What About the Three Criteria as Regards Cyber Bullying?The issue of whether and how the three key criteria of traditional bullying can be applied to cyberbullying is discussed in considerable detail in a recent chapter by Smith et al. (2012). After thoughtfulconsideration of a number of different aspects, the authors reach the tentative conclusion thatthe three key criteria defining traditional bullying are largely applicable to cyber bullying as well.They suggest that the imbalance of power can be assessed “in terms of differences in technologicalknow-how between perpetrator and victim, relative anonymity, social status, number of friends,or marginalized group position” (p. 36). In partial contrast to my position stated above, however,they do not think the imbalance of power should be based on the victim’s perception but ratherfrom an “outside” perspective as much as possible.It is of vital importance for the building of a solid and cohesive body of knowledge aboutbullying that researchers can reach and use in their research a reasonably common conceptualdefinition of the phenomenon. But empirical analyses can also help inform such a development.In the following analyses, the main focus is on whether the ordinary response alternatives of theOBQ can be meaningfully used also with cyber bullying items.The aim of these analyses was to examine if cyber bullying items (being bullied) would relatedifferently than the global traditional bullying items to a variable that these items can be expectedto correlate with (Olweus 2012a). Poor self-esteem is one variable that has been found to be linearlyrelated to the five frequency response alternatives of the global being bullied question in the OBQ(varying from “not bullied in the past couple of months” to “several times a week”; Solberg &Olweus 2003). The background for this comparison is that some forms of cyber bullying can referto single—and not repeated—events but still be shared with a large group of people and be readagain and again. Being exposed to such cyber behavior can certainly be very distressing for thetarget, and it might be considered a “misclassification” if the targeted student were categorizedas “not being cyber bullied” because the event happened only once (with the common “2 or 3times a month” as a lower-bound criterion for classifying a respondent as being bullied). If suchmisclassifications occurred for several episodes of cyber bullying, one would not expect a regularlinear increase in poor self-esteem with increasing frequency of cyber bullying but rather somedifferent pattern with an elevated level of poor self-esteem for the “once or twice” category.This was clearly not the result of our empirical analyses, where we found a linear-increasing relationbetween the five response alternatives for the general being cyber bullied question and poorself-esteem. Students who were exposed to cyber bullying more often tended to have systematicallypoorer self-esteem. This result is very similar to what has been found in previous analyses of traditionalglobal being bullied questions. Similar results were also obtained when the relation between