Coping may explain why being cyberbullied affects children’s well-being differently, though previous studies are inconclusive. This survey among 325 children focused on the role coping strategies may play in the relationship between cyberbullying and depressive feelings and health complaints. Being cyberbullied was measured with the Cyberbullying Questionnaire, general coping with the Utrecht Coping List, and cyberbullying-specific coping with a questionnaire developed for this study. Health complaints were measured with the Short Questionnaire for Experienced Health and depressive feelings with the shortened Children’s Depression Inventory. The results showed that 18.8% of the children were bullied by mobile phone and 24.1% through the internet. Correlation analyses showed strong relationships between victimization, coping, depressive feelings, and health complaints. In the regression analyses conducted in all children, victimization, general emotion-focused, and problem-focused copings had main effects on depressive feelings and health complaints; emotion-focused coping interacted with victimization in health complaints. Simple slope analyses of children with high scores on emotion-focused general coping showed a stronger positive relationship between victimization and health complaints. Regression analyses of only cyberbullied children showed that only emotion-focused cyber-specific coping was associated with more health complaints and depressive feelings. 1. Introduction Most children and adolescents make use of the internet and mobile phone. For example, 90% of European youth [1] and 93% of the youth in the US are online [2]. Although the internet and mobile phones provide numerous benefits to youngsters, they also have disadvantages such as Cyberbullying [3, 4]. The definition of Smith et al. (2008) is mostly used to describe the features of Cyberbullying: “Cyberbullying is an aggressive, intentional act carried out by a group or individual using electronic forms of contact, repeatedly and over time, against a victim who cannot easily defend him/herself” [5]. This definition is based on the definition for traditional bullying [6]. However, the aspects of repetition and power imbalance are under debate among Cyberbullying researchers [7]. A child does not need to be approached several times to be labelled as bullied, because one threatening message or a single humiliating picture is often online for a long time, accessible to a large group and can be easily forwarded by others [7–10]. However, a child that has been insulted once in a chatroom or by
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