Differences in Coping Strategies for Public and Private Face-to-Face and Cyber Victimization among Adolescents in Six Countries

Abstract

The aim of this study was to examine the role of publicity (private versus public) and medium (face-to-face versus cyber) in adolescents’ coping strategies for hypothetical victimization, while also considering culture. Participants were adolescents from China, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, India, Japan, and the United States. The study also controlled for adolescents’ gender, individualism, and collectivism. Adolescents completed questionnaires on the hypothetical coping strategies that they would use for four scenarios, including public face-to-face victimization, public cyber victimization, private face-to-face victimization, and private cyber victimization. Overall, the findings revealed that adolescents relied more on avoidance, social support, retaliation, helplessness, and ignoring for public and face-to-face forms of victimization than for private and cyber forms of victimization. Cross-cultural differences in coping strategies are discussed.

Keywords

Cyber victimization bullying victimization adolescence coping strategy cross-cultural differences

Worldwide, adolescents are exposed to aggression, including both face-to-face and cyber forms. An understanding of how adolescents around the world cope with these experiences is needed to help researchers develop culturally sensitive intervention and prevention programs. Furthermore, bullying might take different forms, such as occurring either publically or privately and online or offline, which might also alter how adolescents cope with these experiences. To this end, the present study examined coping strategies for public and private forms of face-to-face and cyber victimization among adolescents from China, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, India, Japan, and the United States (U.S.).

Cyber Victimization

Cyber victimization is defined as experiencing harm via electronic technologies (Grigg, 2010). These behaviors might include receiving degrading or hostile messages from someone, being the target of rumors, or being called mean names. This definition of cyber victimization does not include repetition and power imbalance as these core elements of bullying are hard to define within cyberbullying (see Corcoran, Mc Guckin, & Prentice, 2015 for a review). Cyber victimization is important to investigate because it relates to various consequences, including depression, anxiety, and academic difficulties (Perren et al., 2012; Smith et al., 2008; Wright, 2015). Furthermore, research has revealed that cyber victimization is a global concern, not localized to one region of the world (Barlett et al., 2013; Livingston, Haddon, Görzig, & Ólafsson, 2011; Wright et al., 2015). Most pertinent to this present study is the exposure of Chinese, Cypriot, Czech, Indian, Japanese, and U.S. adolescents to cyber victimization. The available research has documented cyber victimization among these adolescents. For instance, a large-scale survey, EU Kids Online II, found that children and adolescents from the Czech Republic had slightly higher exposure to cyber victimization (8%) when compared to the European average (6%), while Cypriot adolescents had lower rates (5%) than the average European exposure (Livingston et al., 2011). Another study found that Indian adolescents experienced the most cyber victimization, followed by Chinese and Japanese adolescents (Wright et al., 2015). Other research has revealed that U.S. adolescents experienced more cyber victimization when compared to Japanese adolescents (Barlett et al., 2013). Regardless of mean-level differences in the experience of cyber victimization, it is clear that adolescents from these target countries are exposed to thesebehaviors.

Victimization, Culture, and Coping

When confronted with a stressful situation, individuals attempt to mitigate or eliminate negative effects. Lazarus and Folkman (1984) conceptualized two levels of appraisal for dealing with stressful situations. Primary appraisal refers to the meaning that people assign to stressful situations and it is influenced by people’s values, commitments, and goals, which are typically violated by experiencing stress (Park & Folkman, 1997). Secondary appraisal involves people’s evaluations of various coping strategies and the outcomes of such strategies (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). After appraising the stressful situation and deciding on a coping strategy or strategies to use, people then enact the chosen strategy or strategies. In the peer victimization literature, there are typically five coping strategies investigated, including initial reactive responses toward the bully or getting back at the bully (e.g., retaliation), support seeking (e.g., asking for help), avoidance (e.g., not thinking about the situation), helplessness (e.g., inability to take control over the situation), and emotion-focused strategies (e.g., ignoring) (Perren et al., 2012). Emotion-focused coping strategies involve trying to reduce the negative emotional responses associated with the stressful situation. The coping strategy of ignoring is a type of emotion-focused coping strategy as the individual is attempting to diminish or reject the emotions elicited from the situation.

