The relationship between harsh parenting and adolescent cyberbullying: a network analysis

Despite harsh parenting has been found to increase the risk of developing cyberbullying, there is still a gap in understanding the complex interplay between harsh parenting and cyberbullying in the general population. This cross-sectional study aims to examine such a complex relationship between harsh parenting and cyberbullying in adolescents with a network analysis. A total of 1,409 secondary school students successfully completed a set of self-report questionnaires measuring harsh parenting and cyberbullying. To enhance stability, subscales of a questionnaire were used as nodes in the network, which was constructed with edges representing partial correlations between nodes. Network Comparison Tests were used to investigate the differences between participants with high cyberbullying and low cyberbullying. (1) Harsh parenting was positively correlated with adolescent cyberbullying, after controlling for the inter-relationships between all nodes in the network; (2) Verbal cyberbullying showed the highest centrality strength, while anonymous identity exhibited the highest intermediary and closeness centrality. The network structure demonstrated sufficient stability; (3) Comparison between high and low cyberbullying subgroups indicated that the high cyberbullying subgroup exhibited higher global strength in the network (strength difference = 0.47, p = 0 0.48). No significant difference was found between the network structures of the two subgroups (maximum difference in edge weights = 0.18, P = 0.43), indicating a small inter-group difference and a highly similar overall connectivity pattern; (4) Regarding geographical regions, no difference was observed in global connectivity strength between Jiangsu and Sichuan (difference = 0.37, P = 0.62), suggesting broad comparability across provinces. These findings underscore the importance of addressing harsh parenting as a potential risk factor for cyberbullying in adolescents and emphasize the need for targeted interventions to mitigate these negative outcomes.