Cyberbullying on social network sites poses a significant threat to the mental and physical health of victimized adolescents. Although the role of bystanders in solving bullying instances has been demonstrated repeatedly in research on traditional bullying, their role in cyberbullying remains relatively understudied. Therefore, we set up an experimental scenario study in order to examine the influence of contextual factors (severity of the incident, identity and behaviour of other bystanders) on bystanders’ behavioural intentions to help the victim or reinforce the bully in cases of harassment on Facebook. Four hundred and fifty-three second year students of Flemish secondary schools participated in the study. The results on the one hand showed that bystanders had higher behavioural intentions to help the victim when they witnessed a more severe incident. Incident severity also interacted with other bystanders’ identity in influencing behavioural intentions to help the victim. On the other hand, bystanders had higher behavioural intentions to join in the bullying when other bystanders were good friends rather than acquaintances. In addition, an interaction effect was found between other bystanders’ identity and behaviour on behavioural intentions to join in the bullying. Furthermore, both helping and reinforcing behavioural intentions differed according to gender.
Information- and communication technologies (ICT) offer this generation of youngsters ample opportunities to communicate with peers. However, in their social interactions via ICT youngsters can be confronted with undesirable phenomena such as cyberbullying. The large-scale EU Kids Online study on internet safety (Livingstone, Haddon, Görzig, & Olafsson, 2011) revealed that 9% of children between nine and sixteen years old had been bullied through the internet or mobile phones within the past year, while 5% had bullied others. Other studies in various countries, however, have reported higher prevalence rates: on average 24% for cyberbullying victimization and 18% for perpetration (Patchin & Hinduja, 2012). Cyberbullying victimization has been related to numerous negative health consequences, such as depression (e.g. Kowalski and Fedina, 2011, Machmutow et al., 2012 and Schneider et al., 2012), emotional distress (e.g. Mishna et al., 2012, Şahin, 2012 and Šléglová and Černá, 2011) and in extreme cases even self-harming behaviour (Price and Dalgleish, 2010 and Schneider et al., 2012) and suicide attempts (Schneider, O’Donnell, Stueve, & Coulter, 2012). We can therefore conclude that cyberbullying poses a significant threat for adolescents’ mental and physical health.
Nowadays, social network sites (SNS) are very popular amongst teenagers (Lenhart et al., 2007 and Livingstone et al., 2011), and we can see that these sites form a common venue for cyberbullying (Livingstone et al., 2011 and Ybarra and Mitchell, 2008). The important role of SNS in cyberbullying has led researchers to examine the prevalence of perpetrators and victims of cyberbullying on SNS (Ybarra & Mitchell, 2008). Nevertheless, the largest group involved in cyberbullying on SNS appears to be the bystanders or witnesses of cyberbullying incidents: Lenhart et al. (2011) found that 88% of US social-media using teens had witnessed harassment on SNS, while 15% had been victimized and 19% had harassed someone on SNS. They also investigated bystanders’ reactions towards harassment on SNS. A variety of reactions was found: 80% of bystanders had defended the victim (at least once in a while) and 79% indicated that they had told the bully to stop. In contrast, 91% indicated that they had just ignored what was going on and 21% had even joined in the bullying (Lenhart et al., 2011). The latter data, however, do not provide insight in the reasons why bystanders act or intend to act in a certain way when witnessing cyberbullying on SNS, insight which is essential in order to promote bystander behaviour aimed at helping the victim and discourage behaviour that reinforces the bully. Bystanders’ behaviour or behavioural intentions could for example be influenced by personal characteristics of the bystanders themselves (e.g. socio-demographic characteristics, personality, attitudes, norms), but also by contextual characteristics, such as features of the cyberbullying incident and characteristics of other people involved in the incident (the bully, other bystanders). In order to shed light on the latter category of characteristics, we set up an experimental design through which we investigated the influence of contextual characteristics of a harassing incident on SNS on bystanders’ behavioural intentions to help the victim or reinforce the bully.
6. Conclusion and discussion
In this study we used an experimental design to examine contextual influences of a harassing incident on SNS on bystanders’ behavioural intentions to help the victim or reinforce the bully. In total, three contextual influences were examined: the severity of the incident, the identity of other bystanders who are present and the behaviour of these other bystanders. In addition, gender was added to the models as a control variable.
