Dealing with online harassment: Understanding online protective coping strategies on social networking sites

While bringing tremendous benefits to users worldwide, the proliferation of online social networks has also given rise to undesirable online harassment behavior which consists of performing harassing behavior through electronic or digital social media to inflict harm or discomfort on others. Although victims can respond in various ways to the threat of online harassment, little attention has been paid so far to the complex nature of online protective coping strategies, more specifically, how victims respond to these threats by using the available features in the online social network platforms. This proposal has two specific goals in its effort to fill this gap in the literature. The first goal is to develop an instrument for online protective coping strategies. The second goal is to investigate the effects of appraisals on victims’ online protective coping strategies by drawing upon the extended parallel process model (EPPM). Overall, this proposal contributes to the area of online harassment by studying victims’ coping strategies in response to online harassment. It can serve as a springboard for future work to understand the effect of online protective coping strategy and can be used as a guide to design effective coping features to combat online harassment on online social networks