A cross-sectional mail-out survey was completed by 325 year seven students enrolled in
three state schools in South England city. Participants were aged 11 (n = 163; 50.2%) or
12 years (n = 162; 49.8%) and slightly more girls (53%) than boys (47.7%) participated.
In order to recruit participants, we contacted the school board and/or management of all
secondary state schools in South England city (n = 21) by letter and asked them to participate.
The letter included a short description of the study, its aim and the importance of
participation. A week after the letter was sent, we phoned the schools and followed up.
This yielded a cooperation rate of 15%. Most schools declining participation mentioned already that they were participating in a number of research projects as their reason for
not wanting to be part of this study. Those schools that agreed to participate subsequently
received the surveys along with instructions for both the participants and their teachers (i.e.
how to supervise the completion of the surveys in the classroom). In the teacher’s instruction,
we explicitly asked them to apply due care in acquiring the data because children
can become very upset about cyberbullying and to remind their pupils that the survey is
anonymous, that their participation is voluntarily and that there are no wrong answers.
Prior to distribution, the survey was pre-tested with 17 members of the target population
(who were subsequently excluded from the study) on clarity, completeness and correctness.
This study was approved by the Ethics Committee at the Open University of the
Netherlands’ School of Psychology.