Bullied-Experience Talks in Online Communications

Abstract

Social supports such as giving empathy, affection, and respect increase children’s well-being and reduce stress. We aim to drive social support for bullied children through the Internet (online social support). In this study, we focus on bullying in real life (offline) and support through online communication. For this purpose, we investigate how online social supports affect bullied children and which conditions ensure the supports have positive effects by analyzing online communication data on an avatar chat service. We found that bullied-experience talks in the virtual world with a few friends have a positive effect on bullied children. The talks tended to include bullied children’s self-disclosure. Therefore, this finding suggests that self-disclosure by bullied children is very important for supporting them.