Cyberbullying as a negative result of cyber-culture of Slovak children and adolescents: selected research findings

Cyber-culture points out the life in cyberspace and goes beyond national cultures. It is particularly attractive for the young people who use Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) to express their attitudes, values, beliefs and thinking. Those do not need to be necessarily in accordance with the standards of an individual society. Cyberculture becomes dangerous. Great risk lies in cyberbullying that represents negative impact of cyber-culture on human behavior. The aim of the study is to detect cyberbullying as a negative impact of cyber-culture among of Slovak children and adolescents. The research was carried out on a sample of 1619 11-18-year old respondents (average age was 14.51). Results of cyberbullying research carried out using Latent Class Analysis (LCA) have proved the appropriateness of 3-latent-class module. Relative entropy of the module reached 0.915. It was demonstrated that 52.9% of respondents belonged to the group of uninvolved, 42.7% were victims and 4.4% were victims-aggressors. Being a negative consequence of cyber-culture, cyberbullying is a challenge that educators - including other assisting professions - face when educating children and adolescents to orientate in cyberspace, behave responsibly, express themselves in a way that would not interfere others’ integrity and identity (personal and virtual). The study was written under VEGA MŠVVaŠ SR a SAV č. 1/0244/15: “Detekcia a riešenie kyberšikany”.

The study is the first that discusses the latent class analysis of cyberbullying in Slovak Republic. "The research did not proved the differences in forms of cyberbullying as per gender. Most frequent form of cyberbullying committed by boys included sending offensive insults via internet (28.9%), sending false information (24.3%) and sharing controversial photographs via internet (19.6%)." (Hollá, 2016) Girls are most often cyberbullied in a form of posting false information (17.9%), sending insulting messages and comments (17.6%) and sharing controversial photographs via internet (11.1%). The research has shown that most victims of cyberbullying happen to be on Facebook social network.