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I’m Watching You: Cyberstalking Behaviors of University Students in Romantic Relationships

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Abstract

As technology has become an ever-present facet in the lives of young people, they have become reliant on it to form and maintain relationships. It has also helped facilitate negative relationship behaviors, such as the monitoring of romantic partners without their permission (aka cyberstalking). The purpose of this study is to investigate theoretical predictors of cyberstalking in a sample of university students by applying General Theory of Crime and Social Learning Theory. Results indicated that low selfcontrol and deviant peer association are significant predictors of cyberstalking, specifically attempting to log-in to a person’s social media, as well as social media presence and sex.

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Notes

  1. We recognize the limitations of using a single item indicator. We liken our measurement to others that have examined different forms of hacking (Marcum et al., 2016); thus, we felt justified in our use of this measure.

  2. Because the dependent measure is captured using an ordinal scale, we attempted to perform plum analysis on the data. We obtained substantively the same results. These results are available from the third author on request.

  3. An attempt was made in these data to address these hypotheses. The attempt was not successful. These results are available upon request.

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Correspondence to Catherine D. Marcum.

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Marcum, C.D., Higgins, G.E. & Nicholson, J. I’m Watching You: Cyberstalking Behaviors of University Students in Romantic Relationships. Am J Crim Just 42, 373–388 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-016-9358-2

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