Given cultural differences across the countries examined in this study, it is reasonable to expect that adolescents might cope differently with peer victimization. Lam and Zane’s (2004) study corroborated this proposal by revealing that Asian Americans utilized more indirect control coping strategies for peer victimization, while European Americans used more direct control coping strategies. Because the meaning of stressful situations and the ways people cope with such situations is influenced by their belief systems, culture is a critical factor to consider as people might adopt coping strategies appropriate to their cultural contexts (Marsella & Dash-Scheuer, 1988). In collectivistic societies, coping strategies are tied to fitting people’s environments, instead of meeting personal needs, like in individualistic societies (Essau & Trommsdorff, 1996; Flammer et al., 1995).

Culture is not the only factor influencing the choice of coping strategies. The choice of coping strategies can also depend on the type of stressful situation (e.g., public victimization, private victimization). Stronger perceptions of emotional impact regarding a stressful situation are linked to the use of more coping strategies (Terry, 1994). The available research is mixed regarding the emotional impact of face-to-face and cyber victimization, with some studies revealing similar emotional impacts and others indicating that the emotional impact is greater for cyber victimization, while some researchers find that face-to-face victimization had a stronger emotional effect (Ortega, Elipe, Mora-Mechan, Calmaestra, & Vega, 2009; Smith et al., 2008). These studies differed with regard to definitions and the measurement of victimization, which could account for the mixed findings.

Thus far, research has not examined whether coping strategies for victimization might vary based on the type of victimization. Although Sticca and Perren (2013) did not investigate coping strategies, they examined differences in the perceived harm of public and private face-to-face and cyber victimization. Perceived harm, a broader from of impact, encompasses not only emotional impact, but also physical and social impacts. Public face-to-face victimization is described as experiencing face-to-face bullying when other adolescents are present, while private face-to-face victimization occurs between the bully and the victim, without any other adolescents present. Sticca and Perren found that adolescents perceived the most harm in public forms of victimization, and that cyber victimization was perceived as more harmful than face-to-face victimization. Given Sticca and Perren’s (2013) and Terry’s (1994) findings, adolescents’ use of coping strategies might be different for public victimization when compared to private victimization, due to public victimization being perceived as more emotionally harmful.

The Present Study

There are noticeable gaps in the literature concerning country of origin differences in the coping strategies used to deal with public and private face-to-face and cyber victimization. The aim of the present study was to investigate these differences among adolescents in China, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, India, Japan, and the U.S, while accounting for gender, individualism, and collectivism. Gender was included as a control variable due to inconsistent findings regarding gender and coping strategies for hypothetical face-to-face and cyber victimization situations (Adams, 2010; Akbulut, Sahih, & Eristi, 2010; Broderick, 1998; Didden et al., 2009; Erdur-Baker, 2010; Eshenback, Kohlmann, & Lohaus, 2007; Hinduja & Patchin, 2007; Huang & Chou, 2010; Kowalski & Limber, 2007; Marcum, Higgins, Freiburger, & Ricketts, 2012; Wright & Li, 2013). Although there might be differences based on individualism and collectivism, we were concerned with potential country-level differences. The hypothetical victimization scenarios in the study varied based on publicity (i.e., public or private) and medium (i.e., face-to-face or cyber), including: Public face-to-face victimization, public cyber victimization, private face-to-face victimization, public cyber victimization. This was an exploratory study which aimed to understand how different forms of peer victimization impact adolescents’ hypothetical coping strategies. Therefore, no specific hypotheses were made as previous research is currently unavailable.

Methods

Participants

Participants were 3,433 adolescents (age range 11–15 years old) from China (n = 674; 46.7% girls; age range 11–15), Cyprus (n = 470; 49.8% girls; age range 11–15), the Czech Republic (n = 537; 52.1% girls; age range 11–15), India (n = 480; 46.5% girls; age range 11–15), Japan (n = 460; 52.6% girls; age range 11–12), and the United States (n = 812; 50.2% girls; age range 12–14). Participants were either from two schools in northern China, four schools in Northern Cyprus, 18 schools in southeastern Czech Republic, six schools in southwestern India, two schools in Japan on the east coast of the main island, and seven schools in the Midwestern United States. With the exception of Japanese participants, all data was collected in Fall 2013. Japanese schools begin in April, and consequently data was collected in July 2014. No income information was collected. Ethnicity information was not collected in all countries.

