Understanding the impact of bullying news coverage on youth and families: Implications for future interventions

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

ABSTRACT Bullying is a preventable public health problem that can have long-lasting health, academic and social consequences. Bullying affects between 18% and 31% of adolescents and has been associated with serious negative consequences including depression, substance use, and academic failure for both the perpetrator and target. Over the past decade, bullying behavior has expanded into the digital realm and is known as cyberbullying. Cyberbullying stories have had frequent coverage by news organizations, including coverage of teens whose death from suicide was attributed to cyberbullying. Previous work illustrates the influence of news stories on individual?s attitudes and experiences. News organization coverage has been influential to readers in areas such as suicide, infectious disease outbreaks such as H1N1 flu, and tobacco use. Little is known whether and how adolescents and their families perceive or utilize news coverage of bullying or cyberbullying. News media may be an untapped resource to promote bullying prevention messages and strategies. Our long- term goal is to develop and test interventions to improve bullying prevention and intervention efforts working with media. Towards that goal, the purpose of this study is to evaluate the current state of news organization coverage of bullying and cyberbullying and its impact on youth and families. First, we will evaluate youth and parent perspectives on lay media coverage of bullying using qualitative interviews with 50 participants: 25 diverse adolescents age 15-18 years and 25 parent/guardians of these adolescents. Second, we will assess the current state of the narrative in news media coverage of bullying. We will identify a sample of 500 news articles from print/online media that cover bullying over the past 5 years and conduct content analysis using natural language processing. Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software we will evaluate the proportion of words that represent fear-based reporting such as alarmist words (e.g. epidemic, tragic), as well as words that represent public health-oriented messages such as prevention. We will also compare news coverage of bullying to cyberbullying. After analyzing data from these two aims, we will conduct qualitative interviews with 30 journalists. Our third aim is to synthesize these findings and identify strategies for future interventions that are feasible and acceptable to journalists. We will work with 3 consultants from the fields of communication and journalism to identify and engage journalists (n=30) in qualitative interviews. When these interconnected study aims are successfully completed, outcomes will include a comprehensive understanding of how adolescents and their parents understand and utilize news coverage of bullying, the current state of bullying and cyberbullying news coverage narrative, and perspectives of journalists on intervention approaches that are feasible and acceptable. We will utilize these findings towards novel intervention approaches, such as to leverage news coverage towards enhancing prevention of bullying.