Not Everyone Thinks It's Bad: A Study of Youth's Attitudes Toward Cyberbullying

• In Event: Moral Development in Broad Contexts

Abstract

This paper studies the following two questions: (1) How can attitudes towards cyberbullying be empirically measured and (2) what attitudes do Swiss teenage students have towards cyberbullying? In our effort to clarify the questions, we developed an instrument for measuring students’ attitudes towards cyberbullying. The primary objective of this paper is to validate the measurement scale. In a second step, we present the characteristics of attitudes among students in Switzerland. Overall, the students interviewed, especially girls, expressed negative opinions of cyberbullying. However, previous perpetrators of cyberbullying do not rate the behavior as negatively. Even though a clear majority of the students are opposed to cyberbullying, about a quarter of them tend not to rate such behavior as reprehensible.

Authors

• Arvid Nagel, St.Gallen University of Teacher Education

• Perry P. Gao, Education Bridge Institute

• Horst Biedermann, Saint Gallen University of Teacher Education

• Fritz K. Oser, University of Fribourg