Effects of Cyberbullying on Academic Performance

Abstract

Cyberbullying is defined as an intentional, aggressive, and repetitive behaviour in which an individual or group uses electronic devices, primarily the Internet and smartphones, to bully someone who is unable to defend himself/herself (Aboujaoude et al. 2015; Bulega et al. 2017).The prevalence of technological bullying by peers ranges from 5% to 72% (Aboujaoude et al. 2018; Kowalski et al. 2014), with an average incidence rate of cyber-victimization of 23% in the adolescent population (Hamm et al. 2015). As a result, there is a significant disparity in the findings of different scientific studies, most likely due to the use of different methodological measure and strategies to assess cyberbullying and cyber-victimization (Buelga et. al.2012; Vivolo-Kantor et al. 2014). Cyberbullying has clearly become a growing problem among youth in every country around the world in recent years (Antoniadou et al. 2016; Lee and Shin 2017; Yubero et al; Zych et al. 2016). The purpose of this study is to look into the effect of cyberbullying on academic performance among high school students in Surat. The study included 92 high school students ranging in age from 14 to 19 years. The scale used to measure the adolescents experience as a victim of cyberbullying in the past 12 months was “Cyber Victimization Scale (CYBVICS)”. CGPA of the students were collected, average was calculated. The SPSS programme was used to analyse the data and to analyse the collected results regression was used. This study hypothesises that cyberbullying is a significant predictor of academic performance among school-age students. Regression analysis of data shows that cyberbullying is a significant predictor of academic performance in school-aged students. The findings show that cyberbullying is a statistically significant predictor of academic performance.