Karen Slovac's 'School Social Workers' Perception Of Cyberbullying

A critique of Karen Slovac and Jonathan B. Singer’s “School Social Workers’ Perception of Cyberbullying”
Technology is an indispensable tool for the contemporary society due to the numerous advantages that it has. Unfortunately, the term “technology” is not only related to positive aspects, so one of the issues which is commonly linked to technology is cyberbullying. However, finding a clear definition for cyberbullying has been a problem for many researchers. Researchers rarely agree on the concept of cyberbullying since some think that the definition should be broad but others think that it should be more specific (Russell, Justin and Hinduja 2704). Due to the fact that there is not a widely-accepted definition of cyberbullying, society is

Also, “it aimed to increase practitioners’ awareness of cyberbullying as an important trend in school social work practice”. Slovac and Singer used data collected in 2008 from 399 SSWs from nine of the 11 member states of the Midwest School social Work Council. In addition, the method used to collect the data was a survey which contains 16 questions. The authors presented the results based on two different analyses that are univariate and multivariate analyses. The univariate analyses were used to show that SSWs’ perception about cyberbullying may vary, but the majority agrees that it can cause “psychological harm, including suicide and that it is an issue that merits increased attention”. However, the use of multivariate analyses proved that SSWs’ points of view regarding cyberbullying may be affected by school level. The authors highlighted the fact that further studies on this topic are urgently required in order to help the school social workers finding the best methods to prevent and solve cases of cyberbullying which can create depression and lead to suicide. In addition, the authors emphasize that schools lack an effective cyberbullying

Slovac and Singer explain that schools should create most effective cyberbullying policy; however, these policies wouldn’t work if parents, law enforcements and students don’t work together to create a society where cyberbullying is intolerable (Hinduja and Patchin 8). The authors stated that schools need more effective policies in order to reduce the number of cases or even eradicate cyberbullying from schools, but it is extremely difficult to find solutions when a consistent concept is not stablished (Sabella, Patchin and Hiduja 2705). It is also important to notice that many school social workers did not answer the survey, so it can be assumed that the result would be different if every school social worker of the answered the