A Study on the Cause Analysis of Cyberbullying in Korean Adolescents

With the development of information and communication technology, online communication is becoming more active than offline meetings in daily life. This online communication is accelerating, especially as smartphone distribution and utilization become more prevalent. This communication in cyberspace has the advantage of people being able to communicate anytime, anywhere beyond time and place, while causing a variety of inappropriate consequences. A typical one is cyberbullying, which is a serious problem for adolescents who have active communication online. The purpose of this study is to accurately investigate and analyze the status of cyberbullying among adolescents. To this end, national survey data of the National Information Society Agency (NIA) was analyzed for the past three years. The population size and sample size from 2017 to 2019 were 5.773.998 and 4500 (2017), 5,663,725 and 4662 (2018), 5,502,801 and 4779 (2019), respectively. The statistical analysis shows that the biggest type of cyberbullying among adolescents is verbal abuse, and the biggest means is instant messaging. In addition, the most frequent forms of cyberbullying victims and cyberbullying perpetrators occur between individuals. In addition, the correlation between the interpersonal relationships of adolescents and the cyberbullying experience rate were analyzed, and various cyberbullying factors such as psychological factors were analyzed. As a result, we found that the interaction with parents and friendship reliability have a negative correlation with the cyberbullying experience rate. We expect the results of this study to be of great help to future research and policies of juvenile cyberbullying.