Due to the extensive development of information and communication technology and the significant improvement of its accessibility in the last two decades, a substantial part of interpersonal interactions, especially between children and adolescents, has shifted to cyberspace. Besides many positive functions, this also opened up a space for developing deviant behavior in new dimensions and moving part of the violence to this new environment. In this doctoral dissertation, we focus on a specific form of violence, known in English as bullying, in cyberspace, mainly from a methodological point of view. To find out how well-researched the field is and how to ensure the quality of the cyberbullying research, we: 1) reviewed the existing literature with an emphasis on the Slovenian area, 2) identified the gaps of current empirical research, 3) examined the various terms used by Slovenian authors to label this construct and proposed suggestions for uniform use, 4) reviewed and proposed a suggestion for the uniform use of the definition of the construct, from which the uniform conceptualization and operationalization should also be set, 5) justified the meaningfulness of conducting the mixed methods research design, and 6) summarized the key recommendations for research according to the identified peculiarities of the sensitive topic. The set goals were achieved through a detailed review of existing literature and methodological analysis of empirical contributions, content analysis of secondary quantitative data obtained with a survey questionnaire, methodological analysis of this questionnaire, qualitative data from focus groups with the target population of adolescents, and interviews with pedagogical workers. The meaningfulness of our conclusions was verified by a professional evaluation of the most important findings by an expert in safe internet use and an expert in methodology. Our findings justify the need to use consistent terms, definitions, and conceptualization in further research and highlight the recommendation to implement the integration of methods to ensure the validity and reliability of cyberbullying research.
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