Reziproke Effekte von Cyber-Mobbing

Wie nehmen Opfer Cyber-Mobbing wahr?

In our sample 139 (14 percent) had experienced cyberbullying as victims yet. Concerning their emotional reactions they were asked whether they felt annoyed, helpless, abandoned, ashamed, angry, sad or whether they were afraid that others will learn about the incident. All these variables form one dimension “emotionality of the reaction”. The reliability was calculated with Cronbachs Alpha = 0.82. The accordingly built index was used in the following analysis. It can be shown that girls react in a more emotional way than boys, whereas age does not influence the emotional reaction. If victims know the perpetrator they react more emotional. Furthermore, the emotional reactions correlate strongly with the presumed influence of the incident on other people, e.g. their friends and also with their experience after the incident happened, e.g. with the feeling of being socially isolated. For further inquiries we compared victims of public cyber-bullying-attack with non-victims. While we asked the victims about their actual perceptions we asked non-victims about their presumptions of a victim’s reaction. The results show that victims and non-victims differ significantly in their perception respectively estimation of cyberbullying. Non-victims think that victims are socially isolated more often than victims themselves say. They also think that other people (friends, classmates, etc.) are influenced stronger than victims think. The results show that the reciprocal effects approach can be a useful theoretical background for cyberbullying research. Further research should now focus on a more detailed comparison of perpetrators estimation and victims’ experience.

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