Does Cyberbullying Prevalence Among Adolescents Relate With Country Socioeconomic and Development Indicators? An Ecological Study of 31 Countries.

BACKGROUND: In addition to individual characteristics, it is also important to evaluate how the environment may influence the dynamics of cyberbullying. We aim to study the correlation between cyberbullying prevalence among adolescents and selected country-level indicators.

METHODS: We used two different data sources: data from a previously published literature review, to identify information on cyberbullying prevalence across countries, and data from the World Bank databases, to extract information on country-level indicators. A correlation matrix was used to present the association between the selected country-level indicators and the prevalence of cyberbullying.

RESULTS: We observed a statistically significant negative correlation between cyberbullying victimization (cybervictims and cyberbully-victims, respectively) and gross domestic product (r = -.474 and -.842), gross national income (r = -.485 and -.758), enrollment in secondary (r = -.446 and -.898) and tertiary education (r = -.222 and -.881), the number of secure Internet servers (r = -.118 and -.794), and the number of Internet users (r = -.190 and -.818).

CONCLUSIONS: A country's educational level seems to be an important contributor to the occurrence of cyberbullying.