Validating a Cyberbullying Victimization Measure Among Undergraduates

Cyberbullying—the intentional, repeated online harassment of a person with less perceived social power (Patchin & Hinduja, 2015)—is a pervasive issue facing today's college students (Bauman & Baldasare, 2015; Francisco et al., 2015; Myers & Cowie, 2019). As a result of cyberbullying, victimized students can suffer social, psychological, and academic consequences (Hinduja & Patchin, 2015; Juvonen & Gross, 2008). While K–12 research has been focused on developing instruments for measuring victimization among adolescents (e.g., Patchin & Hinduja, 2015), the higher education literature on how to measure cyberbullying victimization among college students is still contested terrain (e.g., Doane et al., 2013; DuMont, 2016). Without a valid and usable instrument, student affairs researchers and practitioners are unprepared to capture the trends in cyberbullying and the extent to which their students are experiencing victimization. This article reports the psychometric validation of a cyberbullying victimization scale determined to be a reliable instrument to evaluate college students and to inform evidence-based interventions and student support services.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Universities have a legal responsibility to take reasonable care to minimize the risk of injury to students, foster a harassment-free learning environment, and offer resources for victims (DuMont, 2016). Increasingly, courts are holding universities accountable for responding to issues of cyberbullying; however, many college leaders are still unaware of the scope of the issue on their campuses (Myers & Cowie, 2019). Because victimization is associated with issues such as depression, withdrawing from school, and suicide (Juvonen & Gross, 2008), a valid measure of cyberbullying is key for student affairs and higher education assessment researchers interested in studying students' health and safety. A valid, usable survey can also help administrators identify and respond to trends in cyberbullying on campus.

The field has not reached consensus, however, on how best to measure or operationalize victimization among college students (Alipan et al., 2020; Jenaro et al., 2018). Lai and Kao (2018) found that significant gender differences were reported by researchers who adopted single-item versus multiple-item measures of victimization. They encourage using measurements that ask students if they have experienced specific types of cyberbullying. Indeed, with their meta-analysis Kowalski et al. (2014) warned researchers against single-item measures of victimization as people can misinterpret how cyberbullying operates. Doane et al. (2013) developed a multi-item cyberbullying victimization instrument for college students; however, with 21 items, it may be too long to gather robust samples in a college setting where students are already survey fatigued (Porter et al., 2004). Other researchers (e.g., Francisco et al., 2015) have pared down these lengthy multi-item surveys, but these resulting surveys are limited in that they only ask about the students' most recent victimization, thus failing to capture prior and potentially more severe instances. To provide higher education researchers and practitioners with a more usable tool, I examined the K–12 literature for a brief, multi-item instrument that could capture all prior victimization experiences.

The most commonly used multi-item measure of cyberbullying victimization among adolescents is a 9-item survey (Patchin & Hinduja, 2015) that measures the extent to which students have experienced any of eight forms of cyberbullying (see Table 1). Grounded in the cyberbullying literature and iteratively developed over repeated deployments (Hinduja & Patchin, 2015), Patchin and Hinduja (2015) found that the items loaded onto one factor of cyberbullying victimization and were a reliable measure of the extent of victimization among adolescents (α > .89). While Doane et al. (2013) confirmed the convergent validity of an earlier version of the survey by correlating it with their 21-item survey of victimization among college students, the refined 2015 scale has not been previously validated for a sample of college students. A brief, valid, multi-item measure of college students' victimization experiences has the potential to address the gap in the higher education literature and could serve as an important tool for student affairs researchers interested in supporting cyberbullied students. The research question at the outset of this study was: To what extent is a widely used adolescence cyberbullying victimization scale valid and reliable for a sample of college students?

METHOD

In February 2019, I surveyed a sample of undergraduates...