Adolescent Aggression in Social Media: Perception and Personal Experience

The paper explores the relationship between adolescents’ attitude towards aggressive behaviour in social media and their behavioural patterns. The analysis is based on the data of a survey carried out by the staff of the Centre of Sociology of Education (Institute of Education Management of the Russian Academy of Education).The survey involved 2074 students of 5th, 7th, 9th and 11th grades of schools of the Moscow Oblast. As it was revealed, the number of respondents who ‘don’t like’ watching aggressive scenes decreases from 7th grade to 9th.Active users tend to ‘like’ watching such content. Those adolescents who consider their profiles as ‘provocative’, ‘explicit’ or ‘unconventional’, also enjoy watching aggressive scenes more as compared to ‘ordinary’ users. The adolescents who had experience of being ‘aggressors’ or ‘victims’ are more likely to accept aggression than those who were ‘witnesses’ (p≤0,05 for all comparisons).The data obtained in the research reveal the specifics of male and female subculture in social media; the space of online communication appears to be a special zone in which participants struggle for social status. The data allows us to identify the key factors of adolescents’ attitude towards aggression in online communication: sex, age, intensity of communication, online self-presentation, classroom status, perception of one’s own life prospects.

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