Factors Affecting the lack of Awareness: Towards a Framework for Raising Mobile Bullying Awareness

Access to online spaces in childhood comes with safety concerns about cyber aggression and bullying behaviour during online social activities. Adolescents that have experienced bullying have been reported to be more likely to have thoughts of committing suicide and to even attempt suicide as compared to those without peer aggression experiences. As such, there have been calls for efforts to develop interventions and to raise awareness of mobile bullying. This study conducted an exploratory, qualitative study in the form of a systematic literature review. The literature review abductively identified the impeding factors that could hinder intervention efforts towards raising awareness of mobile bullying. The findings suggest that the media richness of the content that is used for awareness interventions, hostility within a culture, moral disengagement, self-efficacy and parental relations might affect intervention effectiveness to raise awareness of mobile bullying. These factors should shed some light on why we fail to raise awareness of mobile bullying despite numerous existing interventions. Furthermore, the behavioural, environmental and cognitive factors as established in literature to affect bullying involvement, however, they also affect the effectiveness of awareness interventions. The study also provides a theoretical contribution in the form of a theoretical framework and related recommendations on how to integrate the suggested impeding factors as part of the solution towards intervention development.