Measures

Individualism and Collectivism

Adolescents were asked about their endorsement of collectivism and individualism (Li, Wang, Wang, & Shi, 2010). There were 16 items included for this questionnaire, with eight assessing individualism (e.g., Winning is everything) and eight assessing collectivism (e.g., Family members should stick together, no matter what sacrifices are required). All items were rated on a scale of 1 (Absolutely disagree) to 9 (Absolutely agree) and averaged to form separate composite scores. For individualism, an alpha of 0.80 was found for China, 0.78 for Cyprus, 0.70 for the Czech Republic, 0.80 for India, 0.75 for Japan, and 0.73 for the U.S. For collectivism, an alpha of 0.84 was found for China, 0.85 for Cyprus, 0.87 for the Czech Republic, 0.83 for India, for Japan, and 0.79 for the U.S.

Coping Strategies for Public and Private Forms of Face-to-Face Victimization and Cyber Victimization Situations

Adolescents read four different victimization vignettes. The vignettes varied in regards to the medium (face-to-face or cyber) and publicity (public or private), resulting in four situations: Public face-to-face victimization, private face-to-face victimization, public cyber victimization, and private cyber victimization. An example of the public face-to-face victimization situation is as follows: “A classmate says something really nasty and humiliating to you at school in front of everyone,” with bold font and an underline under “at school in front of everyone.” If the situation was about cyber victimization, then the “at school” was replaced with “online.” Similarly, if the situation was private, then the “in front of everyone” was replaced with “but nobody is around to hear/see it.” After reading each of the vignettes, adolescents rated ten coping strategies, which corresponded to social support (3 items; e.g., I would talk to my family about it), retaliation (1 item; i.e., I would get back at him/her), avoidance (4 items; e.g., I would try not to think about the situation), ignoring (1 item; i.e., I would decide to ignore him/her), and helplessness (1 item; i.e., I would do nothing because I do not want to make it worse) on a scale of 1 (Definitely would NOT) to 5 (Definitely WOULD do) (Perren et al., 2012). Items for social support and avoidance were averaged separately to form scores for each of these coping strategies. Overall Cronbach’s alphas ranged from 0.29 to 0.83 for the coping strategies of social support and avoidance. For social support across all situations, an alpha of 0.65 was obtained for China, 0.54 for Cyprus, 0.67 for the Czech Republic, 0.48 for India, 0.83 for Japan, and 0.72 for the U.S. For avoidance across all four situations, an alpha of.31 was obtained for China, 0.37 for Cyprus, 0.46 for the Czech Republic, 0.29 for India, 0.46 for Japan, and 0.45 for the U.S.

Procedures

Schools were recruited through calls or emails to principals. After agreeing to allow their students to participate in the study, classroom announcements were made, which explained the nature of the study, how adolescents could participate, and what they would do if they were to participate. Consent documents were sent home with adolescents after the initial classroom announcement, and these documents were returned to adolescents’ teachers. The exceptions to the consent procedure were Japan and the Czech Republic in which school principals provided their consent for adolescents’ participation. For these countries, it is believed that the school principal has the best interest of the children, similar to parents. Thus, active consent procedures were used in all countries, except in Japan and the Czech Republic, where passive consent was used. Data was collected at adolescents’ schools, during regular school hours. At the time of data collection, adolescents provided their own assent to participate. None refused to participate. Other than a few make-up sessions in some countries, all data was collected once per school. Measures were translated into the main language of the adolescents’ country of origin from English.

Analytic Strategy

A series of multiple group multilevel models (Hox, 2010; Snijders & Bosker, 2012) with repeated measures at level 1 nested in students at level 2 comparing countries of origin were estimated in Mplus 7.3, with coping strategies as the dependent variables. At level 1, publicity (0 = private, 1 = public), medium (0 = face-to-face or cyber, 1 = cyber), and interaction between publicity and medium were included as predictors in the model. At level 2, gender, individualism, and collectivism were included as covariates in the model. Maximum likelihood estimator with robust standard errors (MLR) using a sandwich estimator taking into account the non-independence of observations due to the class level was used to estimate all models.

