Introduction

Cyberbullying is a global concern that many governments and schools are struggling to address (Shariff, 2009). While cyberbullying is a relatively recent development, researchers are beginning to gather a body of scholarly literature addressing this issue. This introduction summarizes key findings from this literature to contextualize the remainder of the book, addresses current challenges in cyberbullying research, and considers the ways forward for research. These key findings include similarities and differences between cyberbullying and non-cyberbullying; overlap between the two forms of bullying; prevalence; age, grade, and developmental differences; gender; motivation; consequences and correlates for perpetrators, targets, and dual perpetrator/targets, including the relationship between cyberbullying and problem behaviors, and cyberbullying and mental and emotional problems; the content and context of cyberbullying messages; and possible adaptive functions of cyberbullying. The section on challenges in current research addresses conceptual and methodological limitations in cyberbullying literature and discusses the importance of theory building on empirical research. The chapter concludes by reviewing what appears to be working in non-cyberbullying research and how that knowledge can inform research on cyberbullying.