Risk and Preventive Factors Related to School-Bullying and Cyber-Bullying: Comparing the effects of Socio-demographic, Family Environment, Friend Environment, Personality and Behavioural Factors Between School-Bullying and Cyber- Bullying

Background: Research in the field of school-bullying has been expanding for at least three decades while research in cyber-bullying is still evolving. There has been an enormous amount of empirical works and projects throughout the years, all aiming to understand how bullying functions, the motivation behind such behaviour, the related factors, the consequences, and of course to create efficient prevention and intervention models. However, in spite of the continuous efforts to decrease the rates for both forms, previous research has shown that school-bullying remains stable whereas cyber-bullying is on the rise and evolving.

Aim: This three-year project aimed to explore highly studied as well as neglected risk and preventive factors in relation to SB and CB; examine relationships, differences and predictive effects, whilst providing a comparison of the factors’ effect on SB and CB.

Methodology: For this project 408 participants were recruited to complete the online survey in Google Forms. The questionnaire aimed to measure school-bullying and cyber-bullying both from the perspective of the victim and the perpetrator, empathy, self-esteem, aggression, anger, impulsivity, self control, guilt, morality, copying strategy/minimisation, factors related to family, and friends. To achieve this 11 previously validated scales were employed and a series of questions were constructed in order to measure other related aspects.

Findings: Results showed that there are complicated relationships, differences, and predictive effects between the factors and the two forms of bullying, with some factors relating to both forms of bullying, while there appears to be an overlap between the two forms. To collectively present the results, a four level model was developed and the school-bullying/cyber-bullying prevention/intervention model emerged.

Conclusion: Bullying is a complicated phenomenon regardless of the expressed form. There are numerous gaps in research that require further examination and several limitations that future research should address. In spite of the current project’s limitations that are addressed in detail, this project managed to provide a collective comparative picture of risk factors for both forms of bullying and has developed a detailed anti-bullying model that could potentially tackle both school-bullying and cyber-bullying.