What is That?: An Exploration of Stalking, Cyberstalking, Bullying, and Cyberbullying

• In Event: Intimate Partner Violence: Methodological Considerations and Innovations

Abstract

Stalking, cyberstalking, bullying, and cyberbullying are comingled in the criminology and criminal justice literature. Stalking and cyberstalking converge in the literature with authors describing very similar behaviors yet labeling them differently from one work to another. Authors, too, describe bullying and cyberbullying similarly yet reserve these terms for situations involving teens and young adults. Our goal is to explore the conceptualizations in the literature in an effort to determine the boundaries, if any, between these similar concepts. We surveyed students in two large universities in the southeast to determine their perceptions regarding this definitional quagmire. Results indicated that, like researchers in this field, students had trouble clearly delineating the concepts. Finally, we propose that our discipline use these terms carefully and uniformly so that these concepts are better understood as separate and distinct behaviors and to remove the ambiguity amongst the terms.

Authors

• Angela Overton, Georgia State University

• Jessica Huffman, Old Dominion University