摘要：Cyberbullying is a new recent form of bullying or harassment using electronic means to aggressively and intentionally harm someone repeatedly and over time, where a power imbalance exists between cyberbullies and the victims. (1, 2) With computers and mobile phones now a part of everyday life for youths, there are a multitude of ways for students to engage in cyberbullying, including the use of email, blogs, websites, chat rooms, mobile phones, instant messaging, webpages, text messages, and online games. Through these media, harmful messages can reach large audiences in a short span of time. Youths who are cyberbullied are more likely to experience psychiatric problems, substance use, offline victimization, delinquency and aggression. (3, 4) In Canada, cyberbullying recently became a priority on the policy agenda following the suicides of two teenagers. (5) These highly publicized cases of cyberbullying have attracted extensive media attention both nationally and globally.
Given these serious consequences for cybervictimization of youths, understanding the etiology of cybervictimization by identifying its important predictors is essential to help schools develop prevention and intervention strategies for reducing cyberbullying and victimization. Children are typically enmeshed in families and schools, which are situated in neighbourhoods. The ecological systems theory contends that a community's contextual environment influences an individual's risk for involvement in deviant or aggressive behaviours. (6) Understanding the factors that predict bullying behaviour in school therefore requires a close examination of the complex inter-relationships between individual and environment. Under the ecological system theory, the multi-level contexts include individual characteristics (i.e., socio-demographic characteristics, behaviour and mental health variables), microsystem (interpersonal relationships of individuals within immediate settings, i.e., parent-youth relationship or peer relationships), mesosystem (interconnections between the microsystems, i.e., interactions between the family and teachers), exosystem (indirect environment, which does not contain the child, but affects the setting in which the child lives, i.e., school and community characteristics), macrosystem (cultural norms and beliefs, religious affiliation), and chronosystem factors (change in family structure). (6)
