Cyberbullying Victimization, Mental Distress, and Adolescent Substance Use: The Role of Cyber Features

This paper examines how cyberbullying victimization affects adolescent substance use and what role different cyber features play in this process. We followed the full research cycle multimethod design archetype and iterated between inductive and deductive methods. The paper includes three studies. In Study 1, we used the propensity score matching technique to deductively analyze over half a million observations from the 2011–2019 state and national Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance surveys. Our results suggest that cyberbullying victimization is associated with strikingly high levels of substance use, including binge drinking, drinking, smoking, and marijuana use. In addition, using the bootstrap method, we demonstrate that mental distress mediates the relationship between adolescent cyberbullying victimization and substance use. In Study 2, we used qualitative methods to inductively explore the cyber features that might influence the established relationship. Two cyber features, publicity (observed or joined in by an audience) and separation (temporal or spatial), emerged from our qualitative data of 85 respondents. In Study 3, we further used experiments to deductively test the effects of the identified cyber features. Our results from 2,015 observations show that publicity aggravates the effect of cyberbullying victimization on mental distress, whereas separation mitigates the effect. The results of the experiments also confirm the effect of cyberbullying victimization on substance use. The results of the post hoc study from 1,987 observations further show the moderating effects of separation on publicity. Our study contributes to the literature by showing how cyber features, specifically publicity and separation, influence the relationships between cyberbullying victimization, mental distress, and substance use.

History: Rajiv Kohli, Senior Editor; Yili (Kevin) Hong, Associate Editor.

Funding: This work was supported by the Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation of Guangdong Province [Grant 2025A1515010285] and the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72004007 and 72134006].