Children’s Online Safety: Predictive Factors of Cyberbullying and Online Grooming Involvement

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Please the annotated pdf.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

thank you for your comment and valuable suggestions. In the introduction paragraph, the hypothesis section has been changed avoiding the long passages and highlighting the importance of our hypothesis. In addition, the Conclusion section has been reviewed moving some passages to the discussion section, stressing the main findings of the study and the need for further research on this age group.

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors investigated the extent of cyberbullying and online grooming in children, as well as their main predictors. The research was carried out on data from 412 primary school children, applying factor analysis. The researchers found that three out of ten children have committed cyberbullying and two out of ten have been victims of it. The authors identified screen time, parental supervision, phubbing behaviors, prosocial tendencies, and family socioeconomic background as the main predictors of children's involvement in cyberbullying.

My comments are:

1.-I can not find the approval of the study by an ethics committee. Comment about it.

2.-It is suggested to include the validation metrics of the applied instruments.

3.- It is suggested to include the statistics of the specific types of cyberbullying and grooming behaviors found.

4.-It is suggested to highlight the hypotheses explicitly, that is: H1: Description, H2: Description, etc. Later, in the corresponding section, describe if the hypothesis was accepted or rejected and explain the reason, using the same form. H1: It was accepted or rejected by…

5.-“We computed the polychoric correlation between each pair of variables.” And what was the result?

6.- It is suggested to include a table or graph with the results of the procedure described in lines 299-310. Along the same lines, the statement “a better interpretation of the results is reached by using only four factors” requires further explanation.

7.-“By using these variables, we implemented two different analyses driven by two different motivations: on the one hand, to study how the distribution of factors’ scores changes according to the variables we carried out the analysis of the variance (ANOVA); on the other hand, to compare differences in relevant statistics of central tendency we computed the summary statistics (i.e. mean, median, min, max, range) of each factor. In the present study we will show only the mean scores for an easier presentation of the results.” It is better to use all relevant means to clearly explain all the sections of the article.

Author Response

Dear reviewer, 

thank you for your valuable suggestions. Please see the attachment for details.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper corresponds to a study based on a survey that aims to fill the knowledge gap by measuring the spread of cyberbullying and online grooming in a sample of 412 primary school students in the city of Rome and identifying the main individual and environmental predictors associated with children's involvement in these phenomena with factor analysis.

Minor revision in aspects like:

- line 32: [11]and (space missing)

- mainly in page 4, where you have the percentages, you can add de values (numbers)

Well done... 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

thank you for your comment and suggestions. The error in line 32 has been corrected and in page 4 we have added the values next to the percentages.