Intersectionality and cyberbullying: A study of cybervictimization in a Midwestern high school

Display Omitted Our paper applies an intersectional approach to the study of cyberbullying.We explore the conditional impact of race, gender, and sexuality on victimization.We conducted an original survey of students in a Midwestern high school (N=752).Race moderates the impact of gender (but not sexuality) on cybervictimization.Our results add much-needed complexity to the cyberbullying literature. Cyberbullying has been the focus of much empirical research in the past decade. Several scholars have examined the effects of gender on cyberbullying with mixed results. Little research, however, has considered the effects of race and sexuality, and analyzing these demographic characteristics individually (i.e., non-interactively) provides a limited view of the influences of race, gender, and sexuality on cybervictimization. Accordingly, we employ an intersectional approach that captures more fully the nuances between cyberbullying and social location. For example, given the centrality of race in American society, it is surprising that the research on cyberbullying among adolescents finds little evidence of a "race effect." We hypothesize that racial identity moderates the degree to which cybervictimization rates vary by gender and sexuality. Evidence from an original survey of students in a Midwestern high school (N=752) lends qualified support to our conditional hypotheses: the relationship between gender and victimization is stronger for white students than it is for students of color, but there are no racial differences in the impact of a student's sexuality and their experiences with cyberbullying.