NetSE: Small: A Framework to Identify Relationships Among Students in School Bullying Resulting from using Digital Communication Media

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Bullying among students at a school has become a serious social problem. In the project, researchers at University of California, Irvine and at KDDI Research and Development Laboratories study school bullying using digital communication media (such as cell phones, short messaging systems, emails, blogs) and create a sociological based network framework to help teachers and parents identify whether school bullying may exist among students. The project models interactions among students as a relationship network, constructs a relationship network from usage statistics of digital communication media, and identifies whether unique structural features exist in a relationship network that may indicate bullying among students. The framework is designed based on two key hypotheses: (1) school bullying imposes distinct structural features in a relationship network, and (2) a relationship network is constructed with some degree of accuracy from usage statistics of digital communication media without examining privacy-violating information. The framework only uses usage statistics that maintain privacy of communication, and it extracts such usage statistics from those publicly available, those collected by and traditionally made only available internally to a service provider, and those that the framework directly monitors. The PIs collaborate with researchers in sociology and social psychology to empirically verify the hypotheses used in the framework, design the framework and empirically examine the framework. The intellectual merit of the project includes considering privacy of communication and applying sociology and social psychology knowledge in framework design. The broader impact of the project includes advancing understanding of school bullying, creating a framework that helps teachers and parents, and sharing of the project findings and artifacts with a large segment of the research community.