Cyberbullying perpetration and victimization among adolescents in Hong Kong

a r t i c l e i n f o Cyberbullying is a growing concern worldwide. Using a sample of 1917 secondary adolescents from seven schools, five psychometric measures (self-efficacy, empathy level, feelings regarding a harmonious school, sense of belonging to the school, and psychosocial wellbeing) and five scales regarding bullying experiences (cyber-and traditional bullying perpetration and victimization; reactions to cyberbullying victimization) were administered to explore the prevalence of cyberbullying in Hong Kong. Findings indicated that male adolescents were more likely than female adolescents to cyberbully others and to be cyber-victimized. Cyberbullying perpe-tration and victimization were found to be negatively associated with the adolescents' psychosocial health and sense of belonging to school. Cyber-and traditional bullying were positively correlated. Multivariate analyses indicated that being male, having a low sense of belonging to school, involvement in traditional bullying perpetra-tion, and experiencing cyber-victimization were associated with an increased propensity to cyberbully others. Technology is advancing rapidly, and peer harassment and aggression are no longer limited to traditional bullying through physical contact. Over the past decade, information and communication technology (ICT) has become increasingly important in the lives of adolescents. In a report by Lenhart, Madden, and Hitlin (2005), it is estimated that close to 90% of American adolescents aged 12 to 17 years surf the Inter-net, with 51% of them using it on a daily basis. Nearly half of the adolescents surveyed have personal mobile phones, and 33% have used a mobile phone to send a text message (Lenhart et al., 2005). Such heavy use of the Internet is not novel among adolescents in Hong Kong. Many empirical studies have been conducted on Hong Kong adolescents on their excessive and/or addictive use of the Internet. Findings of recent studies indicate that a substantially high prevalence rate of internet addiction is reported among Hong Kong adolescents (range In reality, the heavy usage of ICT such as instant mes-saging, e-mail, text messaging, blogs, and social networking sites not only allows adolescents to connect with friends and family, but at the same time also creates the potential to meet and interact with others in harmful ways (Ybarra, Diener-West, & Leaf, 2007). Cyberbullying or online bullying is one such growing concern. Traditional bullying is a widespread problem in both school and community settings, and has long been researched by scholars in general, involves an individual being exposed to negative actions by one or more individuals regularly …