Missing Data

In total, 0.7% of the data were missing, resulting from 250 incomplete records, namely 40 from the Chinese sample, 104 from the Cypriot sample, 75 from the Czech sample, 3 from the Indian sample, 25 from the Japanese sample, and 3 from the U.S. sample. Missing data was handled using full information maximum likelihood (FIML) estimation under the missing at random (MAR) assumption (Enders, 2010).

Results

In this section, we present descriptive statistics for the main variables of the study and the results of the multilevel regression models. Standardized estimates β using StdY standardization (i.e., based on the variance of the outcome variable) were provided as an effect size measure. StdY standardization was used due to the binary predictors of publicity, medium, and gender. Interaction plots including 95% confidence intervals are shown when the interaction effect between publicity and medium were statisticallysignificant. Means and standard deviation of all coping strategies for public and private forms of face-to-face and cyber victimization in each country are presented in Table 1. Table 2 displays all βs andp-values for each of the coping strategies and across the six countries.

Social Support

Public face-to-face victimization elicited more of the social support coping strategy when compared to private face-to-face victimization among Chinese, Cypriot, Czech, Indian, and U.S. adolescents. In addition, this coping strategy was used more by Czech adolescents for face-to-face victimization than cyber victimization. An interaction was found between medium and publicity for Chinese adolescents such that they used more social support for public face-to-face victimization than for private face-to-face victimization (Fig. 1a). No difference was found for public and private cyber victimization among Chinese adolescents.

Avoidance

Avoidance was utilized more among Chinese, Czech, Japanese, and U.S. adolescents for public face-to-face victimization than private face-to-face victimization. U.S. adolescents also used this coping strategy more for private face-to-face victimization than private cyber victimization. There was an interaction found between medium and publicity for Chinese adolescents (Fig. 1b). Avoidance was used more for public face-to-face and cyber victimization than for private face-to-face and cyber victimization.

Ignoring

Chinese, Cypriot, Czech, Japanese, and U.S. adolescents relied more on this coping strategy for public face-to-face victimization when compared to privateface-to-face victimization. In addition, Chinese and Cypriot adolescents were more likely to rely on ignoring as a coping strategy for face-to-face victimization than cyber victimization. An interaction was found between medium and publicity for Indian and Japanese adolescents. Indian adolescents relied on this coping strategy more for private cyber victimization than for public cyber victimization, with no difference found for public and private face-to-face victimization (Fig. 1c). On the other hand, Japanese adolescents were more likely to use ignoring for public face-to-face and cyber victimization than private face-to-face and cyber victimization (Fig. 1d).

Helplessness

Japanese adolescents relied more on helplessness for public face-to-face victimization when compared to private face-to-face victimization. There was an interaction found between medium and publicity for these adolescents (Fig. 1e). In particular, the helplessness coping strategy was used more for public face-to-face victimization than for private face-to-face victimization. No difference was found for public and private cyber victimization.

Retaliation

Retaliation was used more for public face-to-face victimization than for private face-to-face victimization among all adolescents, except Indian adolescents. The interaction between medium and publicity was significant for Czech and Japanese adolescents. Czech adolescents were more likely to utilize retaliation as a coping strategy for public face-to-face victimization than private face-to-face victimization and for private cyber victimization than public cyber victimization (Fig. 1f). Similar patterns were found for Chinese adolescents, except they did not use retaliation more for public or private cyber victimization (Fig. 1g).

Discussion

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of publicity (private versus public) and medium (face-to-face versus cyber) in Chinese, Cypriot, Czech, Indian, Japanese, and U.S. adolescents’ coping strategies for hypothetical victimization, while accounting for gender, individualism, and collectivism. The findings revealed complex differences in coping strategies based on publicity and medium as well as potential country of origin differences. In general, adolescents indicated that they would utilize social support, avoidance, ignoring, helplessness, and retaliation more so for public victimization when compared to private victimization and for face-to-face victimization in comparison to cyber victimization.

