Researching Cyberbullying: A Colourful Palette of Methods and Experiences

Cyberbullying is a specific form of online aggression that has mainly been investigated amongst children, adolescents, and emerging adults. They can be involved in cyberbullying as a victim, perpetrator, and/or bystander. Cyberbullying research has made use of quantitative methods (such as cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys and experiments) as well as qualitative methods (such as interviews and focus groups) in both off- and online settings (e.g. school surveys and online interviews). Apart from methods that rely on respondents’ active involvement, researchers have also employed methods that focus on analysing existing online data that represent cyberbullying instances or people’s accounts thereof (e.g. manual or automatic content analysis and automatic detection). As cyberbullying research often involves young people and deals with transgressive and harmful behaviours, it requires scholars to carefully reflect upon ethical issues (e.g. informed consent and assent, confidentiality, and power relationships).