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Policy-BriefTe@ch4SocialGood-2024

Publicações

Publication . Veiga Simão, Ana; Ferreira, Paula; Salgado Pereira, Nádia

Moral disengagement and empathy in cyberbullying: how they are related in reflection activities about a serious game

Publication . Francisco, Sofia; Ferreira, Paula; Veiga Simão, Ana; Salgado Pereira, Nádia

Cyberbullying is a complex phenomenon with multiple factors involved, both contextual and individual factors, such as moral disengagement and empathy. This study investigated how moral disengagement and empathy could be related, longitudinally in cyberbullying events. Specifically, two gamified tasks (one for empathy and other for moral disengagement) were analyzed. These tasks were developed attending to the specificities of the cyberbullying scenarios presented in a serious game. To accomplish this goal, data from gamified tasks (N=208), from 4 different moments, were analyzed through multilevel linear modeling. Results suggested that there was a change in adolescents’ moral disengagement over time. Participants with greater empathy revealed lower moral disengagement overall. Over time, adolescents with greater empathy revealed lower moral disengagement within their own growth rate. Overall, our results provide important information about the dynamic relationship between moral disengagement, empathy and cyberbullying, which informs future studies and interventions.

Towards Cyberbullying Detection: Building, Benchmarking and Longitudinal Analysis of Aggressiveness and Conflicts/Attacks Datasets from Twitter

Publication . Ferreira, Paula; Salgado Pereira, Nádia; Rosa, Hugo; Oliveira, Sofia; Coheur, Luísa; Francisco, Sofia; Souza, Sidclay B.; Ribeiro, Ricardo; Carvalho, João P.; Paulino, Paula; Trancoso, Isabel; Veiga Simão, Ana

Offense and hate speech are a source of online conflicts which have become common in social media and, as such, their study is a growing topic of research in machine learning and natural language processing. This article presents two Portuguese language offense-related datasets that deepen the study of the subject: an Aggressiveness dataset and a Conflicts/Attacks dataset. While the former is similar to other offense detection related datasets, the latter constitutes a novelty due to the use of the history of the interaction between users. Several studies were carried out to construct and analyze the data in the datasets. The first study included gathering expressions of verbal aggression witnessed by adolescents to guide data extraction for the datasets. The second study included extracting data from Twitter (in Portuguese) that matched the most frequent expressions/words/sentences that were identified in the previous study. The third study consisted in the development of the Aggressiveness dataset, the Conflicts/Attacks dataset, and classification models. In our fourth study, we proposed to examine whether online aggression and conflicts/attacks revealed any trend changes over time with a sample of 86 adolescents. With this study, we also proposed to investigate whether the amount of tweets sent over a period of 273 days was related to online aggression and conflicts/attacks. Lastly, we analyzed the percentage of participants who participated in the aggressions and/or attacks/conflicts.

The role of professional calling and student cyberbullying on teachers’ presenteeism and productivity loss

Publication . Ferreira, Aristides I.; Almeida, Inês Tomás Ribeiro de; Ferreira, Paula; Salgado Pereira, Nádia; Veiga Simão, Ana; Marques-Pinto, A.; Barros, Alexandra

The teaching profession has always been recognized as one that requires a greater vocational calling. However, education professionals have had to adapt to and manage phenomenons which have arisen due to more demanding work contexts that require them to participate in work, even when they are ill (presenteeism), and to a global-wide digital transformation. Such phenomenons include cyberbullying, which has proliferated in school environments. It is crucial to understand the impact this type of phenomenon can have on these professionals. Accordingly, the main objective of this study was to identify the needs felt by teachers to deal effectively with incidents of cyberbullying and its potential impact on and reduce presenteeism. Two studies were developed, with the intention that the hypotheses posed by the quantitative study could be enriched with the inferences drawn from the qualitative study. A sample of 542 middle school teachers responded to questionnaires and 63 participated in interviews. The results showed that teachers’ professional calling led to a lower loss of productivity, due to a lower frequency of presenteeism. This effect was more pronounced in the presence of cyberbullying observation. This study provides a contribution to the calling and presenteeism literature since it focuses on the impact of observing cyberbullying on sickness presence. It is relevant because by knowing the demands that teachers feel and the resources they lack, it is possible to implement tailored intervention and prevention programs to help professionals deal with cyberbullying.