| Achoimre: | <p>BACKGROUND: Bullying is a major public health problem. We aimed to estimate the prevalence of cyberbullying and traditional bullying among adolescents in England, and evaluate its relative impacts on mental well-being. METHODS: We analysed data from a nationally representative cross sectional study of 120,115 English adolescents aged 15, who completed surveys between September 2014 and January 2015. Mental well-being was assessed using the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale. OUTCOMES: Of the 110,788 adolescents who completed measures of bullying, 33,363 (adjusted: 30.3% total, 36.4% females, 24.4% males) reported any form of significant bullying in the past couple of months. A total of 29,302 (26.6% total, 31.1% females, 24.2% males) reported physical, verbal and relational (i.e. traditional) bullying only, whilst 406 (0.4% total, 0.5% females, 0.2% males) reported only cyber-victimization, and 3,655 (3.4% total, 4.8% females, 2.0% males) reported both traditional and cyberbullying. Both kinds of victimization were related to poorer mental well-being (adjusted analyses, traditional: b= - 1.99, SE = 0.01; cyber: b= -0.86, SE = 0.06). Cyber-victimization accounted for less than 0.1% of observed variability in mental well-being compared to 5.0% of variability accounted for by traditional victimization. INTERPRETATION: Traditional bullying is eight times more common among English adolescents than cyberbullying. Whilst both forms of bullying were associated with poorer mental well-being, cyberbullying accounted for a very small share of variance after adjustment for offline bullying and other covariates.</p>
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