Sakarya University Journal of Education (Dec 2016)
Coping With Cyberbullying Scale: Study of Reliability and Validity
Abstract
It is seen that cyberbullying and cyber victimization have become important problems nowadays because students misuse the information and communication technologies to harm each other. Such events experienced between students at the school have negative effects on academic, psychological and social performance of students. Students may use different methods and techniques to cope with cyberbullying. This study is designed to develop a scale for identifying the coping strategies of students. Confirmatory factor analysis and exploratory factor analysis were applied to the data in the research. 264 high school students from Sakarya participated in the study for exploratory factor analysis. 140 of them were attending at the ninth grade (53%) and 14 of them were the 11th-grade students. 129 of the participants (48,9%) were female and 135 of them (51,1%) were male. 277 high school students from Sakarya participated in the second study for confirmatory factor analysis. 135 (48.7%) of the students were studying in the ninth grade while 142 (51.3%) of them were in 10th grade. 136 (49.1%) of the students were female, 141 (50.9%) of them were male. The ages of the students varied between 15 and 18. During the process of the scale development, first of all, the literature related to the strategies of coping with cyber bullying was reviewed and an item pool was created. Scale was corrected according to expert views, and then, construct validity, factor analysis and reliability analysis were applied. Confirmatory factor analysis and exploratory factor analysis were applied for factorial validity. Moreover, convergence was used for construct validity and Cronbach Alpha and composite reliability coefficient were utilized for distinguishing validity and reliability. Finally, a valid and reliable scale of coping with cyber bullying that has 19 items and 4 factors was developed.
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