Thus far, no studies have focused on adolescents’ use of coping strategies based on both the medium and publicity. The current study addresses this gap in the literature. Understanding adolescents’ coping strategies is important because such strategies relate to their short-term and long-term adjustment and their later involvement in face-to-face and cyber victimization (Hampel & Petermann, 2005; Newman, Holden, & Delville, 2011). Findings from this study indicate the importance of examining multiple contexts when assessing coping strategies. Additional research should further focus on these contexts and the short-term and long-term effects of coping strategies. For example, it might be likely that a coping strategy for one context (e.g., public face-to-face victimization) has different impacts on adjustment and future behavior than when it is used for other contexts (e.g., private face-to-face victimization and public and private cyber victimization). Although just a proposal, follow-up research should be conducted to better understand the role of multiple contexts on adolescents’ coping strategies.

Face-to-face and cyber victimization will continue to be problems for adolescents and schools. Strategies for preventing and intervening in victimization require schools to distribute information used to identify adolescents at risk for victimization, provide support groups for students new to the school setting, offer services for victims of face-to-face bullying and cyberbullying, help victims respond appropriately to bullying, offer workshops for staff on the latest developments in research on victimization, encourage students to not be bystanders, and to establish a code of conduct (Brunner & Lewis, 2007; Bullock, Wong-Lo, & Gable, 2011; Snakenborg, Van Acker, & Gable, 2011). Based on the current study’s findings, it is important that schools intervene to prevent peer victimization, on-campus and off-campus, with attention to the medium (face-to-face, cyber) and publicity (public, private). This is especially important as adolescents relied more on certain coping strategies, even those that might potentially be ineffective, depending on the context. The reliance on ineffective coping strategies could make adolescents more vulnerable to repeated victimization.

Although the current study did not specifically compare coping strategies across the six countries, there were some findings that were not consistent across the countries. In particular, Indian adolescents relied more on ignoring for private cyber victimization than public victimization. Czech adolescents used retaliation more for private cyber victimization when compared to public cyber victimization, while Chinese adolescents did not differ in their desire to use retaliation for either public or private cyber victimization. The overall findings from the other countries included using ignoring and retaliation more for public victimization than for private victimization, with Japanese adolescents utilizing ignoring more for public cyber victimization than private cyber victimization. In addition, the coping strategy of helplessness did not vary based on either the publicity or medium for adolescents of any country, except for Japanese adolescents, who used it more for public face-to-face victimization than private face-to-face victimization. Previous research has revealed that coping strategies differ for face-to-face victimization based on country of origin (Essau & Trommsdorff, 1996; Flammer et al., 1995). Findings of the present study might also suggest that similar patterns could be found for cyber victimization. Follow-up research should be conducted to better understand how country of origin might impact adolescents’ coping strategies for public and private face-to-face and cyber victimization. Such a future direction is important as there were some patterns that deviated from the study’s general findings (i.e., using coping strategies more for public victimization and face-to-face victimization). The findings from the present study might have implications for the development of culturally-sensitive intervention and prevention programs aimed at reducing adolescents’ involvement in face-to-face bullying and cyberbullying in multiple contexts across various countries.

The findings from the present study are complex, warranting some additional investigations to further our understanding of the results. The study’s design was cross-sectional and it is difficult to understand whether such findings might be found among younger and older populations. In addition, age differences might be found in regards to the medium and publicity. Some of the coping strategy items also included one item, which made it impossible to assess reliability. Ethnicity was not assessed in each of the countries, making it difficult to compare coping strategy differences across countries. Such a focus is important as ethnicity might also have an impact on coping strategies. This should be investigated in future research. More development should be given to including additional items to assess the coping strategies of retaliation, avoidance, ignoring, and helplessness. Furthermore, there were reliability issues for social support and avoidance, which were attributed to measurement issues in some of the countries, particularly Cyprus, the Czech Republic, and India. Such problems arise when instruments are developed with a dominant group and applied to other groups. Thus, a possible explanation for the study’s results might be the low alphas for the coping strategies of social support and avoidance. Additional measurement development should be undertaken on coping strategies in future cross-cultural research. A final suggestion for future research is to investigate coping strategy differences based on the medium and publicity among actual victims of face-to-face bullying and cyberbullying.

Overall, the findings from the present study indicate the importance of considering medium (face-to-face, cyber) and publicity (public, private) when examining coping strategies. The findings also highlight the need for multipronged solutions designed to address bullying and victimization across the world.

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

This work was partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B) Grant Number 26870535.

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