Well-Being in an Arctic City. Designing a Longitudinal Study on Student Relationships and Perceived Quality of Life

Abstract

Research on bullying and harassment in Scandinavia has been going on for several decades, and is appearing in new frameworks and forms since the new categories of “cyber-harassment” or “cyber-bullying” have been introduced. Bullying is a phenomenon of great worry, as it seems to affect children and adolescents both on short and long term. A questionnaire on cyber-harassment was designed in this study, and answered by pupils and their parents and teachers, at five schools in the city of Tromsø, Norway. The questionnaire included a section of questions concerning traditional forms of harassment and bullying, as well as questions on quality of life (QoL), and the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). The main research questions were: (1) What is the prevalence of the three classical types of bullying and cyberbullying; (2) Are there gender or age differences; (3) What percentage of children bullied classically were also cyberbullied; (4) How and to what extend did those that were bullied also suffer a lower quality of life. The main novel contribution of this study to the ongoing research is that students who reported being cyber-harassed or cyberbullied, also reported significantly lower QoL-scores than their non-harassed peers.