There is a rich literature regarding cyberbullying, addressing its impact as well as
strategies for preventing or minimising the phenomenon. However, historically, these
have focused on children and the school context (those under 18), implicitly extending
the physical environment into the digital. Significantly less attention has been directed
towards the experience of young adults in Scotland (18-24) and digital life beyond the
schoolyard. To discourage or prevent cyberbullying/bullying, is an ambition of the
Scottish Government, primarily pursued through tactics addressing promoting a culture
of respect in such online spaces; yet, there has been little discussion about what
“feeling respected” means in an online space and how to encourage or facilitate this
phenomenon among online users. This research project explores: how can Interaction
Design be used as an approach to enable promoting feeling respected in an online
space (or online respect) among young adults in Scotland in the context of
cyberbullying.
To address the research question, I draw on evidence from my fieldwork where I
engaged with six young adults (18-24 years old) and six key stakeholders. The
research comprised two distinct but complementary phases of online fieldwork in
response to the constraints imposed by Covid-19 and the wider consequences of the
global pandemic. Adopting a co-design framework, where participants shared their
knowledge, experiences, values, and thoughts on cyberbullying, online respect, and
young adults coping strategies allowed a focus on participants’ experiences, emotional
states and behaviours. This, in turn, allowed a focus on the factors that underpin online
respect, through online interviews, asynchronous activities, and online workshops.
Data gathered from both phases of participation enabled me to provide
anti-cyberbullying guidelines and recommendations for the policy level and establish
an in-depth understanding of the role of digital technologies/online platforms in
shaping young adults' relationships with the world that contribute to not feeling
respected in an online space.
This PhD describes how an Interaction Design approach creates knowledge that brings
an understanding and develops insights into online respect that contributes to
psychology, social, and political disciplines from non-neutral digital technology
viewpoints. Most prior studies stated that cyberbullying is school bullying transitioned to an online environment due to the youth's sociocultural dependence on digital
technology and communications. In other words, they investigated this phenomenon
similarly to school bullying from a technology-neutral perspective. The
technology-neutral perspective means that digital media and online space don't
appear to influence or play any roles in shaping online behaviour or disrespect, but the
way in which online users choose to use digital technologies should be considered key
to the experience of feeling respected in such “spaces.”
The Interaction Design approach in this research project provided a form of research
engagement that focused on the influence of digital technologies and online space
leading to online disrespect among young adults. The Interaction Design approach to
investigating the roles digital technologies and online space play in shaping online
users' behaviours allowed a focus upon the concepts of affordance and technological
mediation theories. Affordance theory enabled a critical and socio-technical view on
how digital technologies and online space might permit novel behaviours, distinct from
those of “real life,” including online disrespect among young adults. Technological
Mediation theory offers a conceptual vocabulary encompassing sociocultural and
environmental views on how digital technologies and online space might mediate
young adults' relationships with their surroundings (both online and offline). These
theories have been central in identifying profound insights into how one might support
or encourage online respect among young adults from a non-neutral digital technology
and context-based perspective for psychologists and policy-makers.