Literature Review:

A. In an article I found, Technology Hurts? Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youth Perspectives of Technology and Cyberbullying, they used 18 students who were either gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Within this article they took a survey and asked them what the predominant reasons they were cyberbullied for. 61% of the participants said they were targeted for their sexual orientation, while 33% said they were targeted for revenge. Although the participants all deviated from the norm, it still shows that the majority of them were cyberbullied because of their sexual orientation. As they were questioned about why they got cyberbullied, they were also asked how. The two most used ways, according to the participants, were electronic victimization and electronic action. Electronic victimization was said to be used 78% of the time, and electronic actions were used 44% of the time. One teen said people would text him and message him on social media saying "You look like a faggot" on his photos after he came out via social media. Another participant said that he has seen it all, and one of the electronic actions used against him was someone sending him a virus because of his sexual orientation. One of the individuals stated that cyberbullying was predominant in his early years of high school, but as the 4 years went on, it slowed down. This proves that as we get older, people start to mature and realize their actions. We are in college and cyberbullying still occurs but not in a big manner like high school. Our group will use our polls to target why people are cyberbullied and pinpoint the most pressing issue to raise awareness and help put a stop to it. 

B. The form of social action project our group has decided to do is creating polls to pinpoint why people get cyberbullied. We will be canvassing the community via electronics to get peoples feedback. What were planning to do is create 3 different poll questions from an internet website. These three questions will be: Have you ever been cyberbullied? What have you been targeted for? Have you ever cyberbullied an individual based on choices from the previous question? These questions will all be multiple choice. The first one will be true or false, the second one will consist of answer such as: Appearance, opinions, friend groups, sexual orientation, personal actions, or other, and the third question will also be true or false. Our group plans to contact the school and send out a mass email to the student body making them aware of the polls and how they can respond. Along with the polls, we will also create flyers and place them around the campus, such as in dorms, the library, the student center, and the cafeteria with the approval of the school. The flyers are used so students can see them because most of us disregard the emails from the school. The flyers will consist of the same questions and different text numbers to reply to in order for feedback. Although the emails are often disregarded, they are worth the shot. The website we will use is poll everywhere.com. This website allows for people to create polls at their own capability. We can receive 40 responses per poll without a subscription, but to make an impact we will use the funding or our own money to create a membership to allow for 250 responses per question. I believe with that amount we can work with a great deal of data to pinpoint why people get cyberbullied. These polls will be based upon people entire lives, not just while in college because it is not as predominant as high school. After we receive the results, our group will create a big poster with the results and we will place this poster in the student center for people to see they come and go. Our goal is to create awareness, and as people see the results they all think twice about cyberbullying. With our results, we can also create multiple posters and ask permission of nearby high schools and grade schools to post the posters in their school to stop cyberbullying in its roots. Another idea with our results is that the group in our class doing cyberbullying as well can post the facts on yin yak and twitter page that they have created to get the information out there on social media, connecting the John Carroll community.