Assessing Psychological Effects of Cyberbullying on the Adolescents of a Cosmopolitan City
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Abstract
The popularity of computer-mediated communication and cyber technology has created many new vices in society that obstruct the development of adolescents. One such vice is cyberbullying, which is an insidious and covert form of bullying. The present paper opts to scrutinise cyberbullying's psychological effects on the victim teenagers of minority communities of a cosmopolitan city. Confirmatory factor analysis, for testing the Psychological Effect of Cyberbullying Scale (PECS) comprising 24 direct item pool, was employed to unfold Mild Psychological Effect Scale (MPES) and Intense Psychological Effect Scale (IPES). Cross validating the initial factor structure was conducted with the help of developing standardised coefficient for the two factor model for PECS. Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient values are above 0.09 for the items of both the Mild Psychological Effect Scale (MPES) and Intense Psychological Effect Scale (IPES). Based on purposive sampling, the study found that all the items taken for conducting the survey are highly co-related to the psychological impact of the victim teens of the minority community of the cosmopolitan city. So the PECS developed for measuring the effect has significance. Study results also indicate that the PECS can serve as a valuable tool for measuring the mental impact of cyberbullying among teenagers.
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