Dimensions and measures of cyber dating violence in adolescents: A systematic review

Abstract

The term ‘cyber dating violence’ refers to a new form of interpersonal violence in romantic relationships brought about via new technologies. In recent years, despite a large number of instruments developed to measure this phenomenon by the scientific community, there are no systematic reviews that specifically compare measures focused on the adolescent population. The current study aimed to conduct a systematic review on measures and definitions of cyber dating violence in adolescence: in particular, we examined the dimensions identified, the characteristics of the population, and the psychometric properties of those measures developed between 2010 and early 2019. The results yielded up to 26 different measures, revealing an apparent lack of inter-measure coherence. Although the observed theoretical dimensions differ among studies, cyber dating violence comes across as a multidimensional construct, encompassing behaviors driven by sexual and nonsexual content, and with control/monitoring reported as the most frequently assessed dimension. However, analyses focused on measure validation remain scarce. The results highlight essential information when it comes to an understanding of cyber dating violence and the need to develop and evaluate instruments for measuring this phenomenon in all its complexity.