Original articleLongitudinal Associations Between Cyberbullying Involvement and Adolescent Mental Health
Section snippets
Study design and participants
The Olympic Regeneration in East London (ORiEL) study was designed to evaluate the impact of urban regeneration associated with the London 2012 Olympic Games on a prospective cohort of adolescents in East London [15]. Twenty-five schools participated (61.0% of those invited). No schools dropped out across the three waves. Information was available for 3,088 year 7 students (aged 11–12 years) across 25 randomly selected schools in four East London boroughs in 2012, a response rate of 86.8%.
Loss to follow-up
Females were less likely than males to be lost to follow-up (odds ratio [OR] = .77, 95% confidence interval [CI] [.65, .91]). Participants who reported their ethnicity as black Caribbean (OR = 1.59, 95% CI [1.08, 2.34]) were more likely to be lost to follow-up than white UK students, as were those who received free school meals (OR = 1.32, 95% CI [1.12, 1.57]). No other sociodemographic, social media, or mental health factors were associated with loss to follow-up.
Sociodemographic characteristics
The longitudinal sample
Discussion
Consistent with the study hypothesis, cybervictims and cyberbully-victims were significantly more likely to report depressive symptoms, social anxiety symptoms, and below average well-being at follow-up, after adjusting for covariates, than their uninvolved peers. The associations were sustained after adjusting for baseline mental health with the exception of associations with well-being. Contrary to our hypothesis, we did not find evidence to suggest that cyberbullies report significantly
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful for the support of the schools, parents, and students involved in this study. The authors also thank Daniel Lewis, Claire Thompson, Ellen Flint, the wider ORiEL research team, and the field team, including Vanathi Tharmaratnam, Danielle House, Bukola Thompson, Shaneka Foster, Lianne Austin, and Rebecca Evans. A presentation based on this paper was presented at the “A New Look At Young People's Health Conference” hosted by the Association for Young People's Health (AYPH;
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Conflicts of Interest: The funders of the study had no role in the study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the report. The corresponding author had full access to the data, wrote the first draft of the paper, and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed therein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Public Health Programme, NIHR, NHS, or the Department of Health.
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Current address: National Centre for Social Research, Policy Research Centre, 35 Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0AX, United Kingdom.