Environmental Risk Factors And Cyber Bullying:The Moderating Roles Of Gender And Trait Aggressiveness

With the popularization of the Internet in adolescents,the venue of school bullying has been expanded to the network space,and a new type of bullying named cyberbullying emerged.According to the definition from Smith and his colleagues(2008),cyberbullying refers to an aggressive,intentional act repeatedly and over time against a victim who cannot easily defend him or herself by using electronic forms of contact.In recent years,the domestic and foreign research has suggested that cyberbullying is a cross-cultural phenomenon,with a higher incidence among Chinese adolescents and with numerous negative impacts on both bullies and victims(e.g.,low self-esteem,depression,substance abuse,truancy).Hence,in order to promote adolescents' healthy growth,it is necessary to explore the influencing factors of cyberbullying so as to provide empirical support for the intervention or prevention measures on cyberbullying.Through the review of literature on cyberbullying,several limitations or shortages should be mentioned in previous studies:only focusing on the relations between single or a few risk factors and cyberbullying;only basing on single environmental domain;seldom probing the moderating roles of individual variables(e.g.,social demographic variables,personality traits)between environmental risk factors and cyberbullying;lacking of the localization research based on Chinese culture.Given all this,we recruited Chinese adolescents as our research sample,and emphasized on the relationships between 13 environmental risk factors and cyberbullying based on three distinct environmental domains(family,school,and network environment).In addition,we modeled these environmental risk factors through the cumulative risk model,and formed a cumulative environmental risk index to investigate the cumulative effects of environmental risk factors and risky environmental domains on cyberbullying.Finally,we explored the moderating roles of social demographic factors(gender)and personality traits(trait aggressiveness)in the relationship between cumulative environmental risk and cyberbullying.In brief,this research aimed to probe the relationship between environmental risk factors and cyberbullying,as well as the moderating roles of gender and trait aggressiveness in this relation.This research investigated 703 junior high school students in Wuhan with questionnaire,and all statistical analyses were performed by using SPSS 19.0.The results indicated:(1)family structure,family poverty,and parents' educational degree were not associated with cyberbullying,perceived anonymity in the cyber context and online social support were negatively associated with cyberbullying,and other environmental variables were all positively associated with cyberbullying;(2)after controlling for age,gender,time spent online,and access to the Internet in the bedroom,traditional bullying victimization,peer rejection,perceived anonymity,online game violence exposure and cyber-victimization positively predicted cyberbullying,with cyber-victimization as the strongest predictor and online game violence exposure as the second one;(3)adolescents with more environmental risk factors were more likely to engage in cyberbullying;(4)in three different environmental domains,adolescents with more environmental risk factors were more likely to engage in cyberbullying than those with less environmental risk factors;(5)adolescents in more risky environmental domains were more likely to cyberbully others than those in less risky environmental domains;(6)when age,time spent online,and access to the Internet in the bedroom were controlled,gender significantly moderated the relationship between cumulative environmental risk and cyberbullying,with cumulative environmental risk positively predicted cyberbullying in both sexes,but the predictive effect were stronger in boys than in girls;(7)when the same variables were controlled,trait aggressiveness significantly moderated the relationship between cumulative environmental risk and cyberbullying,with cumulative environmental risk positively predicted cyberbullying in both groups,but the predictive effect were stronger in individuals with high trait aggressiveness than in those with low trait aggressiveness.These findings have important implications for formulating intervention or prevention measures on cyberbullying:depending on multiple environmental domains with a focus on network environment,focusing on the individuals with numerous environmental risk factors,and adopting different intervention strategies toward different groups(boys/girls;individuals with high trait aggressiveness/individuals with low trait aggressiveness).Meanwhile,parents should strengthen the monitoring of children's Internet use and cultivate positive parent-child relationship.School practitioners should develop their functions and enhance students' network moral education and empathy training.Government should improve laws and regulations about Internet use and promote people to participate in monitoring one's cyber behavior.