Youth with disabilities are overrepresented in the bullying dynamic and experience poor mental health and school engagement outcomes associated with this involvement. However, limited existing research has looked at differences in bullying involvement based on disability category, and how youth with disabilities make decisions about bullying…

The problem addressed in the research study was that cyber bullying and traditional bullying continued to increase at the research site during the past 4 years. The purpose of the study was to determine the influences of mental health services that were designed to decrease the negative effects of both cyber and traditional bullying on adolescent…

Approximately 11 million women and five million men in the United States report experiencing interpersonal violence (e.g., sexual violence, physical violence, psychological harassment, or stalking) before the age of 18 (CDC, n.d. -a). Victims may face a decline in grades, depression, anxiety, unwanted pregnancy, substance abuse, sexually…

Bullying has been a pervasive problem since the beginning of human history, however, with the advent and progression of technology, bullying has evolved. Cyberbullying is defined as "behavior performed through electronic or digital media by individuals or groups that repeatedly communicate hostile or aggressive messages intended to inflict…

Cyberbullying is a social relationship problem; however, there is limited research on college bystanders' responses to cyberbullying that occurs within social relationships. This dissertation extends the literature on the influence of relational closeness and popularity on bystanders' responses to bullying. The current study examines bystanders'…

Three studies were conducted to examine what factors were associated with expected bystander intervention across two different contexts (i.e., online and offline), two different age groups (i.e., adolescence and young adulthood) and three different forms of victimization (i.e., general cyberbullying, gender-based cyberbullying, and gender-based…

There are far too many painful stories about cyberbullying--stories about young adults and adolescents whose lives have been crushed or destroyed because of words, embarrassing pictures, and videos that have been posted on social media by their peers with the intention to defame their character and demean their self-esteem, sometimes to the point…

Nonconsensual pornography (NCP), the distribution of sexually graphic images or videos without consent, is a prevalent form of cyber sexual abuse (Eaton et al., 2017; Ruvalcaba & Eaton, 2019). In recent years, incidents of NCP have received increased attention as a growing number of celebrities and public figures have been at the center of…

Social media has become a crucial form of communication and social interaction. However, users are often unaware of the possible ramifications of using social media platforms or how their user-generated content is being used. The problem addressed in this study is that sexting, bullying, and cyberstalking occurs in all social media platforms…

An alarming number of early adolescents in the United States (i.e., youth ages 10 to 14 in middle school) are experiencing forms of victimization. Adolescents are increasingly using smartphones and various social media platforms, which has made many adolescents more vulnerable to victimization in cyberspaces. This "cyber-victimization"…

Biases in online platforms pose a threat to social inclusion. I examine the influence of social biases on online platforms. In my dissertation, I conduct empirical studies on online crowdfunding platforms (prosocial lending and educational crowdfunding) to investigate the influence of funders' or recipients' social backgrounds on the funding…

Given recent calls for advancing valid instrumentation in the field of cyberaggression, the present study evaluated construct validity and measurement invariance for the Cyberbullying Experiences Survey (CES) in a high school and college student sample. A series of confirmatory factor analyses (CFA), reliability analyses, and a nomological net…

This study examined the extent of cyber-bullying among college students and how well Ronald Akers' Social Learning Theory predicted cyber-bullying perpetration. In addition, this study explored students' use of media and the characteristics associated with involvement in cyber-bullying behaviors as victims, perpetrators, and observers.…

To identify a possible relationship between cyberbullying in the elementary school setting with increasing feelings of empathy and prosocial behaviors a mixed-method, quasi-experimental study was conducted. Lessons centered on prosocial behaviors, feelings of empathy and cyberbullying were conducted weekly in the classroom's morning meetings. The…

Sexually aggressive behavior is well-documented among college students. However, little is known about the role technology may play in facilitating this behavior. Given that social norms have been established as a useful framework for understanding problematic and risky behavior in college students, the current authors sought to determine whether…