The overlap between cyberbullying perpetration and victimisation: exploring the psychosocial characteristics of Hong Kong adolescents

This study investigated the overlap between cyberbullying perpetration and victimisation among 1,893 adolescents. The prevalence of general, overt-aggressive, and relational-aggressive cyberbullying was examined, based on the adolescents’ psychosocial characteristics including self-esteem, prosocial behaviour, empathy, family attachment, perception of a harmonious school, sense of school belonging, and positive school experiences. Results revealed that different kinds of cyberbullying perpetration and victimisation were positively correlated, and further tests using multivariate analysis confirmed the relationship between these two experiences. Logistic regressions suggested that cyberbullying perpetration could predict victimisation, regardless of the type of cyberbullying behaviour, and a considerable degree of overlap was found between different types of cyberbullying perpetration and victimisation based on the further results of bivariate probit models. The rho correlations from these unadjusted bivariate probit models suggested that the categories of general, overt-aggressive, and relational-aggressive cyberbullying were significantly overlapped. To conclude, implications for clinical practice and the study’s limitations are discussed.