As the contemporary phenomenon of school bullying has become more widespread, diverse, and frequent among adolescents in Korea, social big data may offer a new methodological paradigm for understanding the trends of school bullying in the digital era. This study identified Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) and Future Signals of 177 school bullying forms to understand the current and future bullying experiences of adolescents from 436,508 web documents collected between 1 January 2013, and 31 December 2017. In social big data, sexual bullying rapidly increased, and physical and cyber bullying had high frequency with a high rate of growth. School bullying forms, such as "group assault" and "sexual harassment", appeared as Weak Signals, and "cyber bullying" was a Strong Signal. Findings considering five school bullying forms (verbal, physical, relational, sexual, and cyber bullying) are valuable for developing insights into the burgeoning phenomenon of school bullying.
Keywords: Future Signals; South Korea; TF-IDF; school bullying forms; social big data.