When Sameer and I first became interested in studying cyberbullying back in 2001, we began our inquiry by simply speaking with folks. We talked with parents and teens, but also with teachers and other school staff, as well as law enforcement officers and anyone else who worked with young people. We wanted to know more about the harms youth were experiencing online.
After more than two years of delays from our university’s Institutional Review Board, we administered our first pilot survey in the spring of 2004. We targeted teens by including a link on a website popular with this population. We invited respondents to complete a survey about their online experiences. We included a variety of questions, including if they had been called names by other people online, if someone had spread rumors about them online, and if they had been threatened online. We also asked where they were bullied online (e.g., chat room, newsgroup, cell phone text message). Finally, we asked whether they had bullied others online. It was a very simple survey, with only a handful of questions.
We did also include one open-ended question in the survey that asked respondents to tell us in their own words about “their most recent experience with cyberbullying.” What happened? Who did it? How did it make you feel? Who did you tell? We assumed that since we were targeting youth we would get very short answers: “My friend at school called me a name and it made me mad.” “This online kid said something mean. I didn’t tell anyone.” But that’s not what happened. Many respondents wrote paragraphs with so much detail about their experience. This was a sign to us that they had a story to tell. We listened, and cyberbullying has been our primary area of research ever since.
From that first survey more than 20 years ago, we’ve surveyed more than 50,000 individuals from multiple countries. Most of our research participants have been youth, but we’ve also studied parents, teachers, and law enforcement officers. As our study populations have evolved, so too have our methodologies. We’ve surveyed students at school using paper instruments, and used email to target nationally representative samples of youth. Across all of these studies, our purpose is to better understand the nature and extent of cyberbullying, as well as its causes and consequences. We use these data to inform policy and practice and to, in short, make online life better for youth and their caretakers.
As other researchers come across our cyberbullying work in our books or in academic journals, we regularly—at least weekly—receive requests to utilize our instrument in their studies. We are fine with this, and always send copies of our most recent cyberbullying questions, along with validity and reliability analyses we have done over the years. We appreciate that variations of our instrument have been used in dozens—maybe hundreds—of analyses involving samples from all around the world. To give even greater access to our questions, we have now posted them online for anyone to use. All we ask is that researchers who use our instrument provide proper attribution. We’d also like to receive copies of any papers published from data that used our questions.
In the end, we’re all in this together, and it will take a collective effort if we are going to be able to fully understand this problem in a way that can meaningfully impact it. We will continue to study cyberbullying, and our instrument and methodologies will continue to evolve, as technology does, so please revisit our survey instrument page and stay in touch. In fact, we are currently developing and piloting a modified instrument that may be even better assess experience with cyberbullying and other forms of online aggression. So stay tuned!