomes (Baek and Bullock, 2013).

Research on cyber aggression has been conducted in western countries whereas research in non-western countries like Malaysia, China, Taiwan has evolved more recently. Due to the various studies conducted in different countries, empirical research with a cyberbullying focus already exists but there is not much research addressing cyber aggression from a cross-cultural perspective (Wright et al., 2015).

While previous research has provided important insights, it is assumed that adolescents in China do not have the same access to facilities as for adolescents in Australia. However, in this modern generation, China has better access to technology than Australia. Moreover, previous research did not look much into the culture behaviour followed by the respective countries (e.g. Individualism vs Collectivism).

This study aims to generalise the findings of previous work to real work by measuring the impact of adolescents from different countries in a relatively large sample size of adolescents. It is hypothesized that Australian adolescents would report higher levels of cyber aggression involvement than Chinese adolescents.

Method

Participants

The participants will be 500 adolescents between the ages of 11 – 15 years from China (n = 263) and Australia (n = 237). Simple random sampling will be used to recruit participants from two schools in Beijing and five schools in Melbourne.

Design

The independent variable, culture differences, will consist of two groups: adolescents from Australia and adolescents from China. Level of cyber aggression involvement will be the dependent variable. This will be a quasi-experimental, independent measures design. The study will exclude those adolescents with no parental consent.

Materials

Level of cyber aggression will be evaluated using the Horizontal and Vertical Individualism and Collectivism questionnaire, a scale which has been designed to access cultural orientation (Singelis et al., 1995). However, some items will be changed to be suitable for adolescents (e.g., “It is important that I do my work better than others” will be changed to “It is important that I do my schoolwork better than others”). This measure will contain sixteen items, with eight for individualism (e.g., Winning is everything) and eight for collectivism (e.g., Family members should stick together, no matter what sacrifices are required). Participants will rate the items on a 9-point scale of 1 (Absolutely disagree) to 9 (Absolutely agree).

Procedure

All procedures will be approved by the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee. An email will be sent to the schools in Australia and China outlining the purpose of the study, how the school could participate and what the participants will be required to do. A meeting will be organized if the schools showed an interest. Consent documents will be sent to their parents with participants and returned to their teachers. Consent from the participants also will be obtained before their participation in the study. All participants will complete the Horizontal and Vertical Individualism and Collectivism questionnaire online during school hours. Both consent document and questionnaire will be translated into the primary language of the participants. Participation will be voluntary, and participants will be free to withdraw at any time. Participants will be debriefed about the true nature of the study.

Results

Raw data will be analyzed using SPSS (v 24). Scores of the Horizontal and Vertical Individualism and Collectivism will be added to get a total score for level of cyber aggression involvement.

If the hypothesis is to be supported, Australian adolescents will be expected to score a higher level compared to Chinese adolescents in the questionnaire. Should we observe no relationship or Chinese adolescents score a higher level compared to Australian adolescents, the hypothesis will be rejected.