New COE research reveals how students cope with cyberbullying

With the increasing popularity of social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter, the schoolyard bullying of the past has found a new, electronic forum. 

 

College of Education doctoral student Leandra Parris, former graduate student Hayley Cutts, and faculty members Joel Meyers and Kristen Varjas are studying how students cope when their peers take bullying to the Internet.

 

Parris, Cutts, Meyers and Varjas recently published an article on cyberbullying, or bullying that takes place electronically, in Youth & Society, a peer-reviewed journal that focuses on issues related to the second decade of life.

   

For the article, Parris and Cutts interviewed 20 students at a suburban high school about their experiences with cyberbullying and found that teenagers generally deal with it in one of two ways: "Reactive coping" and "preventive coping." Some also indicated that there was "no way to prevent cyberbullying." Reactive coping can involve deleting or ignoring harmful messages and seeking support from friends, while preventive coping can include talking about issues in person and increasing security measures. Some students in the interviews also said they felt that nothing can be done about this form of bullying.   

 

Combined with the research COE faculty and students have conducted on cyberbullying in the past, the article in Youth & Society offered researchers the opportunity to have open conversations with students and identify ways that they cope that previous literature didn't identify.

 

"Students can report instances of cyberbullying, block certain kids from their web pages and change their passwords," Varjas said. 

 

To read more about this research, click here.