A Framework to Identify Relationships among Students in School Bullying Using Digital Communication Media

In this paper, the authors consider school bullying using digital communication media (such as cell phones, short messaging, emails, blogs, SNS, and BBS) and create a framework whose goal is to help teachers identify whether school bullying is taking place among students. The framework proposed in this paper models interactions among students as a relationship network (referred to as a "human relationship network"), constructs a human relationship network from usage statistics of digital communication media, and identifies whether unique structural features exist in a human relationship network that may indicate bullying among students. The proposed framework is designed based on two hypotheses. First, a human relationship network can be constructed with some degree of accuracy from usage statistics of digital communication media. Second, risk factors for school bullying impose distinct structural features in a human relationship network. This paper presents the initial effort to empirically verify the hypotheses to lay the foundations for further design of the proposed framework.