Traditional Bullying Vs Cyberbullying

Cyberbullying Vs. Traditional Bullying – Which is Worse? Bullying is defined by and made up of three different components, aggression, repetition, and power imbalance (Arnett, 2013). It is present across cultures and is even found in nature among animal groups. Bullying has been a part of life since the beginning of time, but due to the recent rise in technology use there has been a significant shift in the kind of bullying that is taking place. Cyberbullying, which is bullying behavior that takes place through different sources of technology such as the Internet, mobile devices, or email, is taking over in the bullying world (Arnett, 2013). In this paper, current research literature on cyberbullying versus traditional forms of bullying will

For this study the data came from 28,104 randomly selected adolescents from 58 Maryland high schools that ranged from grade 9 to 12 (Waasdorp & Bradshaw, 2015). The results of this study indicate that there is a high overlap between cyberbullying and traditional cyberbullying. An additional finding of this study found that girls were more often the victims of cyberbullying, but it did not find that the effects or outcomes of the cyberbullying were more detrimental to girls than boys (Waasdorp & Bradshaw, 2015). Something that was discovered in this study that differs from the results of the previous two studies mentioned is that if someone is a victim of cyberbullying they are likely experiencing other forms of bullying as well. Therefore, there were some poorer outcomes associated with those that were experiencing both cyber and traditional forms of bullying (Waasdorp & Bradshaw,

Bullying is harmful regardless of the form it takes and it can cause significant long-term negative outcomes for both the victims and bullies. It was difficult to find any literature that favored either form of bullying to be more detrimental to the victim; therefore, I believe it is quite clear that they are both equally detrimental to the well-being and outcome of someone who is being bullied. Each of the discussed articles and studies were backed up by empirical data, but as to how reliable that empirical data is, that is hard to say. Waasdorp and Bradshaw’s study had over 28,000 participants, but they were all from Maryland high schools. Although there was a large amount of participants, does that make the data generalizable to the whole population, or even just to the United States population? I do not think it does, because even though there was a large population of participants, they were all from one place in the world and Maryland high schools, I am sure, are different that others across the states. In Horner, Asher, and Fireman’s studies there were less than 100 participants in the first study and less than 50 in the second. How could a sample so small give generalizable results? I do not think it can. The same argument goes for Conway, Gomez-Garibello, and Talwar’s study.